So. Where was I? Oh yes, I was smug about how brilliantly we were managing without a car.
Then I was whinging about how bloody awful it was not having a car.
And then Skoda loaned us a car. For six weeks. And it was completely brilliant. But of course it had to go back and I was very brave. My boys, however, were less than impressed. Harry shed a tear, while Joe was furious, shouting “No! NO!” at the poor man who’d obviously drawn the short straw and had to drive it away.
The following day, we set off to go to the shops and Joe said, “Keys?” I reminded him we no longer had a car. “Keys?” he said again. We turned the corner. “Car?” Joe said, plaintively. “Car? Gone?” Harry and I laughed, but we were both thinking the same thing.
It’s been interesting to see how we’ve adjusted. When the car first arrived, I vowed that we wouldn’t be using it all the time – we’d still walk to school, for example. Yeah, that didn’t last. Almost every day we came up with a reason (excuse) to drive. The weather was bad (too cold, too wet, too hot, too windy), I was too busy, too tired, too hungry or I had to go to the post office or the supermarket or just, you know, anywhere. It probably took just over a week for us to give up on the excuses and just admit since we had a car, we were going to use it.
And apparently six weeks is pretty much the perfect amount of time for it to become habit-forming. Because it was hard to adjust to life without it. More than once, I went to grab the keys off the hook before realising… no keys. (Keys? Gone?) We’d run out of milk, I’d think “Oh, I’ll just nip to the shop…” before remembering. (Car? Gone?) Even as recently as last week when we’d been carless (again) for a fortnight, I suggested to David that we drop the boys off at the inlaws’ and then go out for dinner. “Drop them off how?” he asked. And my heart sank. Car. Gone.
—
Keris Stainton
Debut novel DELLA SAYS: OMG! out now
“Confidence-boosty sex-positive first love goodness. This could be the Forever of the 21st century, girls…” – Susie Day, author of Big Woo! and Girl Meets Cake
http://www.twitter.com/keris
http://www.keris-stainton.com
