Wealth

Sometimes I feel so wealthy! I am healthy(? - enough - although I am kind of creaky sometimes) I know why I am here (although I suspect that there are things left in my mortality to achieve) and with some hard work, where I have faith, I will go after this mortality.

Christine has her Learner Drivers License and has had it for around a month. I could not sit here - with 2 cars in my garage, and not let her drive one of them!

I was reluctant to let her drive Blondie, as - in a Porsche - you sit about half way down the cars length with a really long bonnet stretching into the distance, but you sit around 1/3 of the way down the car! I relented, and bought an "L" Plate for the back window of my Landrover, and she has been driving that! I was scared that a V8 would be too much to handle, and it is a really wide car, but she copes with it easily (enough) although she is still not entirely comfortable as to where she is on the road! The trees woosh by (at a maximum limit of 80 - fast enough in a 100 zone) far too close! I am not used to being in the passenger seat! I found this car - a 2002 Renault Clio, so it is not a common car, and therefore not as likely to be hijacked! - in the same outlet as I bought my darling Landrover! It is not that expensive, but Renault have long had a reputation of being reliable! Before I came to SA, in Salisbury, the taxi fleet were Renault R4's. If they were not reliable, they would not have been used as taxi's!

Christine calls my "new" car (bought so I can have my 4x4 back) "Chloe" (it IS a Clio!) but I call it - small as it is - Madamoiselle Chloe La Frog, since it is French! She has words about this but I paid for "La Frog" so reserve the right to name it!

Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I believe that cars do develop characters and if you name it, you feel more sympathy with it, and it kind of "looks after you!" The car I learned to drive in was called "Fred" (that name suited the car!) served us faithfully, even though it was born just before me, and showed signs of it's age (smoked like a trooper - ie it was NOT a Mormon car!) but if the engine started to run badly, it only needed to cool down and we could replace the sparkplug (piston#2) and all went well again. It used to use almost more oil than fuel, and occasionally when we felt evil, we said to the Petrol pump attendants when we stopped "Fill up the oil and check the petrol!" - much to the confusion of the attendants!