Travel and transport

Dana: Good evening, everyone. When I tell people I drive cars for a living, they picture lorries, or taxis, or possibly racing. What I actually do is deliver vehicles: new cars from the port to dealers, hire cars that have been left at the wrong end of the country, and now and then a very expensive car to a very nervous owner. I drive one car there, and then I have to get myself home without one. So my job is really half driving and half public transport, and it's the second half I'd like to talk about tonight. Dana: People always ask what I pack. They assume the answer is a satnav, and of course I rely on my phone, and I keep a paper road atlas in my bag for the days when the phone gives up. But the thing I would never leave home without is a head torch. A lot of my drop-offs are at farms and industrial estates, and when I hand over the keys at six on a winter evening, I've often got a long, dark lane to walk down before I reach a bus stop. A head torch keeps both hands free for my bag and the paperwork, and it's kept me out of more ditches than I can count. Dana: Friends imagine the motorways must be the hard part. Honestly, after twenty years, a motorway is where I relax. The part of every job that makes my heart beat faster is the handover. You arrive, the customer walks slowly round the car with the delivery form, looking for the tiniest scratch, and if they find one, it's my word against theirs. I used to dread it. These days I photograph every panel before I set off and again when I arrive, and that has taken most of the fear out of it. Dana: Getting home is a puzzle of its own. I plan the return before I plan the drive, because a delivery to a village with two buses a day is a completely different job from one to a city centre. The worst days are Sundays and public holidays, when rural services simply vanish and a forty-minute trip can turn into a four-hour one. Dana: Now, some of you will be collecting a new car yourselves before long, so here's my advice. Everybody checks the paintwork, which is fine. Some people read every line of the paperwork, which is also fine, and plenty insist on a quick test drive round the block. What almost nobody does is lift the floor of the boot. Many new cars no longer come with a spare wheel at all, just a tyre repair kit, and in my experience a surprising number of those kits have gone missing somewhere between the factory and the showroom. You don't want to find that out on the hard shoulder at night. So before you sign anything, check that the repair kit is actually there. Dana: I'll finish with my favourite delivery. A few years ago I took a small green sports car to a man in his eighties who had sold it forty years earlier, when his first child was born. His children had tracked it down as a surprise. He didn't drive it. He just sat in the driver's seat for twenty minutes with the door open, not saying a word. Then he got out, shook my hand and asked whether I'd like a lift to the station.