Our completely car-free "experiment"

Well firstly a happy New Year to you, dear reader.  I am sorry it's taken so long between updates, but I have been enjoying a lovely relaxing bit of time off over Christmas.

As I mentioned before, our family car (the only one we own) chose the Saturday before Christmas to die.  It turned out to be quite a serious fault that, coupled with Bank Holidays, has taken quite a while to fix.  I hope to be able to collect it tomorrow and so that has meant we have spent over a fortnight truly car-free.

So how have we, a family of two adults and three (5-13 year old) children, managed without a car?  It's the sort of problem that would have most families in a pickle in this car-dependent society.  Indeed the first reaction of a quite a few friends and family members was to offer us the use of an alternative car.  Very kind of them but Mrs Folding-Bike and I agreed to try and go car-free, just to see what happened.

I have to start by saying that, unwelcome huge expense aside, we are pretty lucky that it happened over the Christmas break.  I had planned to have almost two weeks off work anyway and the kids don't go back to school until tomorrow.  So how did we deal with the ordinary stuff for which we usually depend on a car?


Shopping:

The shopping was probably the simplest thing to deal with because larger supermarkets deliver.  It took a bit of planning to make sure that the cupboards were well stocked but we did become aware of the the number of times one of us would just hop in the car and zip out for milk, bread or other essentials.  These trips I covered by going shopping with bike and rucksack and, as I commented previously, it is surprising how many groceries one can fit into a medium-sized pack.  I did find the limit though when picking up some items for my eldest daughter's birthday sleepover - it seems that popcorn, fizzy pop, pizzas, chips and sweets are bulkier than they seem.  In truth, I did throw a small sack of dog food in there as well, for the dog you understand, not the birthday party!  However, I had to resort to removing the boxes from the pizzas in order to get it all to fit.  I am sure that I looked pretty eccentric crouched in ASDA's car-park unpacking pizzas but in a dayglo cycling jacket with my trousers tucked into socks, I cut an odd-looking figure anyway.  I'm used to the looks by now!  And besides, the cardboard is better filling ASDA's recyling bin than mine.

I also used the bike to take my hybrid's rear wheel to the bike shop for (another) spoke repair.  I love my versatile rucksack - I just strapped the wheel on the back of it and cycled to town.  Again, strange looking but who honestly cares?  It got the job done. 

Strangely the wheel makes the rucksack look much smaller than it is.

Parties:

Everyone likes a party over Christmas and New Year and we had two planned where we needed to travel.  Boxing Day was due to be spent 50 miles away at my parents' and on 30th December we had another large family gathering  to attend.  Our solution in both cases?  To stock the cupboards and bring the party here!  We had a couple of brilliant days welcoming people to our home and putting on the hospitality.  Hopefully a great time was had by all and we didn't have to go anywhere!  We did have to tidy up a bit but the place needed it - again more a blessing than a chore in the long run.


Random half-days out:

During longer school holidays, we'll often just pop out to town or somewhere else for half a day, to kill time as much as anything.  This Christmas break, we just haven't bothered, largely because we couldn't, and it has been lovely.  We've stayed at home and played games, walked to the park together with the dog and generally found cheaper, simpler and more relaxing ways to spend our time. 

Although we live a few miles from the nearest large-ish town, I have never taken the bus to get there.  We have one which comes through the village every hour and takes 15 minutes to get there.  I took my youngest daughter out on Saturday for a "bus to town" adventure as we had a few things to pick up (my repaired wheel among other things).  She had a brilliant time and, I have to confess, so did I!  It cost me £3.10 for a return ticket and the didn't charge for my daughter.  Had I driven it would've cost me at least £1.70 to park and so adding in the cost of a little bit of diesel and the convenience of not having to find a parking space on a Saturday afternoon, I'd say I had a bargain.  OK so we are a little restricted by the once an hour bus schedule, but we coped just fine by not rushing, taking a later bus home and enjoying a chill out together in a coffee shop.  A bit of Father and daughter time is always welcome and if it involves a treat in a cafe, so much the better.

Waiting for the bus home, she seems happy in her work!

