Cars and Girls - Part Three - Mercedes SLK - Meeting Kasia

I'd been quite happy with my Mazda MX-5 for quite a while. It was a good little car, I'd been lucky enough to buy it from one of our web design customers I managed to save £700 off the already-low asking price.

It was quite a small car, with a soft roof and as such I didn't feel particular safe driving it or leaving it anywhere. When I finally got some money for selling my share of the web design business I splashed out on a nice "new" car. At the time there were relatively few hard-top convertibles on the market. The Mercedes had a nice electric folding roof (none of that unzipping malarkey that I'd had with the Mazda) and all the usual safety features such as airbags ABS etc.

What's more it was sleek, black and fast. Fitting in with the dotCom millionaire image that I was trying to portray at the time. A few days after meeting Kasia I asked her out on a date. Just me, her and Boycie (Boycie being my nickname for the car). The weather was fine so I picked her up and we set off down the coast to a nice country pub for a drink and some pleasant chat. After that I took her to Birling Gap. A great place to enjoy a view of the series of cliffs known as the Seven Sisters. Unfortunately that's as far as our little adventure took us. The car had a puncture and unable to find the special key to undo the wheel nuts I called out the AA. As it turned out changing your wheel yourself on a gravel car park isn't a good idea, so calling out the AA was the right thing to do. After sitting in the car and chatting awhile we stopped off at an intimate little pub on the way home.

After that first abortive date things went a little more smoothly. Kasia wasn't overly taken with my car. Maybe because she is Polish and the car German? Anyway she was more than happy to be chauffuered around and we would drive to local towns for a late night drink, listening to music and snogging at the traffic lights whenever we got the chance. At the end of the evening I would drop Kasia home at the block of Art Deco flats near the marina. The door guy there fancied Kasia and we would often sit in the car kissing giving the guy "a show" as Kasia would put in.

Boycie kindly provided me with the excuse that I needed to get Kasia to stay the night at my place for the first time. I'd had bad experiences with ignoring warning lights in cars. When Boycie's dashboard showed up a warning light I wasn't familiar with this was my prompt to invite Kasia to stay the night. It was either that or risk the engine blowing up. Luckily the warning light was nothing to worry about and after that I didn't need any lame excuses to get her to stay the night.