My ancient old Ford Mondeo (2001) is still going strong. In some ways I hate it for doing so. It’s an appliance and I don’t like appliances, I like things with character. Prior to it I only bought Citroens (BX, AX, Xantia) and I loved them dearly. But they were unreliable piles of junk assembled by drunks. Then, once we had kids, an appliance became necessary.

The “New” Mondeo was the second car in the renaissance of Ford. The first was the Focus in 1999. My wife had a  Focus and it was as close to perfect a car as you could get. Interesting shapes inside and out, totally reliable and not a generic over-priced BMW. Her sister drove it for a few years after her and loved it too. The Mondeo kept the reliability of the Focus but was dead boring to look at, inside and out.

In 11 years, the only problems it has had are a badly designed handbrake and grab handles which pop out of the ceiling. It also loses the gas in the aircon too quickly and it needed a suspension joint replaced a few years ago. It gets one service a year across the road for €100+ and that’s it.

120,000 miles later and it bombs up and down the M7/M8 like a new car.

But in all this time, one thing has bugged me every day. The dashboard has a stippled effect which is a magnet for dust but is also impossible to attach anything too. Particularly phone holders. So I’ve always had to attach them to the windscreen. The problem there is that the angle of the screen is so severe, it is always awkward, in landscape-mode, far away and murdered by glare. In France, on holidays in July, the HTC Sensation overheated so badly using Google Maps Navigation that a 2 Amp charger couldn’t keep the battery charged!

Then yesterday, 11 years later, I had a brainwave. Sugru:

And ye know what? It flippin works!

Here’s to another 120,000 miles.