It’s a camera, of course. So far I have discovered it can capture close objects.

It can zoom in on objects far away.

It can take street candids.

Architecture:

It’ll also do sport/action shots, but I have yet to stumble across any sports or action to photograph.
I like it; expect more photos.

Once you move past the bottom feeding, dubious ownership/reliability rust buckets; you find yourself dealing with car traders rather than private sellers. It’s no more comforting.
The second hand car dealing mechanisms appear to have changed dramatically over recent years, mainly driven by the way people acquire new cars.
When you see new cars advertised, they rarely show the cost of an outright purchase. Instead you can have the car for “only” £250 a month. This enticing price may hide the fact that you have to pay a substantial amount up front, are mileage limited, and will have to pay another lump after 3 years or hand it back. Most people do the latter; which means there is a constant supply of three or four year cars hitting the market.

The lease companies dispose of the cars by feeding them to auction houses, where they are then purchased by large car dealerships who carry out “our 81 point quality assurance check”, which means an apprentice with a bucket washes them and places them in a large sad car park awaiting unsuspecting punters.

The outlet has no history with the car, no interest in its quality, it just wants to shift stock before the next auction.

We visited some of these outlets. Plenty of cars on the outside, a few salesmen on the inside; mainly disinterested, other than possibly pursuing porn bots on their phones. If pressed, they would give you the keys to a car so you could inspect it. There were often obvious problems, which we reported.

“The car sounds like there is a wasp’s nest under the bonnet when you turn on the heater fan.”
“We’ll check it”, in a tone which indicated they wouldn’t and don’t interrupt my porn bot interactions again.
“The car has a very strong dog smell.”
“Yeah, the last owner had a dog.”

Smaller garages provide a more personal service, with the danger that you will acquire a sales person with the personality of a possessive puppy who will pursue you for weeks and months after you have discounted the car they were offering. The solution was to block phone numbers, direct mails to spam and, as a last resort, telling one of them to “please fuck off and never contact me again”.

The whole buy a car enterprise was time consuming and tiring, and as our frustrations grew the budget increased and we moved from acquiring a temporary addition,  to a permanent replacement for our iX20, from an internal combustion car, to a hybrid, to sod it, let’s get an electric. Which we did and it’s amazing, if not the £2,500 bargain we originally planned.

Finally we had our two cars to support my radiotherapy. Then my wife decided to change her work schedule such that she could come with me for all my radiotherapy sessions; so we never needed to use two cars and the whole exercise had been an expensive and frustrating waste of time.

In February 2020 my wife and I, plus cat, moved to the UK. A month prior I made a fleeting visit to rent a house and buy a car.

The car buying task came first, because I needed it to drive to Northumberland to find a house; so the day after I arrived in the UK I slumped, jet lagged and exhausted, in my son’s car and we went car shopping.

My normal approach to purchasing anything is to conduct days, sometimes weeks, of research before finally deciding upon, for example, an electric tooth brush.

But this wasn’t normal, so within the hour we had visited a garage, test driven a likely candidate and paid a deposit. Job done.
It could have been a disaster, but it (a Hyundai iX20) served us well for six years and we had no plans to change it.

Then came cancer, and with it a logistics problem. I would have to attend radiotherapy for 20 consecutive weekdays in Newcastle, there was no practical way of getting to the hospital without a car, and my wife needed the car for work on some of those days. We needed a second car.

The obvious solution was to buy something reliable and cheap, run it for a month and then sell it for what we paid for it. We set a budget of £2,500.

To maximise the chance of our purchase being reliable for a month and not depositing oil and engine components on the drive, I listed cars with a reasonable reputation for reliability and off we went.

