Charming people

At least once a shift, I'll pick up passengers who are charming, witty, chatty, literate, or in some other way a delight to be with. Maybe we'll talk about books, maybe we'll swap travel stories, maybe my passenger is just a total darling. There's a young man in a wheelchair I occasionally pick up from school, and despite his disability, he is always happy. You can almost feel the warmth of his personality radiating.

These passengers make my job such a joy. They balance the snobs and the yobbos. Over-balance them, really.

I come home after a shift exhausted but happy.

And you know the best part of my life? All the people who make my job such a pleasure, and I have three more at home. I cherish the company of my wife and adult children.

So it was a rare pleasure to go out shopping today. First stop was a jeweller in the upmarket shops at Manuka. It's coming up to our twenty-fifth anniversary, and I suggested that Kerri should have a diamond ring to mark the occasion. She agreed, and has spent a month or so researching the exact style she wants. We had a look at some rings today, and after discussion of styles and sizes and colours, we're pretty close to getting one made up to suit her exact wishes. It's not the diamond sparkle, but the sparkle in Kerri's eyes that is my prime objective here.

We broke for discussion over cherry pie and skinny latte at Artoven. Two of my favorite barristas were on duty - they make my regular night-time visits doubly pleasant with smiles and chatter. We sat outside in the early spring, talking about ring-buying strategies and design features. An arcane subject, but important.

We returned home to collect our son, and then went car-shopping. Our oldest car, an ex-government Mitsubishi Magna, is reaching the end of its economic life. It is dented and scratched, rattles alarmingly, stalls occasionally, and is probably going to break down completely soon. Its last service, it needed work done that would have over-capitalised it, so we declined the $900 quoted cost, accepting that it was about time it was replaced.

And, to tell the truth, Kerri finds it a bit embarrassing to be collected from work in a noisy old Magna. Even if it is driven by a sweet young man.

We bought a Hyundai Getz last year. It's a sweet little car. Fun to drive around town, economical, easy to park. It's hard to pry my daughter out of it. I wouldn't want to drive up to Sydney in it, without cruise control and seats that are a bit on the basic side, but it does the job well.

This time around, we'd been thinking of a Mazda 2. Same class as the Getz, just a little more refined. I've been admiring its cheeky but not crazy looks for a while, and liking what I saw.

I'm not a great car shopper. Pull up at the dealership, check to see that the thing ticks all the boxes, take it for a test drive, and hand over the money. Maybe others like to haggle, and maybe others like to spend days on research, but I don't have the time or the inclination. My daughter and I spent a day driving from dealer to dealer before selecting the Getz, mainly because we couldn't find a reason to move on to a different brand and we were getting tired.

This time we cut out all that shopping around bit. The car came in the right configuration - automatic and three doors, had the basics, and the only thing lacking was the cruise control. We declined the upgrade to alloy wheels and a nicer sound system, instead opting for a safety pack.

Four of us going over Hindmarsh, and it performed well climbing the hill and coming down again. Not exciting, but nothing to make us dislike it.

We picked out a colour - silver - put in our order, threw in our old Magna and in a week or so we'll get a phone call to say come pick it up.

And then it will be hard to prise my son out of it.