My sister lost her first car today :( Holly the little Puegot 205 has spluttered her last. She passed away peacfully at the garage from a terminally expensive engine fault. No flowers.
... yeah yeah I know: I'm a sentimental old bugger, and don't worry I am hamming it up a little for effect here, but seriously first cars are special things! Partly that's because they're usually old and therefore tend to have what we euphemistically like to call "character"... but they're special too because they're usually the first really tangible signs of our own adult independence, the first milestones on our journey as a grown up.
My first car, Boo (a bright red 1990 FIAT Panda) lived an unusually long life as my first car, I learned to drive behind that wheel and we were pretty mch insepparable for the next seven years or so! Happily Boo is still running about up in Fife somewhere: when he became too expensive for me to keep on the road I gave him to a friend who likes mucking about with mechanical stuff even more than I (and is far better at it!) but before then that little red biscuit tin and I must have covered almost every inch of the country on our thousands of journeys together, so that when the time came to say goodbye, there were so many memories clocked up on the odometer that it was a real wrench to let go.
My little sis is saved some of that trauma by the fact that she (unlike me) doesn't really like driving very much, and so while Holly's mileage was pretty astronomical, most of it (roughly to the moon and back from memory) was travelled with a previous owner. Al is also much less of a fool than I, and is (I expect) far more concerned about the practical and financial impacts of Holly's demise than any emotional attachment... and quite rightly so: this is part of why I often call her my big sister even though she's two years younger than me, but all the same I know she'll be sad to be parting ways with her powder blue Pug, after all a journey isn't always measured in miles.
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