Last week saw the end for me, for the foreseeable future, of car ownership. I've been saying for a while that I wouldn't replace my car when she finally became uneconomic to repair and, now that she's gone to the scrapyard to be recycled, I'm following through on that commitment. I like bikes and trains, and I dislike traffic jams, so it makes sense personally, as well as environmentally. But that sense isn't quite adding up for me yet.
In the seventeen years I drove her, Volva became for me that thing that psychologists call a transitional object: the sight of her parked up was an emotional comfort. She's been a reliable ally in many of my life's adventures: camping and other holidays, getting to work and other necessities. She's helped with nesting and de-nesting, moving my sons' stuff during their school days to and from guitar and cello lessons, sports days and parties. We've driven to and from Falmouth, Antwerp, Edinburgh, Oxford, and London as they've journeyed around their early adult lives. She's carried me twice to the Outer Hebrides and hundreds of times to Wrexham and Newport. She contained the only functional cassette tape player I owned. Two weeks ago, cruising down the M5 to Dorset, I listened again to the tapes of 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue' that have been in the glove compartment for years, and chuckled to the jokes for the nth time. Volva clocked up around 250,000 miles since arriving in our family - a trusty stead.
Then on Thursday, as I was on the brink of one more London stuff-moving trip, the journeys ended. It's thrown me off-course, this change, and for a few days I've not quite known how to organise myself. Kind friends have offered to help out and I've signed up to a community car share scheme which I'll soon get the hang of.
I've questioned the validity of my feelings of disconcertion about this change, and the decisions that led to it. There's so much that's so very much more important to be sad about - of course there is. But it's not the chunk of metal I'm missing, but the loss of connection with what has been a consistent and reliable space for so many mundane and exceptional adventures.
It takes six weeks to embed a new habit, I've heard. Maybe by the end of June, I'll have got the hang of this.
