It's been a hectic week of talking to insurance representatives and storage people and salesmen, but this is the result.



It's the 2015 model of the Honda Fit that we had before! It's a lot sleeker than the old version - this one hasn't been ploughed into the back of a jeep yet.

Once again we went for the top of the range of options, after getting an excellent price from a salesman who claimed the quote was a mistake but he would honour it anyway (but I always thought he was a bit dodgy). As a result, it's a subcompact/economy car but it doesn't seem to know it, with a lot of things that you would normally expect to find on much more high-end cars - rear-facing cameras, satellite navigation with map updates and live traffic, and so on. And it moves about quite competently as well, despite being slightly more computer than car - I plan to install a DIY improvement soon which I hope to reveal in the coming days.

This one also has a spoiler on the back and I remain disowned by everyone in Scotland.

For the first time, there are a couple of anniversaries at this time of year. Even though it really doesn't seem like it, it's now exactly one year since I started my new job (which I should stop calling my "new" job, seeing as it feels perfectly normal now). Going into a company with some semblance of hierarchical organization was a completely new experience to me, as small as everyone else thinks it is, but I seem to have found a secure place and even feel like one of the older people there as others come and go.

I still miss having an office with a door, but now that I'm sitting in an open-plan room next to the corridor where people come in, I feel that I get much more conversation with people. We're moving across the road to a bigger space in about a month, so perhaps I'll manage to get myself a window seat - the only seating plan anyone has put forward so far is just all arriving as early on moving day as they can possibly manage and camping out in the best spots.

The car has also had its first birthday - over the last twelve months it's taken us 4,907 miles that would otherwise have been covered (far more slowly) by buses, and by my estimation, we've spent about $500 on fuel for it (compared to $1400 for the total cost of MBTA passes for us for a year).

The occasion was marked by having to go and have the Massachusetts inspection sticker renewed - it's a test that's done on several aspects of the car to make sure it's safe and within acceptable bounds of emissions, though I'm told that all they actually have to do is to connect the car's computer up to a different computer and ask if it's reporting any problems. This was the first time I'd had to take the car to anybody who wasn't our actual dealership - the whole process was done in about fifteen minutes by the most monosyllabic man that I've ever met. I've owned goldfish that had attempted to exchange longer dialogues than he did, with his entire contribution to the conversation being "Keys? Sit. ... Okay. Cash? Mastercard. Keys on the front seat."

So now I have a new green sticker instead of an old orange one. Quite by coincidence I met my driving instructor this evening, so I could say that his teaching had led me to having no incidents at all for a full year.

Being rather new to ownership of cars built after the turn of the millennium, this symbol entered my life yesterday. Even though I'm pretty sure my parents just ran their cars on the same tyres without touching them for years, tyre pressure - which is measured in the almost beautifully unwieldy unit of pounds per square inch - can vary a lot by the season, and drops significantly during colder weather. And, as I found out when I looked in the manual, our car warns you when a tyre is beginning to become underinflated (though decades of computer evolution have not allowed it to tell you which one).

As we were going to the hardware-type shopping centre anyway, I got a little gauge/repressurizificatenizer thing, which attaches to your car's power outlet, screws on to the tyre valve, has a handy non-adjustable light pointed directly away from both of these fiddly attachments, and produces a horrendous buzzing noise while doing absolutely sod all to the tyre's pressure. The dial did at least allow me to discover that I was at 30ish psi at the front and 25 at the back, though - so I took it to a garage instead and found the air dispenser... thing that I've never even paid attention to in my life before. It took me about three goes, but I eventually got them all up to the pressure that it wanted - after going up a couple of psi above the recommended level, I finally realized that the warning light wouldn't go out until the engine had been on for a couple of minutes.

