Crook

If I knew where to get hold of an oil drum, I'd start a fire and invite everyone we know around to the flat to watch me burning fifty dollar bills, because burning money would be a far more entertaining way of disposing of it than handing over our Eftpos (switch) card to all and sundry, which is all we seem to be doing right now.

Having parted with the money for the computer expert and the parking pedant, this morning we parted with another $50 for an enormous second-hand computer monitor, having calculated there was no way on earth we could afford to replace the laptop.

And then we put the Toyota in for it's Pink Slip (MOT) and the garage rang back saying it was crook and needed $1000 of work to sort out some rust underneath, a figure they revised to $2000 after they'd had a tea break and the rust specialist had given it the once over. And this is a car we bought for $900 and which cost us a further $500 within a month of getting it home because it was overheating whenever it was, well, driven.

We'd shelled out the $500 at the time because the guy in the garage said it was mechanically sound, and anyway, it was worth $1500 so we'd break even when we sold it on in January but there's no way we could break even now.

"Look, it's a good car" he said to Darren on the phone. "You'd get $2000 if you sold it on and anyway, it'll run for another five years mechanically".

"But I only need it for another five months. I'm paying for someone else to get five years out of it because I certainly won't"

So we thought about it and we realised we didn't have much option, especially since Darren has a 45 minute commute to work and there's no public transport, and especially not when the batphone rings in the middle of the night. Sure, we could use $2000 to buy another crappy car and the new crappy car could have lots of new faults for us to fix and this could go on forever until we made some sort of decision, so Darren rang the mechanic back.

"Look, I haven't got an option. Just do whatever needs doing but spare every cost you can"

And with that we set off along the Parramatta Road back into the city, the one road in Sydney you don't want to be driving down if you're trying not to think about cars because it's almost all car showrooms. And then we passed a silver Golf for sale and I nearly wept at the position of having two perfectly good cars in the UK, neither of them available to us right now.

"Go on then" I said as we approached an Alfa Romeo dealer, "I've seen my car so I suppose now I'm going to see Darren's"

And sure enough, there it was, the same silver sportswagon that's parked on our drive in Warrington, an exact replica right down to the colour-coded roof bars. And with that I managed to rant for a whole twenty minutes about everything from lack of a dishwasher to the state of the British education system, culminating in a brief analysis of the class system, as applied growing up on a 1970's council estate.

Our accountant wants $300 for filling in our tax return. It's raining in Sydney, and like Buddy Holly, today, it's been raining in my heart.