A New Car? Make It So!

Sometimes it feels as though, whenever I write about my non-geeky life, it's all doom and gloom but that's far from the truth (it's just the doom and gloom tends to make one forget the good bits).

Rachel and I actually live a very good life and there's no better example of this than the surprise present her parents' gave us at Christmas: a cheque towards the purchase of a new car.

Here's a picture of us opening the cheque for the first time on Christmas day.

The reactions are real (although admittedly I was calculating how many DVDs I could get for that sum of money). And yes, I am a grown-man wearing a Jake The Dog T-shirt.

Anyway, Rachel picked up our new car last week - an almost new, shiny, black, Ford Fiesta Zetec and it's so smooth compared to our poor old car (also a Ford Fiesta Zetec, which I purchased around the time I started working at Maxim, so I'd had it for about a decade).

This is something we've talked about for ages, as Rachel was becoming increasingly concerned about taking our old car on any long journeys (such her frequent trips to Wales to see her two godchildren), and with our Christmas cheque we were able to go to a local dealership and tell them exactly what we wanted.

Now I know next to nothing about cars, but I'm a sucker for gadgets so this new vehicle is a Star Trek-like leap into the future for me, with its sundry gadgets, parking sensors, iPod socket and numerous push-buttons on the dashboard.

We've even finally joined the "clicker age" and have a car that be remotely unlocked using a key fob clicker. Sure, most people had those last century, but like I said I'm quite backward when it comes to anything to do with cars.