My very first car was a FIAT 500 which I bought on hire purchase at the tender age of eighteen and which taught me an important lesson: if you want to eat, don't buy a car because it kept me poor until I emigrated a year later.
I stayed poor for the next two years even though I was surrounded by money because the ANZ Bank didn't provide a lowly ledger-examiner with a company car but almost all subsequent employers did, and so I never became a petrolhead but drove what I was given, from fourwheel-drives in New Guinea to a PEUGEOT 504 in Burma, a TOYOTA Crown in Malaysia, a top-of-the-range HONDA in the world's largest sandbox (Saudi Arabia), and a BMW in Greece (and a whole host of lesser cars in other countries).
When I came back to Australia in 1985, I reluctantly bought a second-hand NISSAN Stanza in Townsville which kept me moving until in 1990 I lashed out on my very first new car, a TOYOTA Camry, after I had settled in Canberra. How I then switched to a FORD Focus is explained here.
Bought in May 2010, the little FORD Focus has kept us going ever since with little to no trouble until "car fever" hit us last week when we started to look at and take for a test-drive an MG3 - see above photo - and a SUZUKI Ignis. The salesman that showed us the MG3 couldn't even be bothered to interrupt his lunch. His insouciance kind of impressed me whereas the SUZUKI man was such a consummate salesman that we almost felt guilty to say "No" to him which in the end we did to both.
We just couldn't see the sense in swapping our trusty ol' FORD Focus with its simple mechanics which had kept us going for over thirteen years and for over 100,000 kilometres, for a whole heap of electronic gadgets that automatically locked us in and out, cruise-controlled us, and even told us where to go. We just want a very simple car that gets us from point N (Nelligen) to point B (Batemans Bay) without the wheels coming off!
