It’s a simple truth that our family has always been Ford fans. For as far back as I recall the cars have been descendants of the original Henry… I recall driving off in a new model way back and hating leaving my treasured XC at the dealership.

I believe cars have personalities and this week, my beloved long-time servant, blue Falcon, Yuri heads off, at least to a new owner and not a scrap heap… Yuri will no doubt give them the same reliable service he gave me.

My son has told the person who is taking him that Yuri is indestructible, surviving the 2014 bushfires and saving our dogs, kangaroos have bounced off him with damage to them but not him, and that if a tree was to fall across the highway it would hit the car behind.

Lucky is Yuri’s middle name… he’s never given one moment’s trouble, mechanically. Yuri is a super car…

The other silver Falcon – not so… it was possessed.

Mum and dad bought it for me and it cost more than they paid to keep the wretched thing going. It spent a lot of time in the local garage with its mouth open, I felt it didn’t like me, so I gave it to my husband to drive.

Since then, my daughter in law got booked for speeding in it, then husband copped two speeding fines in it… he  who drives so slowly that old ladies on pushbikes pass him… and who got lumped with the wretched points again? Me.

I should have set fire to that cursed car fair dinkum…

Yes I know they can do stat decs to say they were the drivers, but no… I had points on my licence… apart from gifting the government megadollars for fines given in places where you couldn’t do any damage if you were FLYING… I was over it…

Like the blue Falcon (Yuri) the silver beast survived the 2014 fire. Then when we moved to our current town it stalled on me in the middle of the local intersection lights in the busiest part of town.

Horns blew, people shouted, huge stock trucks revved and, embarrassingly, I had to be pushed across the intersection by two police men.

Worse was to come when we were in the rental after the fires… husband got into it to BACK out of the garage, it instead shot forward through the wall of the garage collapsing it and almost giving my poor man heart failure… and not even getting a dent in its shiny mudguards…

I said “that’s IT!!~  and bought another car (Ford Focus; dear little thing), said to my son that I never wanted to see the silver Falcon again… and I was happy when he sent me a photo of it on the back of a wrecker’s truck… it was POSSESSED! However, my faithful blue Yuri sits in the front yard, awaiting delivery, no doubt it will serve the new person well… I am going to miss him…