“I just want to drive my car.”

The past week has been spent trying to buy and insure a car. I simply had no idea how complicated this was going to be. The list of things that went wildly wrong is too long to elaborate on; suffice it to say that between: unfamiliar makes & models, staying in one town with the dealership in the next, a foreign cell phone + roam package, a compromised debit card, online insurance companies, and an international driver’s license, well, my first week in Scotland was not the relaxing yet efficient travel launch point I had hoped for. There were tears.

But the week had its highlights. My mother and father grew up less than 5 miles from the Arnold Clark dealership in Motherwell. I have relatives who speak with a Scottish accent; I watch a lot of UK TV; and I have a pretty good ear for accents. But the nice young man who sold me my car – well, dear God, I struggled to follow our conversations. I truly only understood about 1 word in 3 and did my best to glean the rest from context and guesswork. I asked him to repeat himself so often he must have thought I was deaf. It was like those videos of a Scotsman getting in a voice-activated elevator. Nevertheless, we got there in the end, and I think I drove off the lot with the car he intended for me to have.

The other highlight was finalising my car insurance – as I said, it would take too long to explain why I was having the issues I was, I just was. When it finally came down to the last few details and no one would accept a Canadian credit card, I remembered a friend living in Oxford. For the last 20 years, we have seen each other exactly only once a year (COVID excepted) when she came to Ontario for Christmas. And yet, this friend, whom I met in 1973 and stayed friends with ever since, stepped in and paid for my insurance, no questions asked; calling the call centre, offering her financial details, and sitting on the phone for 20 minutes while a sales rep read her the small print of the contract. (All in the clear understanding that I will pay her back, of course. The cheque is in the mail.) Old friends truly are the best friends.

Was it worth all the grief? Well here is the car, with all my worldly possessions awaiting loading. Yes, they all fit, and yes, Scout has the entire back seat to stretch out in. A peppy little Vauxhall Corsa – easy to handle, easy to park. Now I just need to figure out all the buttons, bells, and whistles on the dashboard.