All revved up and nowhere cheap enough to go

12:11pm Thursday 8th May 2008

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At the weekend I did something that I've heard people talk about but never actually done myself - I went for a drive'.

I've been driving since I was 17 but pretty much had a destination in mind for each trip, and never quite understood why my sisters used to take people for a spin in the car, just to be driving. But I've been at home a lot recently, trying to get a few essays done and it seemed like going for a drive' would be a good excuse to vacate the house. If I was going to the shops, I'd be accused of procrastination, but simply driving seemed to be a legitimate, even encouraged, way to pass time.

And what a revelation it was. It was a rare sunny day and there I was, cruising in my Peugeot, window down and music up just to the point where I can't hear myself sing (but no further, since that awkward incident with the ambulance). If I'd had prescription sunglasses, they'd be the final flourish. I needed some petrol but that was no problem - cooler, even, than driving, putting petrol in your car was like being part of a covert, grown-ups only club. You quickly whip off your specs, slouch over to the petrol hole, carefully tend to your car and then pay for it on plastic, all the while in a trance of disbelief at performing this sequence of grown-up rites. And even my reaction to the price was for adult ears only, and put me in a characteristic grown-up bad mood. Since when did the price meter go up quicker than the litres one? Forty quid it cost me to fill her up, and that's only a small engine - I'm regularly blushing from within its confines when we're chugging up Whitwell Hill and it decides that third gear just isn't a satisfactory gear at the moment and it would really like me to take her down a notch. Forty quid for that sort of performance?

And this isn't the half of it. I'm lucky enough to have my own four wheels, given to me for my 18th birthday, but the little sweetheart eats money as if it's going out of fashion, which of course it is.

I made an informed decision to leave her at home after witnessing a tragi-comedy when one of the discarded white appliances in our street tipped over and neatly gorged a chunk out of the side of a student's little Mini Cooper run-around. But this also leaves my car dormant at home, fully insured (I desperately wished to be with Sheila's Wheels, with Australians in my backseat, but Sheila wasn't having any of it and in the end I was stuck with Diamond and their altogether more staid advertising campaign) and taxed to the hilt. And now with a fresh wave of oil strikes, petrol is at the most expensive it's ever been and frankly, the pennies will not stretch to both the ownership and the driving of a car. How can people even afford to get in a tizzy about fuel shortages? Surely most of the country's drivers have sold up and bought a horse and trap for the school run?

Next time I'm feeling a little restless, I think I'll plump for that equally pointless, yet infinitely cheaper option - sitting in the car and wishing I could afford to drive it'.