On the way back from our business in the area, we took a turning on to the main road into our town and I noticed that all the other cars on the road were crawling in a very organized line in the left lane. Thinking that there must be roadworks ahead that I didn't know about, I moved into the lane with them, and it was only then that I realized that I was now in the middle of a long column of cars in a funeral procession. Junctions were being redirected by the police around us, so I felt we were stuck with it - and not really knowing what else to do, I just turned on my hazard lights like all the other cars in the line and proceeded to use our vaguely appropriate colour to blend in, making sure not to smile. Then when we reached the graveyard I just indicated out and sped away, feeling slightly guilty about having accidentally hijacked what must have been a fairly important funeral, even if it saved me a bit of time getting home.

We also narrowly avoided being part of an actual funeral later in the day, because we've just come back from driving fifty miles through a stupidly early October snowstorm. This, on reflection, was a bad decision - we were at a wedding, and when I saw the warning that snow was starting to come in I actually asked the front desk of the hotel if they had any rooms left for the night - but with no rooms available, we decided to brave the journey.

With visibility at a very unsatisfactory level, everyone on the road was in the middle lane, in a long snake just following the lights of the car directly in front of them - then a bus, going far too fast (probably one of the budget lines trying desperately to complete a route before it fell over and/or caught fire) absolutely buried us in its wake, throwing half a ton of snow on to our windscreen which obscured everything before the wipers got through it. After ages just concentrating on the very faint lines on the road, avoiding having to brake and hoping that I would just continue travelling in the direction I was pointing, I've never been more glad to get back on to town roads and the hugely reduced speed that comes with them.

The Honda has served us extremely well so far. Tomorrow we will stay inside.

When I write about real-life incidents here, it's nice to be told that I've taken something very mundane and blown it up into an entertaining story. I'm beginning to wonder, though, if this isn't through any actual writing ability but because these things really do seem bigger than they should to me, through nervous stress that's been building up over the last twenty-six years.

I had another parking ticket yesterday - I had noticed the car marked "Parking Officer" hovering around the car park I use for work, but didn't see the slip of paper half-melted in the rain at the bottom of the windscreen until I made to turn right out of it. They mark it with a red strip on the front addressing you as "TO VIOLATOR:" as if you've just exposed yourself, and this one said that I had been in a restricted area. Being specifically allowed to park in the space that I was in, I zoomed back to my space and caught the car just before it moved off. The woman inside acted like a bit of a miserable old piano teacher when I presented her with the ticket, asking me where my permit was and where it was meant to be displayed. The answers are on the back and front, respectively, but no instructions to this effect had been provided, and as I park with the back of the car facing outwards I thought it more logical to put it on the back window rather than make the traffic wardens stumble through the hedges when checking them - but if they prefer to do that then I have no argument. She became a lot nicer when she realized I was a new driver and had an accent, though, took the ticket back, and I've peeled the permit off and put it on the windscreen to prevent any more potential bat attacks in the future.

I'm not used to this compared to the situation where I lived in Scotland, where we've got plenty of room and so you could just pull over and leave your car where you felt like it, as long as it wasn't in anyone's immediate trajectory. It also means, of course, that I've had 100% of parking tickets rescinded in my entire time as a driver here - let's start as I mean to go on.

Also, I'd like it known that if you're whipping cream without holding the bowl, and it tilts even slightly when the electric whisk impacts the side, it then paints the most wonderful clear stripes across everything and everyone in the vicinity. That was a much better problem.

After the two-hour wait for the registry and the final cleanup (where I think they were understaffed - our salesman came past apologizing for the wait, with oil on his shirt and a power screwdriver in his hand), we finally got to take the car home. When we got in, more than ready to have dinner, we found that the chicken that we had in the fridge for our planned dinner had gone off... and then realized that instead of improvising something else, we could now just scoot down to the supermarket and back in about ten minutes, without it being an hour-long planned excursion while wrestling a granny-cart along with us. It was like a huge revelation - is this how normal people live? I hadn't realized the amount of flexibility that I'd been missing since living in Scotland, just in owning a vehicle - I can't wait to go around to see someone back in Brookline (for which the MBTA's site estimates about an hour and a half) and say yes, we'll be there in fifteen minutes.

