My bank account took a bit of a battering in May. The car was increasingly unreliable so I put it into the garage for its long delayed annual service. It seemed fine the next day then the day after it broke down (first symptom: couldn't drive uphill!). So one of my friends who is more mechanical than me had a go at fixing the engine, which only resulted in a bill for spare parts that didn't seem to help any.
So after a week or two, we lost patience and went round the corner to the nearest car yard. While I am browsing through the high-priced models out the front, my friend marches up to the manager and says straight out "Have you got any good cheap cars?" Well, if you don't ask you don't get. He takes us over and shows us a very clean and impressive Mazda that's about a quarter of the price of the cars out front.
Then we haggled a bit and he knocked 15% off the price.
So I now have a new(ish) car that seems to run well; it even came with half a tank of petrol, which is nothing to sneeze at these days. And I am slowly getting used to the newfangled digital display! 
