There are certain things you expect to need when you’re getting ready to start university: pens, notebooks, reliable laptop, proportioned bag to carry all of the essentials…  A new car was most definitely not on my bingo card, yet here we are.

My trusty little RustBucket^TM has been with me for seven years. It celebrated its 15^th birthday in March and while it was never going to win any beauty contests, it did exactly what I needed it to do: kept moving. That is until approximately four minutes* before I was due to drop most of my hours at work and toddle off to become a full time student.

Impeccable timing. Really. Spectacular.

To be fair to it, the Fiesta has been showing its age for a while with new niggles pretty much every month, but an exhaust suddenly resembling a small tractor combined with the engine deciding to drink oil like a student at happy hour (see what I did there? Ha!) brought us to the point where we had to admit that throwing more money at it might not be the best idea. It was one of those things that was obviously imminent – a 15-year-old Ford was never going to last the duration of my student life, but this was just a tad sooner than anticipated. So, I needed a car.

But you’re travelling in by train… I hear you cry!

Yes, yes. I know. I’m still planning to get to Belfast by train. I have absolutely no desire to sit in Belfast traffic every morning, fight over the limited free spaces or spend the next 3-4 years of my life developing a mild case of road rage on the M1. But real life continues to exist outside student life so I can’t just become carless because I happen to have gained me a student card. I hate driving, but shopping trips still need done, children have annoyingly active social lives and, one day a week at least, I have to go to work and just generally participate in society. Also, my husband would not enjoy being the only taxi service available in our household. It’s amazing how many miles you actually do when you think you’ve been “nowhere”.

I don’t know much about cars beyond what I think is pretty**, but apparently I can turn car shopping into a full-time research position – mileage, age, MOT history, insurance, tax, engine size, dealer reviews, finance, gap insurance…. And eventually I found the one I really didn’t want to let get away. A 2022 Renault Clio. (Which is considerably newer than the car I had originally imagined buying at some point in the next year or two… Oops.) This is the point where sensible Mature Student Me would like to make it very clear that I did not wander into a dealership, become hypnotised by a shiny thing and come out several thousand pounds poorer on a whim. There were calculations. Honest! When you factor in the fact I had the Fiesta for seven years and don’t do huge mileage, buying something newer now should mean I have a decent, reliable car for a (very) long time. That’s the theory anyway.

Somewhere, an 18-year-old is getting ready to start university, spending their time choosing bedding for halls and wondering how many plates they’re going to need. Meanwhile the 40-something Fresher over here has spent the week transferring a personal number plate, changing car insurance and waiting for a V5 so a dead Fiesta can be SORNed. So same basic experience, really. Right?

*Well, 4 weeks.
** Renault Clio / Vauxhall Corsa were the final contenders. I like a small car, being little myself.