I've been on a first aid refresher course the past two days and because it's work-related driving insurance means you have to have a hire car. Since I went with someone else she drove, as I'm not convinced at all I can drive any other car but mine, especially as we had to drive at rush hour time.

But when we got back today I drove it around the close a little bit. It was very nice having a lighter steering wheel and when I turned the car round I was surprised when all of a sudden I'd got a full lock on the steering wheel, as it had power steering. I didn't have to have the seat all the way forward, but it's actually a bit hard to tell because it was an automatic.

I dislike automatics anyway because I don't understand them and also because I want to decide when to change gears - I want to be in control of that. But I was terribly confused by it going all on its own unless you put your foot on the brake. So you have to have your foot on the brake before you take the handbrake off and put it into D, I think it was. Then you could swap your foot to the other pedal. Although I did that, it would have been a lot simpler to have used my left foot on the brake. After all, you have two pedals and two feet so you might as well use both legs.

So I'd quite like a car that requires less effort to drive (ie power steering and automatic choke) but not an automatic. Anyway, I'm an intelligent person, I am perfectly capable of driving a manual car. And with fuel prices the way they are, an automatic is going to cost more in fuel (as well as costing more to buy in the first place).

I did look at the manual on my car. Helpfully, it's for four different cars, so I assumed mine was first on the list and found it does about 40-50 miles per gallon. Which is a completely useless measurement when you buy petrol by the litre and I only know that my petrol tank holds 42l. But it does give metric too (the car's not quite that old not too!) and it does 5-7 litres per 100km. My journey home is about 150km and that takes 2 hours. So it's an inefficient measuring system because it all depends on how fast you drive and what gear you do it in, but it means 42l should last for about 9 hours (that calculation really wasn't helped by me dividing 42 by 6 and thinking it's 9...). Which is a long way and explains why I only fill my tank up once a month.

My car also has, I think, 43bhp. So if it loses 5 horses per year then... my stables aren't looking too good. 19x5=a number far bigger than even the biggest number on the page.