Who's The Daddy: The pain of watching my lease car be returned

If I could give anyone one piece of advice, it would be this - never lease a car when you’re out of your mind on prescription painkillers.

Sure, you can eat your greens, never spend more than you earn and ration the sauce. All that’s a given really. But not tying yourself to a watertight three-year contract while the balance of your mind is affected by powerful and addictive opioids is a life hack you won’t get anywhere else.Regular readers, those who haven’t been alienated by the occasional Parental Advisory - Explicit Content nature of this column, may recall I smashed my left elbow and wrist to bits in a cycling accident in 2019.My surgeon did a magnificent job of piecing them all back together like some demented jigsaw puzzle, and painkillers were initially prescribed that would knock out a white horned rhino for a week.

And boy, are they moreish. The highlight of the initial recovery was one Sunday afternoon when the painkillers and the laxatives (taken to combat a particularly nasty side effect of the painkillers - backed up for a week) chased each other around my system like Olympic level tag.

Three months of travelling to work on unreliable and expensive public transport as my arm slowly healed nearly broke me, mentally and financially. Our place (closed now, we’ve been wfh since March 2020) was handily sited on a business park 30 seconds off the motorway - ideal if you’re driving, but like an episode of The Crystal Maze if you’re on the train and the bus. Three hours there and back, five days a week, as the nights drew in and the temperatures dropped.

So once I was declared fit to drive, I thought it would be a good idea to lease a brand new automatic car (manuals are a bit tricky with a gammy left arm), four months later the country went into lockdown thanks to a once-in-a-century pandemic and three years on it has done just short of 15,000 miles. To be fair, it’s a brilliant car. And I only mention it because it went back this week when the lease was up. Just under 10 grand over three years. And 99% of the time I had it, it was parked up outside my house. And now it’s gone forever with absolutely nothing to show for it. It aced its first MOT last week. Of course it did.