Ten Years, Signed Away
Saturday, September 19, 2026 at 7:49AM 
Please click the photo above to play the daily videoBack to work, though with one eye on the afternoon from the moment the day started. It's a particular kind of morning, that — the sort where everything gets done properly but slightly faster than usual, because there's something waiting on the other side of it.
Rounds first, then meetings, then more meetings, which is how the working day tends to distribute itself once you stop being surprised by it. Still, it all wrapped up in reasonable order and I was home by three, which counts as a small victory in any week.
The drive back provided the day's one genuinely unwelcome moment. A stone came up off the road and put a crack in the Myvi's windscreen — that sharp, unmistakable crack of impact, and then the slow realisation that the little star in the glass is not going to buff out and is, in fact, now a job. There's no arguing with physics and no one to blame. Just a piece of gravel, doing what gravel does, with impeccable timing on a day already dedicated to car admin.
Because the afternoon's real business was the Starex. Anita signed the documents to sell it, and that was that — ten years, concluded in a few signatures and a handshake. Ten years is long enough for a car to stop being a purchase and start being a piece of furniture you happen to drive. School runs, airport trips, holidays, the boot loaded past any sensible limit, that particular smell every family car eventually develops and nobody can ever identify. None of that gets written into the transfer form, obviously. The paperwork records a vehicle changing hands and says nothing about the decade.
Still, it's going to make room for the iCaur, which is the whole point, and there's no sense being sentimental about something we're replacing on purpose. The Starex earned its retirement honestly.
Early dinner at Mid Valley after that, which turned out to be busier than expected — some event or other going on, the sort that fills the place with people moving in a slightly different pattern than usual. We ate early enough to stay ahead of the worst of it and left before the crowd properly settled in, which I'd call good planning if any of it had been planned.
Then home to settle in, and on to the more enjoyable end of the car business: choosing a colour. There's a peculiar seriousness that comes over people at this stage — everyone treating a decision that will be entirely invisible to them while driving as though it were structural. Swatches consulted, opinions exchanged, nothing definitively settled. It'll go on a bit longer yet.
An early night after that, willingly this time rather than by medical necessity. A day that began with meetings and ended with paint samples, with one cracked windscreen and one decade quietly signed away in between. Not a bad shape for a Thursday.
