I’ve been driving the same car for 10 years now. It was four years old when I bought it, which in car years means it’s the equivalent of about 89.

We’d been thinking about getting rid of it for a while, and replacing it with something a bit swisher, maybe two or three years old. The distance between thinking about something, and deciding to do it, and then between deciding to do it, and actually doing it, is quite long in this household, so by March, we were still in the vague “must get another car” stage. Happily, this coincided with Alastair Darling announcing in his budget that anyone who scrapped a car that was more than 10 years old would be given £2000 to buy a new one.

Imagine it! The government handing out free money. More particularly, imagine the government handing out money to a very small, select group of people, one of whom is me. It’s as if he’d announced he was giving £2,000 to Welsh people with short brown hair and Ph.Ds in the social sciences.

The upshot is that for the first time in my life, I’m getting a brand new car. It’s a Toyota Yaris TR3 (I have no idea what that means either) and I’m going to take delivery of it in about six weeks’ time. I’m not really one to get excited about cars, but after 10 years of driving the Escort, preceded by eight years of driving a very basic Fiesta*, it feels, well, quite nice. And how kind of the chancellor to think of me when he had so many other pressing issues on his mind. 

* The Fiesta model was called the Fiesta Popular Plus. It had a 950cc engine, three doors, a manual choke, manual windows, no reversing lights, no central locking and no passenger wing mirror. We often used to wonder what the “Plus” referred to.