A sorry tale of a man and his car

A man's relationship with his car seems to me echoes his relationship with women. It all starts when he is young as he tires of those childish pastimes - playing chicken on the railway lines, jumping out of trees, holding your breath whilst crouching down and then leaping up so that your mate could make you faint (I did it in the doorway of Millets in Weston-Super-Mare - Oh yes the memories and the scars are still so vivid!)

But then one day something catches your eye, something beautiful, something gliding along like a panther, something with 4 wheels and a hooter, yes a car! Oh how they taunt you in those years before you can get a license. You put their posters up on your bedroom wall and look longingly at them while you fiddle in your pajama pants. You inhale their smell as you walk down the high street. They tease and taunt, you can't wait to be a man and get inside of one!

You first car is beautiful, you caress it and treat it soooo nicely, you polish her bumpers every Sunday whether she needs it or not, you spend money on trinkets and baubles to make her even more beautiful, you fill her full of expensive liquids and yes you are rewarded. She goes like a tiger, 0 to 60 in 6 seconds, so fast she has you flat on your back gasping ogasmically.

Your friends are jealous, they all want to go in her, but you guard her jealously, you won't allow them to even touch her, its you who wipes her down with a clean chamois, getting soapy and wet together is your idea of fun.

But soon she starts to be a little tame, doesn't want to get going in the morning, little moaning noises are emitted as you try to turn her on, especially on those cold and chilly mornings of Winter. She also has started to look a little old, bits of her start to sag and rattle. Little pustules breakout all over her body work and you, well you start looking at sportier models.

Something with a little spring in its step, something a bit ahem, racy! You go out one day and pick one up, run her through the paces, just to see what she can do and to prove that you've still got it, still got some lead in the old pencil as you accelerate around the curves, va va vooming through the tunnels as you put your foot down and she responds to you like a harlot on anthetamines.

But somehow deep in the back of your mind, there's still that itch of foreboding, because you know that one day she too will be tired, she'll have lost her get up and go, but she'll still be costing you a wedge as she now spends her time with an oily mechanic underneath her doing improbable things with a torque wrench and a grease gun. Oh yes he'll be giving her a 50,000 mile service and be greasing her nipples before you can say Aston Martin and you'll be paying for the pleasure.

But what can you do, you can't live without her and you can't live with her. You can't just leave her, send her to the scrapheap, you've invested so much into the relationship, you have even started to trust her, understand her moans and rattles, she even excites you once in a while, like when the brakes failed going downhill or that time when you both forgot you were driving in Europe and drove on the left for a little bit until the petrol tanker turned up.

Yes you've both reached that age when the folly's of youth are naught but distant memories, now I don't mind a bit of crumpled bodywork, the faded countenance, that's all right with me as long as there's a spark under the bonnet and she can shake that ass with the best of them. Yes she's just cost me a pretty penny these last two months and she is still in need of some restorative work down there (her plumbing you know - well she is French and you know there plumbing is atrocious!)

But there's a few miles left in the old gal yet!