Yesterday, my friend Buffy added a comment – well, more like a question – to the comments for the piece I wrote on us buying a new car. Buffy asked “did the Husband get the Bang and Olufsen sound system?? You'll find him sitting in the car listening to his CD collection in the middle of the night, until the new car smell wears off! Lol”. Well that’s a story in itself.

Last Monday the Husband and I set off back to the car salesroom. The Husband has a set system for testing a new hifi system, whether it is the very, very good one we have in the living room, the much smaller and cheaper system I put in the kitchen, so that I can have music while cooking or the one in the bedroom, for music while getting ready for bed. The Husband takes several CDs, carefully chosen to test a new system with music both loud and soft, fast and slow (from memory he took Rachmaninoff, Finzi, Shostakovich plus Sting and the Police). He took all these on Monday, plus both our iPods and we tested out the Bang & Olufsen system in one of the cars in the showroom. I suspect he was already minded to buy the system; he certainly didn’t take any persuasion to buy it. When we plugged in my iPod we could see the playlist showing on a panel on the car’s dashboard – so it is easy to choose what to listen to provided, of course, that you do this before you start driving! The sound quality of the music system was excellent, so we’ve ordered it to be added to our new car. One of the good things about it is that someone looking in one of the car windows could not see the music system at all; it is invisible unless you dismantle the car’s innards. And it wouldn’t be worth while doing this to steal the hifi system as it will only work in the car.

I have been driving for 40 years and, up to now, I’ve been able to sit in any car and drive off without any problem as usually they all have the same switches and levers, etc only, perhaps, in different places in different cars. But then up to now they have all, including our current Citroen Xantia, been cars that work mechanically. Nowadays new cars are basically a computer on wheels. Cars nowadays have all sorts of switches and things I just do not recognise and I can imagine it will take me a while to work out what they are and what they do. The thing that does throw me completely is that the car doesn’t have a handbrake. Instead it has a switch that automatically turns on the handbrake when the car stops and turns it on again when the car starts to go again. But still, I’ll get used to it and everything else. Eventually.