Well,

that was très civilised. Christmas Day passed in a pleasant haze of food and enough beer, in an alternate universe, to have drunk myself under the table. On Boxing Day we walked along the beach to the Crusoe in Lower Largo, and if you kept the power station behind you, it was a genuinely picturesque scene. Grey clouds rolled over the Forth, the water was choppy and it looked for all the world like somewhere up beside Inverness or Skye.

And then the next day I had to come back to Edinburgh to work, and after eight hours banging my head off my desk, we had less of an "aha!" epiphany and more of a "how on earth did we miss that earlier?" one. The next five hours were spent frantically trying to capitalise on the glaringly obvious so that I could come back home to view a car.

I'd seen the car - an '85 Porsche 924 - on the web, and my Dad and I took it for a test drive today. Initial impressions weren't good. First and second gear were either entirely absent or temporarily out to lunch, and we made several crawling starts in third on the way to the motorway. Once we were rolling, things looked up: steering was precise and if presented with a reasonable gear ratio, the engine pulled nicely with a convincingly snarling tone.

As we came off the motorway and were pulling onto a B-road, I switched the wipers on against the snow. Almost as soon as it came it went, and so I flicked them off.

Unfortunately, the wipers didn't stop moving. Things took a surreal turn when the horn started to randomly sound itself.

"Was that you?" my Dad asked.
"Er, no."
"Hmm. Let's stop to see if we can get it into first."

So, crawling along the B-road looking for somewhere to stop, we saw a guy out for a bracing afternoon stroll. The horn, in an act of near-perfect comic timing, gave a cheery beep as we rolled past him.

He gave our sentient car a deadpan wave, and we waved back, convulsed with mirth.

After a bit of experimentation ("Hit it harder. Harder!"), I managed to reliably get it into both first and second, and engaged in some light caning back to Kirkcaldy.

In the end, the gear problems are almost certainly down to some worn out 50p bushings, and the Herbie-esque horn and wipers is probably a pair of dodgy ground connections. Now all I need is the RAC inspection to tell me that I'm not about to buy a complete lemon...