I've been doing some light reading in the form of the navigation manual (150 pages) and the owner's manual (330 pages), just working out what we can do with it. I've never regularly driven a car that was put together after about 1995 before, so most of the available array of controls except the steering wheel are new to me - like central locking, cruise control and something called "RES ACCEL" that I think might fire rockets. One of my concerns about the navigation system was its ability to understand me - even other humans sometimes have difficulty with that, but on a few test routes, it didn't pick up the name of the destination any worse than I feel it would have for anyone else. We've already been arguing with it in terms of what route to actually take - on the main road rather than through a maze of residential streets - and the speed at which it recalculates the route when you stray from it is very impressive.

In general we've been just getting used to the existence of our newfound transportation - I drove Whitney to work this morning, though we don't plan to use it to replace that walk often, and for my last day at the office I rode the bus of irony one last time because I didn't really want to deal with parking, or the inner city traffic, at this point. We've already had a folding table in the back - with the back seats down flat, it's suddenly like we've rented a van. I'm sure that I'll get used to driving again, even though in America it seems that you need to be a lot more alert in general - here, everything is the Forfar Road roundabout(s).

• Car
• Spreadable butter

Just to put things in perspective, the entire email exchange with our insurance company for explaining and organizing car insurance, from first sending my UK licence through explaining and exchanging documentation for the entire process, spans 21 emails. A post about a Playstation game has gone back and forth for sixty comments since yesterday and has not yet stopped.

For the last ten days, I've been adjusting numbers in various spreadsheets and reading reams of advice online, trying to work out exactly what I'll be earning, what we'll be paying out with various approaches to down payment and financing, and learning to toughen myself up and prepare to negotiate when we go back to see Honda Man tomorrow. We're hoping to get quite a bit off the given price, as we've already been given a rather decent offer from someone down the road, that I convinced my contact to put down in writing - it seems, oddly, that the best tactic is to find the dealer who'll give you the best price, then avoid them completely and ask a reasonable-looking alternative dealer to beat their offer. But on top of that, I'm prepared for them to hit us with various surprise fees, including for documentation ($100 is normal, the $280-$250 range that we've been quoted is ludicrous) and made-up things like detailing, fabric protection and rustproofing. I feel that I've done a lot of research, and that I'm better-informed at this point than most dipsticks that go in to be cheated out of their money, but still, I'm nervous about not ever having done this before.

By sending out messages to local dealerships from manufacturers' sites, you pretty much earmark your email account as a spam folder for the next few weeks - I've had replied pouring into my inbox ever since we started looking, and have been feeling like some important businessperson having to answer constant phone calls and update people on the models I'm thinking about and the bids that I'm taking on them. Ford went one better - they sent us a little flowery "thank you" card which arrived in the post today, along with the salesman offering to pick us up if we ever wanted another test drive. What an industry.

I received my driving licence in the post this morning, and it now occupies pride of place next to the existing UK card in my wallet. This new one is reassuringly elaborate, with a shiny seal across the middle and a much better photograph than the one that was taken of me when I was 17, so it makes it feel like it wasn't a huge amount of wasted effort. It's still sort of difficult to believe that I have it - not just because I'm suddenly going into a buying process, but because it represents this large step towards normalcy that I'd previously accepted that I just didn't have here.

Our aim is now to find a small, reliable, efficient car to get for ourselves, in a price range of about $15,000-$20,000 - we're open to both new and used, apart from the models like the Fiesta where used cars do not yet exist. So I completely failed to spend my weekend relaxing from the turmoil of the last month as I had planned - yesterday, Whitney and I both went out to look at Toyotas and Volkswagens, and on Sunday, with her on the way to California, I was suddenly called by one of the Nissan dealers I'd sent an email to, encouraging me to come down and test drive them. Here is the entire summary of my thoughts so far.