The school run:

As it's been a school holiday, this hasn't been an issue.  We only have to get the kids to school tomorrow without the car and a friend has kindly volunteered to collect them.  The experience has made us think about how we could do it without the car though.  The bus goes at a time in the morning that would get my wife to town in time but leave about a mile to walk to Primary School with the younger two.  My eldest starts a little earlier than them at High School but could cycle to a friend's house nearby, freshen up and walk the rest of the way.  It would need a bit of toughening up on their parts but that never hurt anyone, really!  In fact the major concern was from my eldest daughter about appearances in front of her peers rather than the actual physical effort of the cycle.  Tsk, teenagers, eh?


So to sum up, in all honesty, we've managed admirably without a car.  Despite the fact that it's Christmas, there seems to be a little more disposable cash than usual and I guess this is what we would normally have spent on diesel.  It'll have to go in the pot for the huge repair bill we're about to incur but every little helps, I suppose.  We've really felt the generosity of friends too in their offers of help and transport.  Sometimes it takes a bit of a disaster for us to realise just how truly blessed we are.  And we are truly blessed.

When the mechanic told me that the car was going to cost upwards of £1,500 to repair, for a moment, I did wonder whether to bother.  The car is worth quite a bit more than that so I couldn't justify writing it off but just briefly I thought sod it, we'll manage without.

And so we'll go back to being a one-car family tomorrow but hopefully one that will make a few changes.  I hope that we use the car less for those short or unnecessary journeys and cycle more or use the bus.  We have definitely learned that a car, while very useful, is not the must-have item of hardware that we had previously believed. 

I'm sure that, with planning and a bit of ingenuity, even the larger car journeys such as holidays in the summer could be managed by other means.  I'm also certain that, if we did ever decide to go for it, we'd have a fantastic time and would learn a lot through the experience.  Best of all though, now we don't dread the loss of our only car for some reason.  It is a tool to make life more convenient and not life-or-death itself. 

I honestly recommend that we all try and live without our cars, even just for a little bit.  Even those of us who think that we simply can't.  I'm sure that somehow you can.  For the good of the planet, the roads, our wallets and yes, just for the fun of it!

La voiture est tombe en panne*

*Well it is a French car, after all.


Some of you may remember that earlier in the year I got rid of my old car, thereby reducing us to a single car family. In all that time, we have managed perfectly well and there have only been a couple of occasions when the use of careful planning or clever logistics have been required to work around a situation.

The family car we have left is one of those large Citroen MPV "People Carriers".  It's only six years old, extremely versatile and with a small-ish diesel engine, pretty economical too.  It is also however very electronic and correspondingly complex and bug-prone.  In general I can forgive the latter characteristics on account of the former.

Last Saturday night, we were all on the way back from a Christmas Pantomime when just about every warning light came on and the car became very sluggish and unresponsive.  Having no breakdown cover (which has been on my list of "things to pay for" for several months) we managed to limp home and consult Google.  Apparently it seems, many modern cars have a "limp mode" whereby they operate but at reduced speed in the event of a control-related problem.  All indications were that this was what was wrong with the Citroen and so yesterday, once local businesses opened after Christmas, I took it to a garage.  An initial reset to clear any spurious alarms (and congenital electronic glitches to which these cars are prone) did not work and so the mechanic undertook a more detailed assessment...

Long story short, the turbo is completely shot.  I'm an experienced mechanical engineer and having now seen the rotor rattling around in the turbo housing, there can't be a bearing left in it anywhere!  As bitter experience has made me come to expect, it is not a simple job to repair either.  A bulletin from Citroen (shown to me by the mechanic) list all of the other parts which have to be checked and/or replaced in order that they will honour a warranty on the new turbo.  Turbo failure is a common problem on this range of engines it would appear.  Why are cars so unreliable these days or at least not simply fixable in the way they used to be?

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is a bill which will be between £1,200 and £1,800 and the car off the road until the New Year.  I was wondering what to do with all of that spare money I had left after Christmas as well...

So we are, somewhat involuntarily and in the short-term, a completely car-free family.  Always one to try and find a scrap of positivity in catastrophe, it will at least be an interesting experiment. We live in a rural village a couple of miles from a small town, three from the nearest large supermarket and four from a larger town to which we can get a bus.  I expect to be running quite a few errands on my Dahon, which is no great chore and will help to work off any excess calories stuffed in during the Christmas period.

And so the experiment begins.  Wish me luck and I'll keep you posted!

Veni Vidi Visa*

* With apologies to Latin speakers everywhere, "I came, I saw, I shopped."


