Ideliver the family to Aberdeen airport on a Monday morning. They will travel back to Dublin by plane and I will follow with the car later in the week, a 12-hour trip that everyone has agreed would be best made by me on my own. The space normally occupied by people will be crammed full of household products and non-perishable foodstuffs that are much cheaper in Scotland. For months to come I will tell everybody I meet about this, about how things are so expensive in Ireland but how we cannily saved hundreds by bulk-buying abroad and driving it home. I find the prospect of this conversation exciting.

On the way home from the airport the car begins to sound hoarse, a throaty quality which is more noticeable when I open the window. I turn up the radio and the problem goes away for a while but by the time I'm nearing the house there is no denying it. The exhaust is in trouble. There is a pleasure to be had from a roaring engine – boy racers with fat tailpipes understand this. People turn and look when you accelerate because your car is louder than everyone else's. It's a small victory but sometimes that's enough.

What I don't need, however, is my undercarriage falling off in Moss of Barmuckity or Scrabster or some other improbably named town, so I take the car to a mechanic. He tells me to come back at five the next day and when I do, the job is done. I pay him but when I get into the car it won't start.

"Leave it with me overnight," he says after a few minutes of looking at it. "It'll not be anything much."

When I go back the next day he shows me what the issue is. The little computer that mechanics now plug into car engines is giving an error message. Problems with cruise control, apparently.

"I don't have cruise control," I tell him.

"I know," he says. "That's the first problem."

He tells me that he'll try again, that it will probably need something replaced and to give him a call later. When I ring he says he's ordered the relevant part, some type of cable. It'll be ready the next day.

That night it snows. Roads into the town from two directions are closed. There is no milk in the shops and nobody working at the mechanics. It's fair enough. I'm not in a mad rush to get home so another 24 hours won't hurt.

When I talk to him the next day, though, he's not happy.

"It's a bloody nightmare," he says. "The whole thing's a mess."

"What happened?"

"A moose," he says. "He's eaten the plastic off your wires. He's shorted the electrics."

"A moose did that?" I say.

"Aye. They dinnae like the cold. They get in under the bonnet and hide in engines where it's warm."

"Seriously?" I say and then understanding arrives slowly. He means a cheese-eating moose. The kind of moose that you see running soondlessly on kitchen coonters.
The kind that will cost me four hundred and fifty poond and another week.

"It'd be more expensive at home," I tell myself, but discover that I really don't want to hear it.