When I went freelance, one thing I told myself was that it would probably only be for a couple of years. The travel involved, I imagined, meant that as a job it would have a very short shelf-life. Well, here I am, seven years later, and the one thing that I'm definitely not tired of is the travel: in fact, after all these years, I still rather like it.
Sure, it can be a bit of a pain to be away from home, and some hotels I've stayed in have been rather insalubrious but on the whole, it's still quite an adventure. For someone as generally lacking in confidence as me, it's been a great lesson in self reliance.
Occasionally, I get to travel abroad - Saudi Arabia, Denmark, Germany, the USA - which is fun because I love airports (I'm in Heathrow as I type this) but most of the travel is within the UK. And that means I get to do one of my favourite things in the world: driving.
Not long before I left my last job, I bought a car. Having had company cars prior to this, I was a little nervous about buying but I went ahead and bought a car being sold by a colleague. She needed a new kitchen and so was selling her car which she'd bought new, eight months previously. Which is how I met Nigel and fell in love.
Nigel is a dark blue Mini Cooper, with a Union Jack roof decal. In all the years since I became self employed, as I've moved towns, as relationships have come and gone, through good times and bad, Nigel is the one constant. He and I have travelled over 150,000 miles together. If you assume an average 40 miles an hour, that means I've spent in the region of 3750 hours driving: that's just under six months, constantly driving a distance roughly equal to six times around the world. And still I love driving and, in particular, I love driving Nigel.
No matter what my mood, no matter how crap things have been, no matter how rocky my love life or how precarious my business, Nigel never fails to bring a smile to my face. He's just so perfect to drive, so responsive, so much damned fun, that I swear to god I've laughed out loud with pleasure driving down some (invariably twisty) roads.
I'm not a fan of anthropomorphising but Nigel (named after Mansell, because of the Union Jack) clearly has a character of his own. If you spend six months with someone, constantly, you'll get a pretty fair picture of anyone's personality. He's a boy because sometimes I lust after other cars and that would feel weird if Nigel was a girl, obviously. Because nothing else about this post is weird, is it?
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