The first candidate was a Volkswagen Polo. It was apparently in excellent condition and offered a “recent full valet” which of course is important when you are dropping a couple of grand on a car. Or you could just clean it yourself…
It was more than an hour away in Darlington, home to an excellent railway museum and now, apparently, a sparkling clean Polo. The location of the seller wasn’t obviously a car sales outlet, just a small unit in a nondescript industrial estate, Frantic hammering from inside the unit indicated occupancy and Dave, for that was his name, eventually emerged, oiled and sweaty but not in an erotic way, to start his sales pitch. “Had a recent valet” he proudly announced, pointing to a rather sad car covered in dust and bird shit. Perhaps he meant inside. He didn’t. If there had been any cleaning taking place, they had used a cleaner with the aroma “Piss and Despair” (copyright Autoglym). 

He passed me the key, “lovely runner” he promised. I turned the key. There was a click, but no running. I turned it again, another click and the smell changed to piss, despair and electrical fire.

Dave, who was now sweating more profusely, opened the bonnet. Among the  shower of dust and bird poo we could see the alternator smoking. “It’s seized” Dave told us helpfully, visualising how he might be able to free it with his hammer. “I’ll get it fixed, and cleaned again, when can you come back?”
Next was a trip to Newcastle to examine a Toyota Aygo courtesy of Facebook marketplace which is never a scam. We had an address and sure enough there was an Aygo parked outside. I messaged the seller, expecting him to come out of the house, but instead he arrived some five minutes later from an unknown location. First red flag. 

A careful inspection by me revealed no faults with the car. A cursory inspection by my wife indicated that there was a leak in the roof and the headlining was sodden. Out of politeness I asked to view the V5 ownership document. The name and the address of the owner had been scrubbed out with black pen. Why?
“The car belongs to my brother and he prefers to remain anonymous”. Which is Marketplace speak for this car is stolen, has outstanding finance and I need rid of it quickly.

Next was a Fiat 500, also touted as being in excellent condition, and so it seemed to be; until I enquired about the service record. It didn’t have one; somewhat concerning for a car that was overdue for an expensive timing belt replacement.
“Has the car been serviced?”
“Oh yes, the local garage has serviced it every year for the past six years”.
“Can I see the invoices?”
“ I never bothered with those, just paid cash.”
“How about stamps in the service record?”
“Never bothered.”
I didn’t bother wasting any more time on a soon to disintegrate Fiat 500.
There were more; each either mechanically or legally suspect; all a complete waste of time. We decided to change tactics and look more upmarket. This did not go well either.

To be continued.

If you want to know what sparking joy is all about, read my previous post.

When I retired I decided that photography would be one of my hobbies. I started with a budget camera; but things quickly got out of hand when people started throwing money at me to take photos at polo matches and bike racing events. The money went (mainly) on better gear and before too long I was carrying around 15kg of equipment, at a cost of around £1,000 pounds per kg.

In 2009 I bought a Panasonic GF1 as an easy carry option, remarking in a 2014 post that I would keep it for ever. I am not usually one to keep my word; but I do indeed still have it.

The heavy gear was sold, the GF1 stayed. I then embarked on a decade or so of camera acquisitions and disposals, each new round of acquisitions having less funding available thanks to the loss made on the previous disposal.

Had a dalliance with a Fuji system when we first came back to the UK; but the body was a bugger to operate and I became fed up with carrying around multiple lenses; so I sold the lot and bought a Panasonic GX9, the spiritual successor to my beloved GF1. With a single prime lens attached, I had an easy to carry and operate machine. Surely this all I needed?

I also had a rather limited machine. It couldn’t take close-up macro shots, it couldn’t zoom in, it couldn’t track moving objects with any degree of reliability. You could point it and shoot it and produce a pleasing enough image; just like you could with a phone….

Fortunately my phone was almost as ancient as the camera, so at least the camera took better images. Then my wife ruined everything by buying me an iPhone 17 for our twentieth wedding anniversary.

We went for a stroll to in nearby town. I had my camera. I had my phone. As an experiment I took the same view with both. Zooming to 100% the image from the camera was slightly sharper, but at normal viewing distance the iPhone was as good, if not better.

I could have dicked around with the camera image; but why bother. I sold the camera.

It only took a couple of days for me to realise what I had done. No more photography with a camera! Ever!

This was obviously unacceptable and within the week I had placed an order for something which I am confident will spark my joy.

To be continued.