How the art market has changed over the last 20 years

Driving a car is supposed to be a pleasure but I often wonder how true that is; they cost us an absolute fortune and take up far too much of our time, when we are not cleaning them we are taking them for new tyres, exhausts, batteries, or going off to the car wash to sit in a queue so that six Eastern European youths can cover it in foam and then where are paintwork down with their worn out gritty sponges. The amount of time that we spend sat in traffic jams throughout a lifetime is longer than the total lifespan of people in the 19th century; well perhaps that is a slight exaggeration but it certainly feels like it! Many people think that they are more nuisance than they worth, a view which is shared by my friend Tom, and he has very good reason indeed.

To cut a very long story short Tom lent his car to a girlfriend a few months ago, whilst her own car was in the garage. Knowing her, she was probably having some new dolly danglers fitted to the interior mirror and the nodding dog in the rear window cleaned, but I digress. The foolish girl went shopping in it, tried to park between two cars in the supermarket car park and succeeded admirably in scratching all the way down the side of one! Unluckily for her the owner was just coming out of the supermarket and caught her in the act; he took all her details but was not greatly impressed when he rang her that evening to find out who her insurance company was, only to find that, surprise surprise, she wasn't insured for that car after all. The guy properly called the police, who not only charge her with driving without insurance but charged Tom as well with an offence he had never even heard of; permitting a car to be driven without insurance. This didn't bother him all that much because he assumed it would just be a small fine, but when he appeared before the magistrates a few weeks later and, at his solicitors insistence, admitted the offence, he was fined £250, given six points on his driving licence and since the already had a couple of convictions for driving offences he was banned from driving for six months as well!

Tom did not know about the existence of temporary car insurance (more details here), and if he had known he probably still wouldn't have bought any for his girlfriend anyway; Tom is careful with his money like that. Crazy really, he could've ordered it online in just a few minutes, paid a premium of just a few pounds and it would have saved him and his girlfriend about £500 between them which they spent on fines, costs and expenses in attending court.

Some people just never learn, and Tom and his girlfriend are two of them.