On Saturday, I needed to get a little bit of shopping and pop some books back to the library.  To be honest, even as a regular cycle commuter, I would normally have hopped in the car but this week, fancied a change for the better.  Recent inspiration from a few blogs I've found via Twitter had a hand in the decision I’m sure, in fact I really ought to do a roll of honour at some point!

Anyway, with the decision to cycle made, I emptied out my rucksack (except for puncture repair items and a lock) and headed out on the Dahon.

Firstly, it was lovely to be out pedalling in the daylight for a change!  Most of my riding these days tends to be done in the dark or, at best dawn or dusk so broad daylight was a welcome break from the norm.  Saturday was one of those bright and clear, but cold winter days which I find so nice for cycling as it takes that much longer to heat up and get sweaty. 

Over all I probably covered about 7 miles on the round trip to the small town near where I live (dropping in the library book en route) and then out to Morrisons and back.  I could have used the smaller supermarket in town but (a) it’s more expensive and (b) I wanted to ride a bit further than that! 

And so, a short and pleasant ride later, I parked up outside Morrisons and got on with the shopping.  Like any large supermarket, it was exceptionally busy on a Saturday afternoon.  I however did not have to join the queue of cars crawling around looking for an empty parking space, I cycled straight up the shop and locked my bike to the rack without hindrance.  Another win for cycling over driving.  Smug? Moi?

After filling a basket with what I had come to buy, I paid at the checkout and loaded the groceries straight into my rucksack.  It’s a Lowe Alpine bag I have had for quite a few years and have used for all sorts from overnight trips, skiing, days out walking and more recently cycle commuting to and from work.  It is a very reliable bit of kit - not a specialist cycling rucksack but it holds stuff comfortably on my back so I can't ask for more than that really.  In total it has a 35l capacity but compression straps at each side allow it to be, well err, compressed I suppose if I don’t need the full volume.  It is water resistant enough to keep out a shower and usually anything important (clothes, phone, laptop etc.) get packed in plastic bags anyway.  With the compression straps loosened, it swallowed the shopping with ease. 

Hefting the bag up onto my shoulders, I knew that it was much heavier than it usually is fully-laden (which is about 7kg) but given the nature of some of my items (a large bottle of Pepsi and four cans of beer among other things) that was not entirely surprising.  Sometimes, you just have to grin and bear it for the greater good.  Furthermore, although heavy, it was not intolerably so and I cycled home without problem or incident.  Total fuel cost – nil.

As an afterthought, I had a bit of a weigh-in when I got back to the house and found that the full rucksack weighed 11.5kg.  As I said there were some bulky items but also enough food for Saturday dinner, drinks and popcorn for Saturday night plus Sunday breakfast and lunch.  Knowing the scale of the weight I had just lugged made me feel like I had earned those beers all the more.  “Hobgoblin” from Wychwood Brewery, if anyone’s interested.  Delicious.

And like any good cycling blogger, I was penning this piece in my head on the way back from the supermarket and so had the uncharacteristic presence of mind to take a few pictures:

My rucksack fully laden on the kitchen floor.  The orange hi-viz thing is a small viz vest folded
and held in place by the elastic straps on the back of the bag.  It's there to make me a bit more
visible when the rucksack is obscuring whatever bright clothing I have on.

And the goods laid out on the work surface.  The beer went down a treat and I could just
do with another right now.  Sadly, they all got drunk on the weekend.

We often have to pop out for a few bits from the shops – often fewer items than I had been to get on Saturday.  It just goes to show that cycling is definitely a sensible and practical alternative to a short hop in the car.  With so many journeys under five miles (according to the oft-touted statistics) I think that more people should cycle for small shopping trips.  Yes, my rucksack was pretty heavy but had I used panniers the load on my shoulders would have been much less.  Or had I used both panniers and the rucksack, I could have carried much more shopping.  All on a folding bike.  I’ll be doing it much more.  Maybe I’ll get really committed and buy one of those extra-long shopping bikes like this one or even a Dutch-style “Bakfiets” cargo bike with a huge front bucket.  A guy I follow on Twitter has even built his own - the details are here.  A fine bit of engineering indeed and a very useful bike.  I could probably haul a whole week’s shopping in one of those!

It’s really easy to talk ourselves off the bike and back into the car, especially with things like short shopping trips, where driving has been our default for so long.  However, as with many things in cycling (rain, wind, hills etc.) the reality is always much easier than we imagine it will be.

For me, another small part of my life just became car-free.  A happy feeling indeed. 

