Juliet Nicolson

A vroom of one’s own: how I loved my old Mini

Almost 100 years ago the writer Virginia Woolf advised women to find themselves a room of their own: a refuge away from the busy, crowding demands of life, where they could focus instead on themselves and write, think, be. At a time of austerity, when space is at an expensive premium and when post-pandemic empty nests have been re-occupied by returning offspring and spare rooms newly identified as shared office space, I have found an alternative sanctuary.

For the past 20 years or so my refuge was my car, acquired with the first real money I ever earned as a writer. My Mini offered me an unconditional escape during the milestones, the turbulence, the highs and lows of two decades. It was an unchanging place of stability and comfort, seeing me through the challenge of house moves, of becoming successively an orphan, a wife (for the second time) and a grandmother. This space bore witness to the day I published my first book and usually supplied the means in which I travelled to research the others. It is a place where I wept, laughed, had entire bars of Fruit & Nut all to myself and belted out Abba songs at the top of my lungs, all inhibition banished. The front seat offered me a place in which at the push of a button, the intimacy of radio introduced me to novelists, to political argument, to memories of the rich, famous and not famous enough, and in which I learned to love classical music. Hidden within the dashboard and the side pockets, I amassed a couple of decades’ worth of life clutter, where almost-empty bottles of scent jostled with packets of stale fudge, exhausted biros, old envelopes scribbled with long-abandoned illegible plans for new books, half a pair of earrings, and a slightly sticky, much-thumbed copy of Where the Wild Things Are.

Last week this machine, with which my connection felt almost human, began to make a death-rattle noise

Most of the time I was the sole occupant.

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