As I'm now officially a commuter, I've had to go and buy a proper car that I can put proper miles on. It's hello, shiny new car (and boxes of tissues and cushions on the rear parcel shelf and possibly string- acked driving gloves if I'm not careful) and goodbye Red Shed, possibly the most amazing Peugeot 306 I have ever owned.
If you know of anyone looking for a reliable (I kid you not) car that is happy hauling loads and generally pootling around, but can still get up to 80 on the motorway (ahem) then please point them my way. I am not looking for more than £300, and may take considerably less if bribed with doughnuts. Also happy to swap for a pair of Maxle Revelations in good condition.
Amongst the Red Shed's various outstanding features:
* It's red. Ferraris are also red. You get the picture.
* I owned this car when I met my fiancee. This is proof positive that the Shed will make you successful with the ladies (or gents).
* Automatically immune from being cut up by Audi drivers - they know you don't care if it gets dinged.
* New exhaust about a year ago.
* At least one new tyre. Possibly two.
* One of the tyres says it was originally filled with helium. This makes the car both lighter and squeakier at the same time.
* A Sunroof. That is waterproof. And opens and closes. And yet remains waterproof. After closing. I make no guaruntees for waterproofness while open.
* An Alternative Pastel Wing. This car might be red, but one front wing is a lovely pinky pastel colour that tells discerning motorists that you are a connoisseur. When I am rich beyond the dreams of Croesus, I may well commission an Alternative Pastel Wing of the Tate Modern. If you bought this car, you could live the same dream.
* Five wheels - all attached to the car! At the same time! One of them doesn't go around when the car is in motion. I believe this is because it's the spare wheel, but you might want to get a garage to verify this before purchase.
* Five (manual) gears, or six if you count reverse. Awesome.
* Utterly reliable if driven regularly. Might use a new battery (or a recharge of the three year old battery) if not. Worked just fine in the snows recently.
* 1.8 litre petrol engine with Raw Power(tm).
* Three (count 'em) original plastic hubcaps. The fourth is somewhere in the woods on top of Box Hill. My fiancee knows where it is, as she was driving the shed at the time, hit the pothole that dislodged the hubcap, and saw it bounding away with all the joi de vivre of a recently-fed labrador into the woods.
* Central locking.
* Front electric windows work. The rear ones? Not so well.
* Colour coded bumpers. If the car was a sort of washed out grey.
* My friends Mark and Liz used to own the Red Shed. They actually looked after it. Mark tells me he even used to wash it and even put colour restorer on the Alternative Pastel Wing. I still have the bottle of colour restorer Mark gave me. It's probably not gone off, and I'll throw it into the deal.
To be serious for a moment, this car is actually rather good; I needed it to do around 6,000 miles a year, mostly on motorways, and that's what it's done for the last four or five years. I've had it serviced once a year. I've bought stuff for it when it needed it, and generally been quite nice to it. It's got an MOT until October (from memory), and tax until the end of April. If you need a stopgap car - or a banger that will be fine for years to come if not driven hard, then drop me a line. It's an N registration 306 XT with 129,000 and a bit more miles on the clock, as well as a full service history.
