I thought i'd share a little piece of wonderment from the weekend just past with you all today. It's about my lovely lovely car so anyone not interested in that kind of stuff will probably lose interest right...about....hhhhhhere!...*looks around*...have they gone?...excellent! now let's get onto the *real* matter of the day...some sordid, filthy sex stories!...yay!

No not really...it is just about my car (a fact that i'm quite sure my parents are rather thankful of right about now :))...so anyway, let's start at the beginning of the car saga shall we? Jolly good :) About 3 years ago I was in a position to buy one of the cars i'd lusted after ever since I first saw the concept artwork for it...a Mazda RX-7 (mmmmmmmmmmm)...now these wonderful cars have picked up something of a bad reputation for being hideously unreliable, very temperamental and unbelievably expensive to run...this is mostly due to the fact that they were (at the time) the only production car in the world to use a rotary engine, a wonderful wonderful fantastic thing indeed :D

Now most of this reputation is unfounded...the original rotary engines were, indeed, VERY prone to just blowing up at the drop of a hat but the engine in the RX-7 is a lot more stable and reliable, as long as you make sure to follow a few golden rules and treat it with respect you'll have an engine that'll last for a very respectable amount of time. As for the temperamental thing...i've never really found it to be like that? again, if you look after it you'll be fine. But you'll notice I said *most* of this reputation is unfounded? Yes? Well now we get to the running costs part (yikes!)...I, like everyone else who is warned about things like this, merely laughed them off at the time "Ha!..." I thought "...so it'll cost me a little more in petrol! who cares? i'll have the car of my dreams!"...I would soon come to realise the financially crippling difference between 'a little more petrol' and '10 miles per gallon'!...but i'm getting ahead of myself here, my first shock came when I was calling around for insurance quotes and kept being given prices between £3500 and £7000! Shit! Then I realised that they were quoting me as if I were still 24, when they changed it to 25 the prices started coming down to some slightly more realistic figures :) there were a few more surprises on the way too...special natural oil for the engine, special platinum sparkplugs, tyre costs! (do you have ANY idea how much tyres the width of a steamroller cost...jeebus!)...but all that pales in comparison to the fuel costs! christ almighty! until you've actually had to pay for something with a drinking problem to the tune of 10mpg (or less) then you really can't even begin to understand this...so let me put it this way, after a while of using the RX-7 as my daily driver I actually had to go out and buy a second car to use for normal driving...now, per week, that cost me £20 in fuel (£25 now...bloody John wanker Prescott twat!) to do the same thing in the RX-7 cost me about £110 a week!..aaahhhhh not so laughable anymore is it eh :)

So anyway, after I while I just couldn't justify running the thing anymore and put it in the garage for a while to let my bank accounts recover...that was over a year ago, and last weekend my Engineer (or dad if you will :)) came to pick it up to take it back to the garage and sort it out so I can use it again :D ...and I was actually quite scared of this because, for many reasons, I hadn't even turned the engine over for about 14 months and given the reputation of these engines was just waiting for it to explode or something...so the tense moment came, I sit in it for the first time in ages (*sigh* it's lovely :))...turn the ignition on and have all the temp alarms start beeping at me (I love the over the top instrumentation on this car...there's that many dials and guages it feels like you're flying a plane!)...and then, pulling a stupid "oh dear god this is going to cost me a fortune" tense face, turn the key...and it just fires up first time and sits there happily rumbling away as if I'd driven it yesterday...*phew*

So there you have it really...frickin' expensive to run but what a bloody amazing engine...get it back again next week! I'm very excited to be able to start driving it again but I think i'll have to pop in and see the bank manager soon...I wonder if 'for petrol' is a valid response to the "what is the purpose of this loan" question ;)