Two wheels good, four wheels bad

My bicycle, a prisoner in the spare bedroom these past four months, is being blindfolded and bundled into the car today and taken away to be chained up in the porch of the metropolitan residence. I shall use it to get to and from work once I can muster the enthusiasm to buy a helmet and some lights, pump up the tyres and actually throw a leg over the crossbar. The reality, I suspect, is that it will stay in the porch until the office showers are open and the bike racks are erected out back in the space occupied by the builders' Portakabins. I don't much fancy chaining it to railings in town.

Using the bike will bring to an end eight and a bit years of hacking up and down every day in a variety of cars. The old Volvo wasn't up to it, my first Golf was fine until someone drove it into a Mercedes van filled with roof tiles, my second Golf was fun but was starting to emit blue smoke when I got rid of it, my present Golf is close to becoming an old gentleman but still does the job. I can hardly bare to think of the miles driven and the amount spent on juice but the figures go something like this:

Eight years, four months of 110-mile round trips 210 times a year = 1,743 trips and 191,730 miles.

Fuel, mostly petrol but diesel for the past two years, must have averaged £11 per trip, therefore: £19,173. That feels about right, being slightly more than £1 per 10 miles driven using petrol and slightly less than £1 per 10 miles driven using diesel.

Additionally, there was the purchase of a family car, Saab turbot, which currently conveys my children around the north west.

Purchases of cars: 1st Golf £7,000
2nd Golf £1,100
3rd Golf £3,000
1st Saab £7,000
Total £18,100

So we're very nearly up to £40,000 of taxed income without taking account of MoTs, insurance, servicing, tyres, exhausts, furry dice and things to make the cab smell nice, inumerable stops at motorway service stations for scampy and chips, beefburger, pork pies. Nor has any allowance been made for private mileage, of which there was much, speeding fines, of which there have been a couple, and sundries, whatever they are. I suppose the total bill, including loan and credit card interest and depreciation, must be somewhere north of £65,000. Bloody hell fire.

A year or so ago, before all the office move business and at a point where I was thinking of buying a property somewhere up in the Fens, I actually contemplated having TWO vehicles. Lunacy. And yet, now I'm slyly eyeing up better, newer, bigger, faster, juicier cars, generally Teutonic, specfically with a three-pointed star at the front, or from the Bavarian Motor Works, on the basis that, since I am driving less, they won't cost as much to run. What a sad, egotistical, deluded, mentally penis-extending bastard I am. There should also, of course, be a nod in the direction of my dinosaur-sized carbon footprint and some acknowledgement of the fact that I am taut with overweightedness, muffin top waistband, manboobs etc. Something needs to be done, and smartish.

All of this brings to mind that aphorism of George Best's. On being asked why he was in such a parlous financial state, he replied: "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars - the rest I just squandered."