Your first car is like your first love – you always remember it fondly no matter how much pain it caused you.
If I had been older and wiser I would have known that any car that could be bought for that kind of money wasn’t really worth having. But I was 19 and, armed with my recently acquired student loan, was eyeing up my choices in the second-hand car lot.
On the left was a huge black monster, tastefully furnished with black faux fur layered over every interior surface. On the right was a lime-green sporty little number with attractive black vinyl roof. It was a tough choice. In the end my mind was made up by a distinct reluctance to let any part of my body touch the faux fur, so I plumped for the green machine.
Imagine the car below in startling Kermit green, with rear doors and a lot more rust, and you’ll get the idea.
Image via Wikipedia
It was an FSO Polonez which, I think, had been manufactured somewhere in Eastern Europe. I never did find out what FSO stood for, but I certainly invented a few choice possibilities of my own over the months that I coaxed, begged and cajoled that car into wheezy action. Within a couple of weeks, the exhaust blew, and from then on the car heralded my arrival at any venue well in advance. I tried to fix it with bubble gum and all sorts of other homemade remedies, but none of them worked. Sadly, after blowing all my money on the purchase and the insurance (which cost more than the car itself), I didn’t have anything left for repairs.
On one memorable occasion I set off for class, running the car down the hill in neutral as usual to jump start it – the battery had ceased to function properly fairly early on. I coasted down, building up speed, jammed it into second and . . . nothing. By the time I had tried this several times, I had drifted out into the middle of the road junction, the hill was well behind me and I had no option but to push the car away from the main road and onto a side street.
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