Toyota Yaris - I honestly thought that this one was going to be at the top of our list and an easy buy for us, and it was the first that we went to see, but when we got to look inside one at the dealership, it instantly felt really cheaply made. There are a lot of bare plastic surfaces on the armrest and central console, and the driving position is uncomfortable - I'm a seat-all-the-way-forward kind of person because of my slightly dachshund-like legs, and in this position, the base of the unit for the steering wheel gets in the way of your knee. Instead of having the dials in front of you, they're placed away over in the centre of the console for reasons I can't explain. And the boot of the hatchback sort of nullifies its own usefulness by being too small to fit anything at all unless you put the back seats down. Despite our expectations, the sedan version is slightly better.

Toyota Prius - This is the most expensive car we've looked at, but as it's a hybrid engine, the fuel savings are (theoretically) astronomical. The interior is comfortable while still showing off with slidey space-age designs, and the only thing I found strange was the completely inadequate gearstick. (While I'm on the subject, why is Reverse forwards and Drive backwards? This never made sense to me.) A physical disadvantage that I found with it is that the distance between the driver and the front of the car is... enormous - it's one of the longest-nosed cars I've ever seen. It doesn't seem particularly unusual in a photograph, but inside, the dashboard is extremely deep. I've talked to wolfekko and his other mechanically-inclined friends, and have learned a couple of drawbacks - that in reality the fuel savings are not that significant compared to smaller petrol-engine cars unless you're always driving in busy city traffic, and that maintenance is extremely costly, having to go to a specialist dealer instead of any old garage.

Volkswagen Jetta - We looked at one of these at the almost deserted Volkswagen dealership down the road, as Whitney's mother had told us it sounded like a good small car. She must have been looking at a reduced photocopy, because it's the size of a bus. We left without anybody noticing we were there.

Nissan Versa - This one was the model of car that was our favourite to hire when we lived in Brookline, and it drove very well both then and when I took one out for a test drive. The dealership only had two of them, both used and not yet cleaned, and I didn't get to try the hatchback, because after walking out to the car park, the salesman couldn't find it! During the test drive, someone in front of me suddenly stopped dead for no reason in the middle of traffic, so the brakes got a good test and scored highly with me. According to the car reviews on US News, they have issues with safety and reliability, though, which are things that obviously seem fairly important. I've got another couple of offers on Versas (Versae?) from other dealers as well, and might try to pit them against each other if we go down this route.

Honda Fit - I had just intended to look quickly at the Honda dealership on my way back from the Nissan place, but I ended up going for a second test drive that day. This was pretty much an afterthought on our list, but after driving it, it went right up to near the top of the candidates in my mind - it's actually what I thought the Yaris would be like. It's small but doesn't feel cramped inside, is smooth and comfortable, has the speedometer and readouts in the right place, and the steering wheel is easily adjustable to a much better place where it doesn't obstruct your knee. It also has as standard a USB port on the passenger side, where you can plug in your mobile/music device and then control it from the wheel. I know that shouldn't impress me so much when buying a car, but it does.

I'm slightly wary about this one, though, because Honda Man can tell I'm interested - he asked me if there was anything to do to get me to name a price and buy that day, and I had to say no to him twice. While sitting at his desk going through the likely price and offers, he was on the phone to his boss chuckling away at unheard things like he was Noel Edmonds on Deal or No Deal talking to the Banker, and he kept relaying questions that shouldn't seem as loaded as they did, like which British football team I supported. Anyway, I'm going to look at this with Whitney again and see if she likes it as well.

Ford Fiesta - In America, this is a new car - I would comment once again on how America seems only to get good things many years behind other parts of the world, if it wasn't really a completely different car from the one that I drove in Britain. This is looking like the other of the most likely choices and it ranks as number 1 on the above site which says you absolutely cannot go wrong with it, though we're still to actually go and see and test one. Most of the ones that are available at the local dealer seem to be manual-transmission, and I'm not sure why I feel so reluctant about that seeing as that's what I learned on - I suppose I just assumed that every car was an automatic here, and that the availability of manual gears puts yet another choice on to the pile. It's also a little bit more expensive than the others that we're considering, so if we like this and another model equally, it might come down to price.

That's about it.

