New car

Well, I did it, I bought a new car. So I'm sure you're wondering what mighty chariot would the Double L choose? What could possibly follow the Discovery?

Well, remember how this is the Year of Thriftiness? Yeah, that kind of precludes anything big, fast, or heavy. The car I ended up with is a red M-reg Citroen AX 1.5 diesel.

I can see you shaking your head. A Citroen? After the nightmare that was the Xsara? But after a rather fruitless hunt, my Dad and I went a place which had several affordable cars. For some reason nowhere seems to do cheap cars any more, nowhere had anything under £1000. The closest we could find was a really crappy Toyota for £200.

However this place had a few cars listed on the Internet and they had a white Nissan Micra listed which had a reasonable MOT. But when we looked at it, there was some rust building up at the back and underneath. They also had two Clios, one of which had major rust on the rear arches and neither had much MOT. So they pointed out a J-reg Polo and this AX, both of which had fresh MOTs. The Polo was smelly and strange, and it just didn't seem right somehow.

So, not expecting much, we took the AX out and found it drove quite well. It's reasonably solid, has no rust around the body, the interior isn't bad and though the panels have faded in places and it has a fair amount of scratches and dents, it's in reasonable shape. The engine is a 1.5 diesel, which should hopefully use no fuel at all and the mileage is just over 70,000. So I ended up buying it and taxing it for 12 months. By the time the MOT and tax run out I hope to have sorted out my finances enough to get a decent car. Also the insurance payments have dropped dramatically now I've transferred it to the AX.

My nice Alpine stereo slotted into the AX and connected up immediately with no issues, but it felt like I was ripping the heart out of the Discovery. I know it's silly to get attached to things, but I'm really going to miss that old beast, even though it's been a financial disaster.

Also the new octave strings for the 8-string bass finally arrived, but I left them in my Dad's car! Damn!