Yes, it's caviar on toast, it's delicious and it's packed with vitamins, minerals and other goodies the medical profession hasn't discovered yet. And Lunchista had it for lunch the other day.

Lunchista has never been fabulously rich. I am not an exiled Russian aristocrat, an Indian metal magnate, or one of those women who spends her adult live, as they say, "perfecting her housekeeping skills. Every time she gets divorced, she keeps the house". It's just that a twist of fate has, over the years, saved me tens of thousands of pounds.

Lunchista's first driving lesson took us along the length of Brighton Promenade, the same place in fact where the annual Veteran Car Run (London to Brighton, first weekend in November, great fun to watch) draws its finish line. I enjoyed that first lesson, and what better place to start off your motoring life?

But I never really took to it, and so have never owned a car. Perhaps if I'd fancied a career in farming, forestry or wind-turbine repair, or if I played the double-bass or had to go round in a wheelchair, that would have been a problem. But I didn't, and it isn't. So let's see what happens when you don't own a car.

First, you can appreciate the sheer wittiness of all those adverts for car insurance without the thought "oh heck mine's due for renewal soon..." lurking at the back of your mind. You are no longer terrified by the sight of road-cones. Or polis with radar-guns, or yellow boxes on poles, or sudden flashes. Or strange rattling sounds that cost you 800 quid. Or the Pub.

You can shrug off the worst car crime figures and you never, ever, have to spend ages finding a place to park (which is especially galling if you're in your own street at the time). You can get rid of that concrete eyesore between your house and the street, and have a garden instead (or you can cheat and have a lawn, but invisibly reinforced with something like these natty little squares so that your guests have somewhere to park. In fact you can do that even if you have a car).

But of course people still have to get to work. Does anybody out there still enjoy this, though? Is your daily commute a delightful taste of the open road and the Great British Countryside, or is most of it spent in "traffic"? If you have to drive around as part of your work, hasn't Head Office heard of pool cars? And, if your workplace isn't on any decent public transport routes, have you ever reflected that this is probably because Head Office wanted somewhere cheap, but has effectively dumped the extra expense on you, because you have to fund your own piece of the British transport infrastructure in order to get there?

Don't you deserve better?

Meanwhile, how about the weekend? Or holidays? Hiring a car for those kind of trips opens up the possibility of enjoying the luxury of your favourite pose-on-wheels without the daily expense of keeping it in the style to which it is accustomed, or the nightly fear of having somebody drive off in it. It's also cheaper, unless you still need wheels during the week as well or you need a Maserati every weekend of the year because, for example, you are working on impressing an exiled Russian aristocrat.

Which brings us to the small matter of money. The AA generally have the interests of motorists at heart, so I am sure they have done their homework thoroughly. Here's their detailed breakdown (I must give up on those puns...), showing costs ranging from £1,965 to £9,753 a year for having a car just standing there doing nothing.

That's one expensive piece of garden furniture!

Fess-up time: we run a car here at Chateau Lunchista, but it's just the one and nobody commutes in it. Its most common type of outing is for the various sporty activities of the younger Lunchistas: ironically these seem to be the hardest sort of trips to shift to other types of transport.


About Me

Contemplating the many wonders of a year without a job: I wonder how we'll get by? I wonder what new and interesting things are happening in our neigbourhood? I wonder if the idea of paid work is all it's cracked up to be? And I wonder what I'll have for lunch...