Every car picks its owner and Brendan Glacken is single again - and seeking a long-term partner
I would not dream of attributing male/female characteristics to cars. I am far too smart, or possibly Smart (a giggly pigtailed schoolgirl) for that.
But time was when I had a sensible wife of a car: a good, sound, completely reliable Toyota Carina. Never a head-turner of course, but a long-term companion, a grand two-litre dame of the road, broad in the beam - the boot, I should say - a haughty hatchback modestly turned out in wine-dark red (an old Burgundy, improving over the years).
The guilt of getting rid of her lingers still. There was no particular cause for complaint, other than age, which could not wither her - though no one could accuse her of infinite variety: with this Carina, sameness was all.
Yet she sailed through the NCT for a number of years with utter disdain. Serene to the end, this lady of the highway, hauteur her middle name, was left by arrangement on the side of the road to await official disposal. Not even on that final trip did she let anyone down.
Living up to the sad cliché, the replacement was a much younger model, a luscious Alfa Romeo 156 - in bright red, naturally. A "wife" of a car? No way.
The Alfa was never marriage material. This was a scarlet femme fatale, a fiery 1.8-litre Italian mistress, flaunting herself quite shamelessly. She had the temperament of a race horse and the patience of a toddler.
Why did no-one warn me about any of this?
The Alfa objected violently to being driven like a Toyota. "Sedate" was not in its vocabulary. It positively demanded to be flung about the place. It adored twisty roads and lived for acceleration.
No one would tell me this, so the car had to tell me itself. I was driving it carefully down a dirt track in west Cork one summer day and stopped briefly to view the countryside. The engine began revving furiously, entirely of its own accord. The sound was delightful of course (it's an Alfa after all) but the experience was unnerving.
What was wrong with it? What was it trying to tell me? There was no mystery: the car simply wanted to be driven. It does not like dawdling (nor getting its skirts filthy on dirt tracks). It adores the rev climb from second to third, and loves being shifted down for an overtaking manoeuvre (some people say it winks its sidelights on these occasions, but I don't believe that).
Thus did it dawn on me, never much of a petrol-head, that this was what was meant by a driver's car. But was I a driver's car driver? Perhaps by wishful thinking, but hardly by experience. And this one was entirely new.
But enough already with the wife/mistress metaphor. How are the sexes reflected in cars?
Everyone thinks of blondes in red sports cars, raffish young men in seductive saloons, predatory salesmen hitting on vulnerable female buyers and flattering the male customer in every way possible. It's more subtle than that. It may well be that every car picks its owner.
Cars wait patiently in the salesrooms for the right person to come along and pop the question, or more usually an entire list of dreary questions, the answers to which have little real bearing on whether a sale is made or not.
The salesperson then steps in. But he or she is much more than a mere facilitator - this is someone who has to be able to recognise (wo)man and metal as right for each other, a skill as rare and valuable as those used by matchmakers in Lisdoonvarna for years.
As I remarked, I would not dream of attributing male/female attributes to cars. Still, I am in no doubt that my first car, a Triumph Herald 13/60, was a spinster with a mind of her own, proud of her independence, who made all the driving decisions no matter who the driver thought was in charge.
The MGBGT was a ewe in wolf's clothing, practically popping its rivets if pushed to 70 mph. The Volvo 343, right down to her metallic bronze skin, was Essex Girl before the epithet or the creature herself was invented.
The Saab 99 auto was macho man gone to seed (heated seats, indeed), the yellow-striped Corolla a perky first-year college girl happy to go out with anyone with the price of a pizza, and the Carina, as already mentioned, the under-appreciated wife. Given such a list I might be called fickle, but I still say the cars do the choosing.
As for the Alfa and her status, now that I have entirely succumbed to the car's charms I am rather nervously reminded of the late Sir James Goldsmith's remark to the effect that when a man marries his mistress, he creates a vacancy.
In that light I might easily resist the latest version of the 156 with its minor makeover, equivalent only to a quick dipstick - beg pardon, lipstick job, but an entirely new Alfa is promised in a couple of years' time. Counselling may then be called for.