Rites of passage

Yesterday Hugger Steward sat his last A level and, apart from the Music Department residential in a couple of weeks, has finally and definitively left school.
2/3 of my family more or less grown up. Help!

The day before, LCM and I drove over to Oxford where a really very small sum of money changed hands , and we drove home in convoy, with what will officially be Hattie Gandhi's car.
In real life, I suspect that I'll probably continue to lend her mine whenever she wants to travel any distance, as at 21 years old, the "new" car is probably best kept off the motorways...but that's fine. Despite age and size, the baby car is really fun to drive, putting me in mind of my much loved and lamented 2CVs. So, as my children become more grown up by the day, their mother is rather enjoying reliving her youth.

Mind you, there are some things I need to relearn.

1)Elderly cars need their lights turned off when you park. Removing the ignition key is not in itself enough.
2)And the day of torrential rain and serious flooding is perhaps not the best one on which to need the RAC twice in the space of an hour (nothing seriously wrong with the car...just issues with the driver and the weather).
3) I've forgotten how to make a wire coathanger do the work of a radio arial (and there sure as heck isn't a CD option here)

But it's lovely that I can now say "yes" if HG wants to go travelling, without having to tear my hair out over the impact on my diary. It's good, too, that she can start to build up a no claims bonus of her very own. The "young driver" loading that insurance companies apply makes the cost of driving almost prohibitive; the annual premium for 3rd Party cover is nearly 3 times the value of the car. Ouch.

I'm very uncomfortable about the fact that we are , if only for a season, a 3 car family . I feel that our global footprint is beginning to resemble that of BigFoot, though I'll continue to cycle most places about the parish. But even a long suffering clockmaker cannot carry clocks in a bike basket, and most of the places that HG needs to go have pretty impossible public transport...so they need cars...and I'm too used to having one to sort out the complications if I didnt.
So here we are...moderately repentent but not able to see a more workable solution right now.
In any case, baby car represents freedom - surely an important part of being young in the summer time.