I was quite curious about part of the driving lesson procedure that had been detailed to me when I was at the office last week. They said to me specifically that the instructor would "arrive outside the house, he won't leave the vehicle, won't phone or come to the door to alert you, and will wait ten minutes for you to appear." Approach wearing a blue lapel pin and ask if you once had a barber called Dominique. I still don't know why they were so discreet about it or apparently scared of the outside world - I had pictured someone coming to the house in an armoured vehicle and nervously peeking out of the hatch at the front. But at five to noon, I saw a very normal driving school vehicle had sidled up at the end of the front path.

I couldn't remember or pronounce his name, but my instructor was from Puerto Rico, though I thought he had an Italian accent at first. He set me off driving with occasional directions, just to see how I did at first, and was obviously quite comfortable because he had pulled out his phone and was talking to someone else as we went along after the first five minutes. It was instantly one of the most relaxed first driving lessons you've ever seen - we talked about being foreign in America, his family, where I'd come from before moving to Boston, and so on, in between him telling me where to go and offering observations like "You see, that was a woman" when someone pulled out in front of us without looking.

The manoeuvres took a couple of goes because I'm not used to doing them from the left-hand side of the car, but after re-learning parallel parking, I found his own technique rather better than the one that I had learned previously (mirror to mirror, one right turn, reverse until the right mirror blocks the left brake-light of the car in front, then turn hard left until you see both your headlights reflected in its back). Three-point turns are also different because the roads are about two or three metres wider, so much that you might as well not bother with the three points at all in most places.

I've asked some people for their thoughts on the test, as well - people seem to generally say that if I passed in Britain I'll have no problem here, but I'm just very aware of all the little things that can go wrong. I have another lesson at the same time next week, and then the test soon after that.

Having felt that there just hadn't been enough to worry about in my life recently what with the whole business of buying a house and my parents arriving tomorrow, I went down to the RMV this morning to get a learner's permit for driving. I hadn't really planned the visit much in advance, only having said that I might go at some point in the next while, and had done very little preparation - I downloaded and read the drivers' manual on the bus on the way there. It had occurred to me that this time, I wouldn't have the advantage of seventeen years of picked up knowledge behind me, and unlike the rest of the country I wouldn't automatically know what colour a regulation sign was or what the various road markings meant, but during the couple of practice tests that I mentioned in the last post, it seemed that the general approach of it was just to make sure that you weren't a total moron, and apart from the different shaped road signs, everything looked fairly comparable to what I was used to.

Like all American governmental departments I've seen (which is more than most people have to in this country), on arrival they give you a ticket and then keep you sweating in a row of benches while waiting for your number to come up, occasionally ringing an electronic bell and flashing up letters and sequences of numbers on the screens around you like you're at the world's drabbest Bingo hall. Having been assigned to the C-class personnel, it seemed that my queue moved most slowly, while they absolutely rattled through the As and Bs, but during the time it took for the five or so C-numbers in front of me to be dealt with, I took the chance to look over the vehicle regulations again, noticing that it advised such things as "make sure your vehicle operates good", being one of the few educational publications directed by Derek Zoolander.

Even though I had been calm and unbothered about the level at which I was to be quizzed, the process of even getting to the test is like being interviewed by an elderly Gestapo member in a wooly cardigan. I'm sure I saw a few people in front of me being turned away for not meeting the requirements, but I had brought a whole envelope full of evidence in preparation for their strict rules on needing three separate documents that showed social security number (the original card), proof of signature (my permanent resident card), proof of residence (after some rifling, a mortgage update from the bank) and proof of birth (I'm standing here now). With your whole life plotted out on to their computer, further testing is done right at the counter.

The eye test got off to a rocky start when I failed to find the eye testing equipment - rather than an optician's chart somewhere across the room, you have to stoop down and peer into a sort of Viewmaster mounted on the desk. Looking into this, I had to read out numbers on a background that were visible only to my left or right eye, then pick out another number sequence in a kind of ghostly lighted grid pattern, which I could only just do. Then came the worst part - she switched on an LED at the periphery of vision, and asked me what colour it was.

