Monday afternoon and evening I felt totally stunned, a feeling that began to wear off as Tuesday wore off. Why? Monday afternoon we bought a new car.

I am a great believer of buying a car that works, maintaining it properly and just keeping it going for as long as the car works and it is economic still to run. This is what we did with our current car, a Citroen Xantia SX 1.9 diesel. We have had it for 15 years, buying it very shortly after we married. We have had very few and those relatively minor problems with it over the years and it has never let us down (touch wood). Of course neither of us used it to drive to work. Taking the train to the center of London for work was both the most economic and far less stressful option of traffic queues and trying to find somewhere to park (our employer does not provide parking spaces for employees) and so the car has mainly been used for local trips and longer drives to visit both the Husband’s and my parents. So now, after 15 years the car has done less than 68,000 miles.

At the Xantia's last service we were told by my brother-in-law, a trained mechanic who has seen to the car’s servicing for years, that at the next service the car will need a new braking system, a new gearbox and lots and lots of expensive work done to the hydraulic system. As the cost of all this work will considerably exceed the value of the car we knew that we would need to replace the car before the next service and MOT in the third week in September. The road fund license expires at the end of August.

So we started thinking about possible replacements. We bought a copy of What Car magazine and read the comments and critiques of all the cars sold in the UK. I have also spent a fair bit of time looking online. We both agreed that our next move was to look around various car showrooms and to take several test drives of various cars before sitting down and discussing sensibly what car to buy. So we made our first visit to a car salesroom Monday afternoon.

Ahem.

We went to an Audi dealers in Chelmsford. We had test drives in two different cars (one of them an automatic which confirmed my total loathing of automatic cars). We chatted to the salesman about prices. And then out of the blue the Husband offered them a deal - What Car says that the most you can get off the model is £700, he asked for a discount of about £1,700 on the overall price. After a lot of thought behind the scenes they took the offer. And we shook on it. So we've bought a car. An Audi A4 Avant SE diesel. We are having only a couple of additions to it: an automatic handbrake switch, the reversing warning system the Stepson suggested (he drives his maternal grandmother’s car) and an adaptor for an iPod. And the colour of the car - Red (there were only three basic colours and we didn't like the other two - black and white - and didn't want to pay more for the metallics).

The car will be built to our specifications in Germany and shipped over here. We were told it will take 5 - 6 weeks before we finally get it. Then we will have to make moves to get rid of our old car.

At the moment the Husband is wondering whether to ask them to add a Bang & Olufsen sound system to the car. We'll see.