Real life: My handsome builder ex-boyfriend shows me how to buy a car

The sometime builder boyfriend spotted the Volvo on his way to a roofing job in Dorking. He rang me greatly excited. It had a few bumps and scratches but the pertinent facts were these: one owner. Never towed. A bike rack on the back. Haribo wrappers all over the seats. Oh, and the mark from an auction sticker still visible in the windscreen.

‘So it’s a mess,’ I said.

‘No,’ said the builder, who used to be a car dealer. ‘It’s a genuine family car that you can probably get cheap because it’s a bit dinged up. Trust me.’

The thing is, despite everything, all our stops and starts and offs and ons, I do trust him. But when I turned up to see the car, he wasn’t there so I sat in the car park waiting. The only space was at the car wash where some Eastern Europeans allowed me to put my little Fiat beneath a jet-washing machine.

‘You sure you don’t want wash?’ said one of them, a lean, muscly chap with his overalls pulled down to reveal his tanned, bare chest. Cydney the spaniel sat on the front seat panting at him.

‘No, it’s fine, thank you.’

‘We wash good.’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

I was starting to feel this was a bad idea. Here I was, a single woman, about to test-drive a four-by-four. I was going to be taken for a ride, in many more ways than one.

After 20 minutes, and no sign of the builder, I went to find a salesman. The XC90 in question turned out to be the gun-metal grey one standing at the jet wash, which the Eastern Europeans had just finished buffing. It was a lot nicer than I had imagined.

The salesman showed me inside.