It's a sublimely sunny Sunday afternoon. I'm flicking, clicking, and clacking through the racks of CDs at the HMV on Oxford Street, and hordes of customers are buying books, vinyl, pop posters, and other collectables you might find at Comic Con. No, I'm not sharing a rose-tinted memory from two decades ago; this is only last week. Cue the 'record scratch', 'freeze frame', "yep, that's me" montage.
Okay, but why am I looking to spend £15 on music that's almost certainly available on Spotify, and in a format that most households no longer have the means to play? Well, it's all because I've just accidentally fulfilled a lifelong ambition to own an original Audi TT Roadster. I say accidentally because it's only owing to a car break-in that our much-loved, but seventeen-year-old, convertible got written off by an insurance company that doesn't share my enthusiasm for keeping old cars going until they are at least a quarter of a century old. You don't need a car in London, as absolutely everyone will tell you - right up until the moment that they need a lift to B&Q. So, once the five magic beans had been paid out for our old wheels, it didn't seem all that sensible to get into debt to buy a vehicle that's mostly going to be used for getting out of the city in the few months of the year you might actually want to take the roof down.
Rooting around on Autotrader hoping to find exciting cars for under £1,500 is a bit like flicking through the Michelin Guide in search of the Skegness pages. That was until I nearly scrolled right past a blue edition of the Freeman Thomas classic languishing in a yard in Park Royal. Now if you've never been to the vast 1,200-acre industrial estate that sits at the edges of leafier parts of West London, it's a bit like the 'flesh fair' from the 2001 Spielberg (but really Kubrick) feature film Artificial Intelligence. This is where part-exchanged cars come to be patched up and sold on - either for parts or to unwitting buyers, and in a small number of cases to slightly idiosyncratic risk-takers who have found something rare that they want. After a bit of tyre-kicking, test driving, and filling in some iffy paperwork for a warranty that would be impossible to claim on, I was on the road home in an original-shape 2005 Audi TT. Arriving back, my husband-to-be was, of course, thrilled to discover that our seventeen-year-old car had now been replaced by one that is legally allowed to drink beer in the United States or drive a lorry.