In the past few weeks, mostly due to sorting out my car hassle, I've had to do a few things (e.g. making a particular phone call) which I knew in advance would be stressful.

I've noticed during the process that there's a certain length of time beyond which I don't seem to worry much about the stress of doing the thing. It's fairly reliably seemed to be about two days: if I plan to do such a thing well in advance, I don't feel stressed about it until about two days before it, and then I start to worry, and to curse my former self for having committed me to doing it. Whereas if I plan to do it within two days, I'm much more prone to let the visceral dislike of the idea affect my decision to do it at all.

Of course this is all perfectly normal human nature and in either case my clear duty is to ignore the feeling of stress and just get on and do it anyway. But it's been striking me as interesting that the time horizon seems so consistent. It's as if the ‘me’ more than two days in the future is someone I don't quite see as myself, and hence I can foist unpleasant jobs on him with relative equanimity; but the nearer-future me is really me, so that jobs I foist on him are ones I know I'm going to have to do…

In other news, the car hassle now seems to be mostly sorted out. I've got a new (well, second-hand, but new to me) Polo to replace my defunct Clio; my insurance company have paid me a settlement that looked relatively plausible in terms of my own perusal of online price guides; I've given back the temporary hire car; all that's left now is for the insurers to sort out getting paid back by the other insurers, for which they don't need my help as far as I know. Phew.

Though I've been musing in the past few days that my methodology for choosing a car is wrong. (If you think it seems foolish to think about this just after I buy one, I wouldn't disagree, but better that than not thinking about it at all!) In the past my approach has been to think up a list of models that meet my basic requirements for size and price range and suchlike, then go and test-drive all of them; on some of the test drives I get a strong sense of wrongness, when it just doesn't behave the way I instinctively feel a car should, and then I go ‘warrgh!’ and decide not to buy that one.

The thing is, I got that same sense of wrongness the first time I got into the hire car, and actually it turned out I adjusted to that fine over a fortnight or so, to the point where the Polo now feels less right to me than it did in the test drive. I'm sure I'll readjust fine to the Polo, of course, but that's precisely my point: if that feeling of culture shock at an unfamiliar car is a basically transient issue, I shouldn't be basing buying decisions on it. What I want to be able to do is to distinguish the annoyances which are merely unfamiliarity from the ones that are genuinely annoying and will still be irritating me after a month, and I'm not sure if I can do that on a short test drive.

Or perhaps I should assume that any immediate annoyance is something I'll get used to eventually, and make my buying decisions solely on objectively measurable properties such as that model's statistical reliability, fuel consumption, likely TCO, and tedious things like that.