Road or path - a bit of a rant

There are two immutable facts about travelling by bicycle.  Cars don’t want you on the road and pedestrians don’t want you on the footpath.  So what do you do?

The better-lit “Winter Route” (as it has now become known) which I use to commute at the moment follows for the most part one of the Sustrans National Cycle routes.  This can mean one of many things from a dedicated, traffic-free pathway, a spilt level pavement, a cycle lane at the side of the road or a shared pavement.  I’m glad we have the cycle route system as it’s something which many countries cry out for.  It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than nothing and I think Sustrans are doing their best with the hand they are dealt.  I digress…

My route is generally of the shared pavement type.  It is well signposted but that doesn’t stop pedestrians blithely dawdling along in the bike lane (which I note they don’t do in the road).  The pavement (shared or otherwise) also has the disadvantage of plenty of kerbs to bump up and down which, on 20” wheels can be bone-jarring. 

So then there’s the road.  Cars, vans and trucks simply don’t want bikes there at all.  They are so locked into the rush hour race to get to the next static traffic queue as fast as possible (or so it seems), that a cyclist is quite an inconvenience to them.  Incidentally, I found an interesting site the other day explaining that historically, roads were not built for cars.  It is, appropriately enough, at www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com and makes an excellent point.  A point which is sadly lost of my fellow road users, every morning and evening. 

My solution is to use whichever option is the safest and most considerate at the time.  If the road is busy and the pavement not, I’ll use the pavement.  If the pavement is busy, poorly lit or poorly surfaced I’ll use the road.  If there is a clear, well lit and well surfaced cycle path, I thank the Lord for my good fortune and cycle on unimpeded and with a huge grin on my face*.  Sometimes there’s no option and I just have to use whichever route is at hand in the best way that I can.  In other words, I stay switched on and ride to the conditions at hand.  This is something that car-drivers, on commuter auto-pilot, are shockingly bad at doing. 

Ideally, I don’t want my journey to work to be an inconvenience to anyone.  On the contrary, I want to have less of an impact in terms of noise, pollution, congestion and general annoyance to those around me.  However, very little of our transport infrastructure is built around the needs of cyclists.  This is despite the fact that cycling offers a genuine sustainable alternative to most car journeys (which are I believe under 5 miles).  Until the Government wises up to the fact and design roads and towns with cycling in mind, we cyclists are just going to have to keep campaigning, keep our wits about us and ride in the best way we can.

And to end on a lighter (but relevant) note, there’s this sign which I found somewhere on the internet (credit to whoever took the picture – it’s not one of mine):

 

 

A valid message!

 

*Throw in a decent tail wind and I’d die happy there and then. 

It's dark out there

With just a month to go until Midwinter, it is very definitely dark out there and my commute in both directions now starts and finishes in pitch blackness.  I'm lucky enough to live in a small village which, although on a reasonable busy road, is a couple of miles out of the nearest town.  The upshot of that is though, that most of my usual and very lovely rural commuting route is completely unlit.

I discovered in short order on my first night ride that my front light, bright though it is, struggles to illuminate much beyond the first two yards of road ahead of my front wheel.  The road surface is not that great in parts either and so, with some regret, I looked for an alternative winter route.

I've found that by taking a different route to the station in the morning, it's only the first couple of miles out of the village that are in pitch darkness.  OK there's more traffic going that way, but a seriously bright, flashy rear light and a high viz jacket mean that I've done as much as I can to be seen.  No close calls yet either so it must be working! 

To be honest, commuting in the dark is not nearly as bad as I thought it might be.  As with riding in the wet (and to a degree, the wind) one's mind tends to make a bigger deal out of the situation than ever transpires to be the case.  Through a sleep-fogged, pre-coffee brain first thing in the morning, getting on the bike in the cold and dark is not often an appealing prospect.  However, after the first few pedal strikes, the world is a brighter place, figuratively if not literally!

To paraphrase something I read recently, it is not what you ride that counts but that you ride at all.  In any conditions, it is preferable to commuting by car.


In other news, I spent some of the weekend mucking about in the garage on the resurrection of my fixed-gear MTB.  It's an old bike that I used to commute on years ago which was converted to fixed-gear knock-around duty when I found this site.  An addiction to fixed gear (and other quirky bikes to be honest - folders being a case in point) was born that, even though I have other bikes, continues to this day.  I have raided it for parts over the years but decided to get it back together for reasons which escape me now.  It's not going to be pretty but will (I hope) be an absolute hoot for bombing around the local lanes and trails in the mucky winter weather.  Bring on a bit of snow is what I say!

