Lovely to Have It Back

This morning I brought home my much-loved Range Rover from an unplanned winter holiday at the garage.

Deeply satisfying. Anxiety-busting, too.

I alternate between two modern classics (ok… old cars) to get me down to Surrey for work. When one of them is down, I feel vulnerable. I am vulnerable. Because a couple of times a year I’ll get in one car and an “issue” means I have to swap over. A blown headlamp bulb on the Jaguar, for example. No time to fix it at 4:30am… only a minor inconvenience when the other car is there. A crisis when it isn’t.

When the Range Rover needed recovering from Surrey back to my Shropshire Land Rover specialist, I assumed the worst. A transmission warning light had bothered me twice in recent weeks. Cleared each time with a classic “turn it off and on again”… but still a niggle. I was braced for a gearbox. Turned out to be blocked fuel injectors. Still a chunky repair… but not gearbox territory.

If you run ageing vehicles, you reconcile yourself to them going wrong. Just as long as they don’t go wrong at the same time.

Cars cost money. You either buy expensive ones and move them on before they start going wrong – losing serious money in depreciation. Or you buy old ones “cheap” and then invest in extending their life when things break. I’m firmly in the second camp… but it’s a constant judgement call.

Let’s be honest. My only way into Range Rover ownership is buying an old one.

And I keep going to the window to look at it on the drive. Ridiculous behaviour for a grown-up. I was like this at ten years old with my first racing bike. That sleek Raleigh would have slept in my bedroom if Mum hadn’t feared oil on the carpet.

You don’t realise how attached you are to a car until it’s been unwell and off the road for a bit.

Lovely to have it back.