Van

You know how, occasionally, you get to certain points of your life and want a thing?  Like getting to age X and thinking "why don't I have a house?"  Or age Y and thinking "Damn it, I forgot to secure a family to take care of me in my old age!"

I've been feeling a need to stave of my impending mortality by buying a new car.  I've never owned a new car.  Every car I've had has either been on loan, an ancient hand-me-down or a second-hand car that was at least eight-years old when I bought it.

My current car is actually my mother's old car.  When she bought a new one we used my car (which was older than hers) as a trade-in, and I inherited hers.  Technically, it still belongs to her - we never bothered transferring anything into my name.  I don't actually own anything at all.

Now, maybe my complete lack of property is a good thing - it fits in with my desire to be a stateless nomad.  It doesn't fit in with my desire to pack my life up into the back of my combi van in order to be that stateless nomad.

It also doesn't fit in with my desire to own a large farmhouse where I can raise six kids on a diet of fresh apple pie and make jam and vinegar for the local markets - but then again nothing in my real life does.  I'm not entirely convinced that's even my dream.  I think I borrowed it from a version of myself from an alternate reality.

Anyway, over the years I have often felt a desire to at least own a new car for a little while.  I know the car will age, but it seems as though it would be nice to have a brand-new car at least once.  However, I keep meeting some strange resistance on this front.

I have this conversation with my family on a semi-regular basis that goes a little like this:

Me:  I'm thinking of buying a new car.
Them:  You don't need one yet.  Drive the car you have into the ground a bit more, first.
Me:  I'm thinking of fixing up the car I currently have.
Them:  Why bother?  It's so old it's not worth repairing.

Which, to my mind, translates as:  "you don't deserve nice things.  Keep your bomb and be happy about it."

But, you get that.

Anyway, due to the fact that things have been slowly disintegrating on my mother's old car, I'm slowly convincing my family that they don't need to keep talking me out of buying a new one.  The fact that every single other member of my immediate family has bought a new car over the past few years might also have something to do with it.

So, now the conversation has taken a similar, but more peculiar turn.  I am at a point in my life where I want boot space.  I don't want to scale down from the station wagon I'm currently driving - I want to scale up.  A ute would be nice - a van would be better.

Utes and vans aren't cheap.  They also aren't what my family have in mind.  Both my mother and uncle bought smaller cars when they upgraded, and they don't quite understand why I would want a larger one.  My uncle knows a thing or two about cars, and I keep asking him what he thinks about Ute A or Van B - to which he answers "why don't you just get a hatchback and learn to tow a trailer?"

It seems vans and utes cost money (duh), and are expensive to run (duh, again) and come with all sorts of features that don't interest him at all (I can live with that).

I think he's starting to finally take me seriously, though, and give me some real advice about the kind of cars I actually want to own.  You never know - by the time I can actually afford one of these things, my family may have finally made peace with the fact that I want it.