2,000 miles and counting!

Well, well, well, another mileage milestone rolls beneath my wheels!

If I managed to update my blog more regularly, I could've bee closer to real-time with this post but sometime during last week, I topped 2,000 miles on the Dahon.  OK that's over several months of riding and not a few weeks touring but I never thought that my experiment in cycle commuting would go this far.

Although the nights are drawing in and the mornings are darker, I'm still enjoying it and wouldn't go back to the car out of choice.  Not that I have that choice as I don't own a personal car any longer, just the family one my wife needs.

If you'd told the overweight me a year ago (who was worrying about how best to keep his old car running againsta rising repair bill) that I'd be cycling everyday and lighter, fitter and happier as a result, I wouldn't have believed you.

I used to arrive home having battled traffic for an hour or more in a foul mood and literally buzzing from stress hormones and other such undesirables.  I can't have been too pleasant to welcome home or be around to be honest!

Nowadays, the only buzzing I do is on endorphines and so even after the toughest ride home, I feel great!

Getting rid of my car was out of necessity to be honest.  The repair bill had got to the point where it was more than the value of the car and so it had to go.  However, as I was already cycling at the time and hadn't used it for a while, it was pretty easy to let it go.  No borrowing money for a new one for me, either.

What being (sort of) car-free has done for me is reduce and almost remove entirely the crutch that a car provides.  On those cold, windy mornings or tired days when one just can't be bothered, it would have been easy to jump back in the car.  That would've gone from a day per week, to two days, to three and so on...

But I don't cycle simply because I have no other option.  I do it because I love being out in the fresh air on my bike immersed in my surroundings.  I love travelling cheaply and not harming the environment with my actions. 

I do it because I love cycling.

And so, here's to the next two thousand miles.  I hope they are as fun, inspiring and eventful as the first two thousand have been.


Mileage to date:

Week 30 - 102 miles
Week 31 - 92 miles


Total mileage so far - 2,186.5 miles

I blame Bradley Wiggins!

I do love to see another cycle-commuter out there on my way to work.  If little else it means one car fewer to clutter things up but it's nice to have that sense of kindred spirit so lacking in car-commuters.

Over the summer I've noticed a huge increase in the number of bikes out there.  Both on the train in the morning and locked up at work when I get there.  I have joked, though I do also believe, that the upturn is due in no small part to the fantastic achievements of our Olympic cycling team and a certain Mr. Wiggins in "Le Tour".  In general, I think that this is a brilliant thing though it does have a couple of downsides.

Our small commuter train has a bespoke space to carry two full sized bikes and for ages it was only another lad and I storing their bikes in it.  Now however, there can be as many as seven bikes (including my folder) packed into both the storage space and the doorways at either end of the carriage.  To the train company's credit, they do get as many on as they can, and I've never known them to leave a cyclist behind, but it is somewhat congested at times!  Of course I have the advantage of being able to fold the Dahon which opens up another couple of places on the train that it will fit in comfort.  The lady who gets on with a Brompton from time to time has it even better.  I cannot believe how small those things fold up - a fully functional and very capable bike which will fit in the smallest of luggage spaces.  A versatile combination and (fingers in your ears please Dahon) very tempting when the Cycle Scheme comes back around.

There's also the issue of more bodies waiting to use the only shower at work once I get there.  Again, we've gone from one or two regulars to a gang of about five or six all wanting to shower in the morning.  I get on well with many of my workmates, but draw the line at cramming into a single shower cubicle with them.  Eurgh!  Pass the mind-bleach!

Inevitably, once summer turns to autumn (as it now seems to have done) then numbers will drop off.  In one way that is a shame but will make the experience more comfortable for the rest of us.  On a more serious note though, it just goes to show that if the government and employers want us to make greener choices in our transportation arrangements, the infrastructure needs to be improved to make that possible.  Unfortunately, the way the system works at the moment, it is reliant on more people using an overstretched system in the hope that some of th eprofits get diverted into making those services better for all.

On the whole probably a bit much to lay entirely at Wiggo's doorstep, he is an awesome athlete and all round hero after all.  But it is something that needs to be thought about in order that more people can make cycle commuting a practical reality.

Having just won the TdF and an Olympic gold,
he deserves a sit down, I'd say!

