The new car I swore hand on heart we would buy by June of last year has just been bought.
My wife is the driver, but I have always been the chooser and buyer. I like looking at used cars.
In recent weeks, the search became a frenzy, and I drained the online car sites and wore yard salesmen thin with idiot questions.
Surprisingly, no trespass orders were served.
Our 1992 Toyota Marino still went like a rocket, but the numbers were telling us serious repairs would be soon.
It was dented everywhere, missing an external mirror, graunched in the front where my wife ran into a truck while changing a CD, and some waterhead walking down Cargill St had walked right over our car as well, leaving a hollow in the roof you could fill with water for small children to paddle in.
But it went like a rocket.
My wife had at least narrowed the parameters down as to what she would like, and from these I was able to come up with a number of perfect cars.
But none proved perfectly perfect.
A teacher friend of my wife had just been through this same tortuous process, and finished up with a Mazda Atenza.
My wife loved this car. I want one like hers, she said.
So I found her exactly the same model at exactly the same price. Masterful.
I think I want a Toyota, she declared. I brought my brother in, a mechanic who can divine a car's ills with the sniff of a nostril.
He was unimpressed by certified low kilometre readings. Anyone can put a sticker on a car, he snorted.
After looking underneath one low km Japanese import we loved, he declared the true figure was at least 100,000km more. Chilling stuff.
My wife became dangerously fascinated by European cars, especially black ones, but an episode of The Best Of Top Gear last week, where Jeremy Clarkson took a gleaming 1979 6.3 litre Mercedes for a service and received a bill for 15,000, fixed that.
Eventually, after falling in love with three Toyotas, a Peugeot, a Suzuki Swift, a Ford Focus and deciding twice we weren't going to buy a new car after all, we went back to the Mazda Atenza, which my brother had told us was awesome.
But it was sold two hours before we arrived at the yard.
However, car salesmen are very helpful, and after being told of the parameters, this one found us a car we all loved - even the brother.
Two days later in the same yard I found something even better.
My brother confirmed it was even better. So I bought that one instead.
My wife rang to hear how the testing was going. I told her I had just bought one.
She made a gurgling noise, as if trying to swallow gib stop, then asked if perhaps she should have driven it first.
I pointed out cars are not meant to be driven - often, ludicrous logic works best when you are in a hole.
I told her the car was called a Toyota ist.She was incredulous, and asked if my near-blindness had mistaken ist for 1st.
I told her it was an ist and that I had the original YouTube ad right in front of me.
Which was true.
The 2003 Toyota ist was marketed at young Japanese men, and in the ad, one of these snappy young fellows is hurtling through the countryside in his ist trying to catch a speeding train, inside of which a beautiful young woman with long blonde hair sits pensively.
Even though he is travelling at 200 miles an hour, he turns sideways and yells out ISOBELLE!! And Isobelle looks out from the speeding train at the dashing young man in his ist and screams back RALPH!! We are both 60.
We like trains. This is the perfect car for us.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