"I don't bloody know," I didn't say. I can see colour-vital things in the road perfectly fine because the reds and greens they use are very distinct, but if you're going to ask me what colour something is, don't show me a pinprick of light at twenty degrees past my field of vision. Hoping for the best, I guessed "red".
"No - there's a light on the edge of your vision, what colour is it?"
I turned my eyes directly to it, hoping that that would offer me some help. "Sort of... yellow-orange?"
"No - there's a light on the edge of your vision, what colour is it?"
"Green?"
"Yes."

And that's how they ensure your colour vision is accurate - just keep on asking until you get it right, like a less impatient Granny's Garden, and it doesn't matter that you've just apparently demonstrated that when encountering a traffic light you're going to just go as fast as possible no matter what it's showing. With that safely out of the way, I was pointed to a glass-walled room where - in an arrangement much like the British theory tests - a number of touch-screen workstations were set up with the testing software, and it told me that I needed to attain the generous pass mark of 18 out of 25.

And things started off very well. I recognized the first couple of questions from the drivers' manual and could have answered them very easily anyway with only a bit of common sense, but I didn't know that the machine had a trick up its sleeve - just as you're getting used to the process, it'll suddenly bring you to a dead halt with an irrelevant statistics question. Staring at the first one, it felt like the Bridge of Death from Monty Python - "What... do you do at a Yield sign? What... are the indicators for? What... is the percentage of accidents on the freeway that are caused by drunk driving?" In what way does the last one imply anything about my ability to operate a car? And that wasn't the worst of them - there were the occasional questions about the maximum penalties for speeding and alcohol-related incidents for drivers between the ages of 16 and 21. I struggled through them with guesswork and inference from the questions it had asked before (unlike the British test, you're immediately told whether you were right or wrong and a running total is kept at the bottom of the screen), and was relieved when it seemed to calm down again and offered up some road signs instead.

Despite the machine's best efforts, I passed the theory test with 20 right, having only failed to guess the average age of drunk drivers and the height of the occasional dam in Kazakhstan, and joined the younger girl who had been taking the test beside me in the queue to get the licence handed out while talking about the stupidity of half of the questions. You don't get a card for it - instead I have a rather pathetic slip of paper that tells people I'm a licensed learner driver and includes a photograph that makes me look no more than 90% like an escaped murderer, and I was out of the building in no more than an hour and a half.

I now, once again, have two years to organize and pass the driving test.

Er, I might be buying a car this week. It's something that Whitney and I have sort of talked about one day getting around to considering for a while, and I've been encouraged to finally get a licence instead of continually relying on the way that Zipcar inexplicably allow me to just drive in the knowledge that I held one in a country that drove on the other side of the road, but I always thought it would be something that would get pushed off indefinitely. This afternoon, though, our neighbour came round to tell us about the plans she had for moving out, and casually offered us her car for "$500 or less".

So... I'm not sure what we should do, now. The decision would have to be made fairly quickly because she moves on Friday, though once bought, the car can freely just sit in our off-road parking space until such time as we're ready to use it. I don't know how the whole process really works in America, but I've sent an email off to the man who does our home insurance to ask what the monthly payment might be likely to be, and he should be able to give me some idea of what I'll need. I hope that I'll get time this week to test drive it and get it looked at - it's a roughly-1985 Pontiac 6000 LE (whatever that is), she says it's been good to her and she's taken it to be checked every six months, and it seems to have worked all right during the two months we've been living next to her, at least.

At the moment, hiring a Zipcar for a full day costs us about $100. So the way I see it, if it goes about five round-trip journeys of decent length before the engine jumps out and all four wheels fall off, then it's already paid for itself - and getting an incentive to finally get a licence will be welcome, as would the ability to go beyond ten minutes' walk away without a ton of planning. It might even replace the bus and train to work if I can get unterrified of driving among people from Boston. And if it doesn't work out, we can sell it on to a junkheap and probably break about even.

Is this a remotely good idea?

Edit: She's actually decided not to sell it after all, so all of this turned out to be a bit pointless - however, thanks for everyone's thoughts, and it was clear that this made us consider it, so that tells us a lot...