Another car day

In a rare break from the norm I took the family car to work yesterday. No excuses, I was absolutely knackered in the morning and with the kids on summer holiday, my wife didn't need it.  The drive in and back weren't even that bad traffic-wise but I still didn't enjoy it more than cycling.  There is a big difference between car and bike commuting and to me, it's one of engagement with your surroundings.

On the bike, you can see, touch, smell and speak to what's around you. In the car you are sectioned away from all of that behind metal, plastic and glass. Throw in some music on the car stereo and air-con and the car-commuter really does drive around in a bubble. In their own little world.  We then only see other vehicles competing for the road with us and not the humans driving them.  We lose connection and empathy with our fellow road-users and they become an adversary - someone to be beaten across a roundabout or overtaken as soon as possible.  The unpleasantness of "road rage" is inevitable!

On my bike I feel much more closely connected with my environment, immersed in it and part of it and, because I move at a slower speed than a car, much better able to notice things.  Although the railway station is pretty busy each evening (even more so now that the city where I work is hosting some Olympic sports) it is also vibrant. I love the variety of people that I see and sometimes chat to and you really don't get that experience in the car.

For all that, I'm not anti-car at all. We have one for the family and until recently owned two. I sold my old Peugeot (complete with 175,000 miles on the clock) recently as I had not driven it in months and it was going to cost too much to get through the annual MOT test. A faithful old thing but too costly and unused so it had to go.  A family car is a necessity for my wife as we live a distance away from down and I'd have had a tough time towing our trailer tent on holiday behind the Dahon!

Cars certainly have their place but as a society we've just become too dependant on them.  Jumping in the car has, for most, become the default position and journeys that could be accomplished by another means become just another road-clogging car trip.

I'd love to see more people out on their bikes and using public transport to get to work.  Pricing and services (which I don't find too bad personally) will only get better when volume of use goes up.  In our privatised world, it's all about supply and demand.

I did enjoy a bit of a physical rest yesterday but I won't be making too much of a habit of car commuting.  Been there, done that, had the blood pressure and growing waistline to prove it.  So despite being tired at the end of the week, I was very happy to jump back on my bike this morning and head off down the lane to work.

A brief update

I'm away on a course with work at the moment. Stuck on my own in a hotel for the week with no car. So to make sure I have something to do, I've brought my Dahon and looked up all of the national cycle routes in the area. There's much fun to be had and more to follow...



Here's the Dahon, curled up like a loyal hound, in the corner of my hotel room



Car free?

Well the extended bank holiday for the Queen's 60th Jubilee is almost over. In actual fact, most folk will have gone back to work today but I've taken an extra day's holiday to stretch things out a bit. So here I am chilling at home and lamenting my imminent return to life as a Project Manager in the morning. At least it will only be a two-day working week.

It has also been a fairly cycling-free bank holiday as well. Not for any particular reason, only that the things we did as a family didn't lend themselves to going by bike. I did manage a short jaunt to our local town with my smallest offspring in tow in order to take a parcel to the post office and pick up a couple of bits from the supermarket. Once again, my wife's be-basketed hybrid and the trail gator link acquitted themselves marvellously. In total, only about three miles were covered but didn't take long and it is great to be able to use a bike where once we'd have instinctively jumped in the car. I once went to an industry event on electric vehicles where one of the presenters showed an interesting graph. According to their stats, around 90% of car journeys made are less than five miles in length. Now they were advocating battery-powered electric vehicles as the alternative but five miles is also a really short distance to cycle. Cars are just so easy to jump into though!

There is a point to this ramble - I'll come to it now. For the last eight years we've been a two car family and before that I used a motorbike to get around leaving the car for my wife and the kids. Most journeys we've made for over fifteen years were therefore petrol-fuelled if not by car.

Over the bank holiday weekend, both the road tax and annual MOT certificate expired on our second car. It's been used more or less exclusively as my commuting run around for three years but has 175,000 miles on it and an ever lengthening list of maintenance jobs to do. Since buying my Dahon and cycle-commuting, I have hardly used it. Some weeks ago I decided to do without it but now, legally I have to. When I get round to it, I'll sell the old girl but even so, now we are, technically at least, a single-car family.

By modern social standards, this probably sees us slide down some scale of wealth or another. Plainly ridiculous as I'm spending far less on travel than I did with a second car and so logically should have more cash in my pocket.

Anyway, I'm sure it'll be an interesting experiment and a rich vein of blog material to mine.