OneAndOneIs2

Two years ago, because it stood no chance of passing its MOT, I sold the Vauxhall Corsa I'd owned from new for 600 quid, and spent the lot on a Ford Fiesta the same day. A blue 1995 Fiesta with 90k miles on the clock. One of those "It'll keep me mobile for a little while" buys.

Over the last couple months, it's developed intermittent starting trouble. Yesterday, we hoped to fix this by replacing the starter motor. So we bump-started it, drove it to Brighton, got the part, and got to work.

The new motor went in with reasonable ease. The battery was tested with a multimeter and also seemed to be in dire straits, so a new one of those was popped in. And guess what?

We still had to bump-start it to get home. And the battery light was on the whole time - the alternator wasn't working. The idle speed was way too high too.

In addition, the brake pipes are corroded, the bodywork needs welding, a driveshaft needs replacing, we still need to find the cause of the starting problems, and we couldn't help but notice the exhaust needs patching as well.

Basically, let's face it, the car is dead: The cost of parts alone exceeds the likely value of the car.

So today I went searching for a replacement - something that'll reliably get me the 300 miles a week I usually commute.

Now, the expense of a new car right now is something I really didn't want. But luckily(?!?), having broken my shoulder last month, I've had a few weeks of not having to drive anywhere so the money I've saved on petrol was available to go towards a deposit. Plus on one of my days off, I'd spent an hour arguing with my bank manager: I had taken a loan to buy my motorbike, I had money outstanding on my credit card, etc, and it was all adding up. By the time I left, I had consolidated everything into a single loan with a better interest rate that would cost me substantially less to repay each month. And the new car should use noticeably less petrol each month.

The upshot is, by dint of being off work for a month and sorting my finances out, I had just about enough cash to make a reasonable deposit and pay for a reasonably good car without being too much worse off than I would have been if this had happened two months ago.

So after looking at a Volkswagen Fox and being briefly interested in a Fiesta TDi, I finally settled on a five year old silver Honda Jazz from a dealer who's just a couple miles up the road.

With any luck, I can collect it tomorrow afternoon. Then if I'm passed medically by the hospital on Tuesday, I'll finally be able to drive again on Wednesday and go back to work.

Which will be a relief after a month on the laptop - see previous post.

Yes, it's been a bad week on the technological reliability front. In fact, it's been a godawful week across the board. In fact, let's be honest: 2011 has sucked utterly so far.

Things can only get better..?