Fidelma Cook passed away last month. We are running a selection of her columns as a tribute. This one is from April 2009. We hope you enjoy it.

As I’ve said many a time, our pleasures are simple here. My greatest at the moment is to open my Credit Agricole account online and see the insurance cheque nestling there.

Usually I open it midway through the month and discover that I am already eating into my permitted €300 overdraft, feeling my heart constrict in fear at the thought of being summoned to face the bank manageress, la belle dame sans merci. With the cheque in the bank I can walk proudly, withdraw cash in daylight and not scuttle to the hole-in-the-wall while she’s safely at home practising her dark arts.

Unfortunately, money and I have never married well.When I have some I can think of little else but how to spend it, as if possessing it will somehow corrode my soul. Or, in less poetic terms, I am an incurable spendthrift incapable of saving for a rainy day. The rainy day arrived months ago but I’m somehow happily splashing through it, like Gene Kelly, kicking up my heels and dancing the days away in hope of something turning up.

However, even I was slightly disconcerted to see that the total has dwindled somewhat. After all I have been a model of restraint, buying only one outfit (which will fit me soon), two pairs of ready-made curtains and new make-up which promises to lift and illuminate my face while miraculously filling in the lines. Hah!

A mere shadow of my former self, who truly believed that an hour in Harvey Nicks plus a store card was as close to heaven as the undead could get.

There was, however, a largish cash withdrawal for gardening as my neighbour Pierrot is sadly unable to do my fields this year due to pressure of other work. Ian the pool man has taken it on and, while substantially cheaper and more reliable than any

French gardener, he is still far more than Pierrot, who operated on a neighbour’s rate. Since I’m now describing my “garden” as a “parc a la francaise” I no longer have to worry about flower beds and all the other frippery demanded of real gardens, but I still have hectares of grass to mow and strim, weeds to blast and mole hills to demolish.

I have also dallied with using some of the cash to make a door out of the back kitchen window onto a newly paved courtyard (the one that floods), opening up the mini-stable into a outdoor sitting/dining room and tiling its floor. Naturally I haven’t thought of getting guttering and drains – that would be far too sensible.

The car? Of course the vast bulk of the cheque will be used for that, but I’m no longer sure that my son’s confident statement that he could get me a great left-hand drive in England for £6000 holds any water.

Any ones I’ve sourced on eBay or the various left-hand-drive garages are dismissed with the sneer of a Jeremy Clarkson fan. At one stage, fed up with asking him to see the sensible estates I truly need, I found myself agreeing with him that a 10-year-old Audi twoseater sports car would be perfect for me and the dog. After all, she rode with me for miles when I had a Mazda MX5.

We even mused together on a classic Mercedes convertible even older than the Audi, but then his father intervened and made his suggestions while tactfully implying that Pierce and myself often get carried away.

He offered to go “undercover” for me in the quest for the car most suitable for “you and Portia”. Pierce need never know. I was touched by his concern, but then I’d forgotten that the father was another Clarkson fan and drives

a BMW the price of which could buy a flat here, or even in the UK.

And when I e-mailed Pierce’s father links to certain cars – as with my son I could hear the lips curling over the internet.

Which is why I decided to try it the French way last week, going to Agen and the second-hand car lots.

My brief was simple: estate car, leather seats and €10,000 or under.

Age? Kilometres? “Negotiable,” said I cleverly, doing the Deneuve jacket swirl.

The Mercedes man wished me luck, the BMW man walked me over to a wreck at close to €12,000 and the

Audi man laughed and waved me towards what I’d taken to be a junkyard beyond the Skoda dealer.

I went back to the BMW man and said, “Your prices are ludicrous. I can get a second-hand car cheaper

in Britain.” “Yes,” he said, “you can. Do it. It’s the best way.”

So, I’m still driving Jackie’s car; still plucking up the courage to bid for a car on eBay; still checking into the bank account; still pushing the boy and his father to test-drive my selections and getting dangerously close to buying a pony and trap and blowing the lot.