Moving to The Secret Acre has meant reluctantly taking up driving again. Like painfully slow Broadband, having a car is just part of rural reality.

Having driven all my life, I eventually gave up the car after moving to London, but only after paying out shed loads of cash to keep it in a garage for a year first, just to have used it three times in 12 months, before the penny finally dropped that I really could get by without it and be much better off financially. But it still felt like losing a limb at first.

When I moved to Bristol I feared I might need to get a car again, but to be honest thanks to the availability of City Car Club in the city, it proved quite easy to get by, especially now the fear of not having car was well and truly behind me.

I’m not militantly anti-car, Formula 1 and MotoGP are my secret guilty pleasures, but certainly within our cities lots more people would find there where much happier and healthier with public transport and car share, not to mention financially richer.

For me, now in the countryside, the car is a reality in my life again. But over ten years without a car has left me with a healthier attitude to transport I think. Yes I need a car again now, but it is just a metal box, a tool that gets me from A to B. To me, one of the saddest indictments of our society is the sight of those supped up ‘boy racers’. I can’t help feeling if the best way we can express ourselves is thorough our car, then it’s a very impoverished society we’ve created. Surely there should be much more to life.