Happy New Year! I hope you all had a good one, and those of you that can’t remember New Years, I hope you didn’t wake up next to someone you wish you hadn’t (unhappily married couples don’t count).

So what’s the latest? Well the day after Tilt was sent away for a measly £10, I bought a new car for £900. It’s a dark blue 1995 Ford Fiesta. And it still doesn’t have a sodding name. I don’t know what it is, I can’t come up with one. Well, with Tilt, it was pretty simple, but this one… nah-ah.

One thing I will NOT be calling it is “Lucky” as the only two lucky things about it are that I got £100 knocked off the sale price [£999] and also managed to get it before Christmas (being without a car at christmas would have been disastrous).

Basically, the scanner light I’ve not been able to attach properly yet, and I may even have to alter my car slightly to adapt it (so that in a way, Tilt still lives on). This new car didn’t seem as nippy or as fast at first and was very different to drive. It’s also a little bigger than Tilt - so much so that I’ve already managed to crash it into the side of an expensive sports car (I was trying to park). Fortunately, whoever owns it got his money worth, as there’s ZERO damage to his car but on mine it’s dented the front left-side of it and smashed the glass over the front left indicator. With New Years and then a Bank Holiday etc, it won’t be until Wednesday at the earliest until I can get a replacement cover.

Then I noticed a somewhat familiar-feeling. My new car was TILTING!!! How could this be? It worried me as it doesn’t have hydrolastic suspension like Tilt did. I looked around my car and my front-left tyre was going flat, so I drove it over to a garage to get it pumped up. The following day, it was even flatter, so concluding that it had a puncture, I took it to Kwik Fit to see if they could repair it. (Bare in mind that it wasn’t that long ago that Tilt had a major puncture and I ended up getting both rear tyres replaced). Only this time there was no puncture - the rim had corroded and so air was leaking out all over the place! Thankfully they put the spare on for me and didn’t charge me a thing.

So off I travel to Crewe (a good 30-40 minute drive away) back to where I got it from because I still have a months warranty on it. But it’s not until I arrive there that I find out that the warranty only covers the engine and gear box. But being the fantastic place that they are - they very kindly replaced the rim (after going to the trouble of driving somewhere to buy a new one), put the spare back as the spare and re-filled my windscreen wiper fluid. They even replaced my indicator bulb.

All was working fine until the following day (New Year’s Eve) when the car wouldn’t start. I’d stayed over at my friend Chris’s (Dave’s twin brother) and a neighbour very kindly helped find the problem; the air filter was so old and blocked that no air was getting to the engine. It’s like my car had asthma! So after cleaning my engine and getting a new filter, it worked fine. So I drove back to Chris’s house so that Dave, myself, Chris and his girlfriend Simone could enjoy our final day of 2005 together. On the way I found that my car was a bit faster, a bit nippier - it seemed to have done the trick and all was well with my car. Except for one last final minor detail…

MY EXHAUST PIPE FELL OFF!!!

Oh yeah - I kid u not! I’ve been having to wait till tomorrow before I can buy a new exhaust pipe. Autonational Rescue came out on New Years Eve to check it out (this time in Thundertruck 4, which to my annoyance wasn’t yellow, but was again white just like Thundertruck 2).

All this means that I’ve not driven my new car all year (well, all 2 days of it). With the crappy movie releases and car problems of 2005, I’m hoping that along with the decent line-up of films, 2006 should also be better for me and my car. If it breaks down on the way to Kwik Fit tomorrow I sware - I’m seriously going to track down the Little Chef and beat him to death with a spoon that’s too big. There was a time when I found out that the Little Chef wasn’t real (i.e. that there’s no little man in a little chef’s hat running around all the Little Chef restaurants) but recently i’ve been having thoughts that he might infact be real. And that aliens ate my sandwich.

And so I leave you with this final thought; WAGGAH WAGGAH WOO WOO!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 at 12:58 am and is filed under Tilt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.