I’m not a car person at all, I usually think of cars as being like straight lines, the quickest way of getting between two points.
Last week we exchanged our 99 Opel Astra Estate for an 05 Renault Megane Estate and I am amazed by my feelings of nostalgia for the old car.
The Astra did serve us (mainly) well, she was only six months old when we first got her, the subject (so the salesman told us) of a divorce settlement- a fact afterwards verified by discovering copies of alimony receipts in a pocket.
We are not extreme users of cars, for most of the Astra’s life with us I lived over the shop so she was mainly Sile’s car, on those days she didn’t walk to school, and most of the 100,000 miles we put on her clock would have been French ones on our annual trips to Provence and the Languedoc.
As I said she served us (mainly) well.
The “mainly” was on an Easter trip to Cornwall about four years ago when she suddenly decided to drop most of the moveable parts of her engine in a tangled oily mess on the forecourt of a garage near Newquay.
It cost us a fortune to get her back.
But she seemed to take kindly to her new Vauxhall engine (that is how you pronounce Opel in England) and continued to be her trouble free self until last year.
Since I retired we have taken to taking occasional flights to France, this involves leaving the Astra in a long-term car park for the holiday.
That this did not suit the Astra at all was indicated by the fact that when we arrived back in Dublin last February from a week in the Midi she refused to start and had to be brought back to life with the judicious application of jump leads.
She gave us no more trouble after that.
She happily drove us all over France and down to the very southernmost tip of Spain last summer without so much as a puncture.
The problem happened again last month when we went on a flight to Carcassonne, leaving the Astra at home again, this time in the long term car park in Shannon on a particularly wet and cold January.
Displeasure at this abandonment was shown, when we got back, in the usual way with a totally flat battery but this time we had to suffer the added refinement of the alarm getting stuck on and having to drive all the way back through the night with the hazard warning lights flashing.
This was the moment that something snapped and we realised that the Astra would have to go.
So she was exchanged last week for the Migane.
It is probably no accident that the Migane is exactly the same colour silver and looks fairly identical to the Astra.

About two days after the exchange I got a call from the garage.
It seems that the Astra had been stolen from the forecourt by young joy riders and written off up against a wall.
I was shocked.
How could they have let this happen to “our” car.
That was the moment when I realised that despite all the petty jealousies, the sulking when not brought on holidays, and the totally chauvinistic attitude to England I had grown fond of the Astra.
So Adieu old Astra and I hope your French double will serve us as well as you did.