Two men and a car

Yesterday was an interesting day, not only because I spent most of it with two rather nice young men. What is a middle aged woman doing hanging out with two men in their twenties?

My son was searching for his first car and I was taken along as support and potential adviser - he flatters me because I've only once bought a car. Son's friend thought he knew something about cars, and indeed I was impressed that he turned up equipped for the adventure. His kit included:

• magna light
• plastic gloves
• i-phone

He used the light to peer at the car's dark places, under the bonnet, behind the boot, beneath the wheels. And his gloves kept his hands clean when he poked the wheels to find the brakes. This poking the brakes was helpful on the first car we looked at, a Ford Focus in Milton Keynes because he found a lip and suggested that the brakes might soon need to be replaced, and that comment initiated a conversation with the salesman who assured us that the cars his organisation sold did MOTs before they put them up for sale, so the brakes should be safe enough to pass the MOT - you assume. But the Ford Focus was a tad expensive, so we drove home to have some lunch and further perusal of car selling web sites before venturing out again to Luton, via Dunstable.

The Dunstable car site looked a bit dicey being a temporary office on an unmade up lot and the end of a very quiet road on a quiet industrial estate - we only found it because of the hand painted words on the gate-post "Car sales". We turned round and headed off for Luton.

Son's friend now used his smart phone to access Google map to get us to the Luton. Unfortunately, it wasn't a GPS that might have told us about the closed road and the detour and the detour took us down and up a local road with yellow lines each side and cars parked each side and on coming buses so driving life became a bit fraught. My car is on the small side, and if I see a space to pull in, I'll fit, but if on-coming bus decides to carry on on-coming then my car can't reach the space to pull in. I had to reverse down the main road until I reached a junction full of traffic and still no room for on-coming bully-bus. At this point, another driver suggested I reversed into a side-road on the right, which would have meant only two other cars would have to reverse. Fortunately, I realised that if I pulled onto the kerb on the right, then bus could squeeze between me and other parked cars - not sure why bus couldn't pull over more. Doing this meant that I couldn't get back out into the traffic stream until son's friend turned up sterling. He jumped out of the car, stopped the traffic to let me back into the flow and jumped back in. We decided that we weren't going to come home that route.

The delay meant it was nearly dusk by the time we arrived at the next car sales, a muddy lot tended by a bearded Muslim, with some others collecting and tipping barrels of sand into the muddy ruts. The car was a Nissan Almera and S'sF immediately noticed some damage to the rear bumper and a check revealed the car had been rear shunted. He peered at its engine - his torch now being essential as the light went, but every thing else seemed acceptable. Son, S'sF and Muslim salesman started negotiations over MOT, documents, price, means of payment, when to pay.

Suffice it to say, son has bought his first car and I expect to see more of him now he can drive over here without the hassle of a long slow bus journey at inconvenient hours. So maybe I won't have to drive him places again, but neither will I get the chance to drive his friends around too. End of another era, start of a new.