CAR GOLF

Car or bar? Decision time.

 My girl-thing-friend, Argh, is insisting that to be 'cool', I need a car. Well, it has been warm of late, but I think beer is a better way to cool off, and cheaper, and less complicated.

A car is the easy part. Okay, driving isn't the fastest way to get around here, but getting hold of an old car is easy and fairly cheap. Insurance won't be too expensive either since there's almost nothing to hit in the area. Putting petrol in it is a whole different ball game. That could work out very expensive indeed.

I mentioned to Argh that I could buy a car, dump it in the yard and we could just sit in it. I could rig up a projector screen showing passing countryside. Not good enough, apparently.

So I looked into the costs. The car - no problem. Insurance - painful, but possible. Petrol - very painful. Then I found out about tax.

There is a thing called 'road tax' which all drivers have to pay in order to drive on roads the tax doesn't pay for. I didn't understand it either. The amount of tax depends on the type of car, size of engine, and how much pollution it puts out. Seems reasonable.

Then I found out why old cars had become so cheap of late.

Older cars are to be taxed far more heavily than newer cars. I can only assume that this is so the rich, who can afford to buy brand new cars, will pay less tax and therefore have more money to spend on more new cars.

The poor, meanwhile, who can only afford old cars, will have their pockets once more wrung dry by the taxman. This ensures that they will never be able to save up to buy a new car, so they will be stuck with paying enormous amounts of tax forever. Tax that will, like the insurance premiums, exceed the value of the car by an increasing margin.

There will come a day when a brand new V8 turbo 4x4 will attract less road tax than an ageing 900cc Mini.

So the car idea has been scratched. So have I, since Argh wasn't...

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