That Jack Kerouac has a lot to answer for

The demise of Blight-of-my-life's Vauxhall Corsa has thrust us into looking for a replacement car.

For many people, the prospect of going shopping for a car will be a source of joy and excitement. We are less enthusiastic. It's just like most other shopping; time consuming and irritating, but with the added bitterness of being expensive.
Furthermore, it all seems to be a much more long-winded exercise nowadays too. All the trawling through magazines, brochures and websites, then traipsing round various dealerships asking the same set of questions and getting the same sorts of answers from the weary looking sales people.
Perhaps things used to be simpler back in the 1970s.  I can remember when...

...my first car had finally gone for scrap.
I was working as a self employed steel-fixer and living back with my parents. Money was pretty tight. I was earning a reasonable wage, but I had no savings whatsoever, so my search for a replacement car was severely constrained by my budget. In those days, the concept of readily available credit was unheard of. Unless you were prepared to tie yourself down to a 3 year "Hire Purchase" agreement, you didn't buy something unless you could pay for it there and then.

I went through the local newspaper and optimistically circled a few adverts, then walked to the nearest 'phone box to see if any of them sounded like they'd be worth seeing. The short list got a bit shorter and I arranged to see the likeliest candidates.
After a couple of false starts, including a decrepit Volkswagen covered in chicken droppings in a farmer's barn, I ended up, on a sunny Saturday morning, at a small garage where there were two cars that I could afford. I dismissed one as too shabby even for my limited resources and had a test drive in the other. It was OK. I paid the man £125, he gave me a receipt, the log book and the keys and I drove it away. I was the proud owner of a 1964 Austin A40.

On the way home, I called in at a local broker and a got an insurance cover-note. Then I went around to see my friend Ian and show off the new wheels.

Ian had been one of my best mates since we'd been at school. We had both underachieved companionably for several years. He had been one of the first of my friends to pass his driving test and thanks to his Dad, who somewhat rashly allowed Ian to borrow his Riley Elf, our horizons had expanded. Visits to friends or concerts in Birmingham had become that bit easier.

Ian was suitably impressed.

"Let's go and see Julie", he suggested.
"Yeah. Great idea...", I had a sudden thought, "Hang on, she's not at her folks anymore. Where's she living now?"
"Liverpool."
"Blimey, that's more than a hundred miles away."
"You could treat it as a proving run... You can see if everything works properly."
I was still a bit dubious.
Then he said, "She's having a party tonight..."
That did it.
We bundled Ian's travelling bag into the back, nipped back to my house for my stuff and we were off.
It was the first of many trips up the M6 in that car and it set the standard. We were barely at Birmingham before a hole opened up in the exhaust system that threatened to gas us, as the fumes found their way through the not entirely complete floor. We bought an exhaust bandage, mended the leak and continued. Another thirty miles and the exhaust was beginning to sound a bit throaty again. We bought some Gun-Gum and plugged up a fresh hole that had appeared in the silencer. We carried on until the first repair gave up the ghost somewhere near Manchester. More exhaust bandage was wound around the exhaust pipe, but this time we reinforced the repair by wrapping a butchered Coca-Cola tin around it too.

That got us to Liverpool.

The return trip on the following day was mostly uneventful until, thirty miles from home, with a tortured graunching sound, the horribly abused exhaust pipe broke in half and sagged feebly onto the tarmac. It was probably the extra weight of all that exhaust bandage, repair putty and soft drink cans that did it.
As I surveyed the damage from my, by now increasingly familiar position under the car, it was clear that the exhaust was wrecked, but if we removed the broken section completely, the noise would attract the interest of every police officer in the West Midlands. A final heroic repair was accomplished by removing the metal rod that normally supports the bonnet when you need to check the engine, and using it as a splint for the fractured pipe.

When I got home, my Dad came outside to cast a parental eye over the Austin.
"How was the trip?", he asked.
"Not too bad. Why?"
"I just thought the exhaust sounds a bit rough..."