A moment that changed me: I ditched my car - and improved my fitness, sleep and bank balance

After our rustbucket of a VW Polo was towed away from outside Marks & Spencer, I rang the car pound to ask how much it would cost to get it out. “It will be £250, sir,” said the man. “But it’s only worth £50,” I replied. He clearly thought I might have difficulty coming up with £250 because he added kindly: “A lot of people find that a challenging sum. But there’s no shame in it.” Absolutely, but that wasn’t the issue. “Can I ring you back? I just need to talk to my partner,” I asked. “Take your time,” he said. “It’s not going anywhere.”

During that phone call, I had an epiphany. I could leave the car in the pound, along with the car mats bearing the registration number, which my brother-in-law had bought me. In Nicolas Poussin’s painting Landscape with Diogenes, the philosopher is watching a boy cup a hand to drink water from a pond and realises he doesn’t need his drinking bowl, his last possession (off-the-shoulder toga notwithstanding), and so he throws it away. Similarly, I could ditch the motor, and thereby change my life and bank balance.

That was more than 10 years ago. If I had kept the Polo, today I would be paying out £135 a year to park a rotting lump of metal outside my house, not to mention £400-plus on insurance, and £200 for vehicle tax, as well as ludicrous sums on petrol, repair bills, MOTs and congestion charges. In my own little way, I felt I was doing my bit for the environment: kids in pushchairs at exhaust-pipe level were, thanks to me, slightly less likely to have asthma. I would never have to wash the car again.

But without a car, would I really be a man? “A man ain’t a man with a ticket in his hand,” counselled the mod revival band the Merton Parkas, in their 1979 hit You Need Wheels. Margaret Thatcher is supposed to have said: “If a man finds himself a passenger on a bus having attained the age of 26, he can count himself a failure in life.” I was nearly double that age, at a time of life when I should have been sublimating my fear of death with a manual Maserati, rather than topping up my Oyster card or riding my bike.

I was surprised that my partner (now wife) agreed to the idea. Given how unsafe London is for women, especially after dark, I thought giving up the Polo would be hard for her. “Not really,” she said. She would use more public transport and taxis if she had to. Plus, at the top of our street was a bay for two club cars (a short-term car rental service), which we could use. Our daughter had recently outgrown the car seat.

It was as if the universe was saying: go to the car pound and turn in your keys. So I did, like a suspended American cop handing in his badge and gun. It was symbolic castration in one sense, but personal liberation in another. I retrieved the foot pump and umbrella from the boot. I’m not Diogenes: I needed those.

We have never owned a car in the decade since, but, without wanting to sound too smug and definitely not wanting to be flamed as a woke, kale-eating metrosexual (although I am all of those things) by car lobby shills and gas-guzzling boneheads (no offence) who only touch the pavement on the way to their parked Range Rover, reducing my portfolio of stuff by one significant item has radically changed me. I know my neighbourhood intimately rather than glimpsing it as a passing blur viewed through fearful Crimewatch-tinted spectacles, as I did when I drove everywhere. I realise that, while I live in a somewhat dodgy area (shootings and stabbings are commonplace), it is also beautiful and filled with unexpectedly kind people. Plus, I walk more, so sleep better.

But let’s not overstate the positives. One day, I was walking home holding my iPhone, checking to see if Villa were losing to Fulham when I heard a noise from behind. A motorcyclist had mounted the pavement, and his pillion passenger snatched my mobile. If I had been driving, that wouldn’t have happened.

That said, I wouldn’t want to judge people who drive. Let me check my privilege: I’m everybody’s worst nightmare – a white, able-bodied male, with all my own teeth and, now, an Oyster card that allows me free travel on most of London’s public transport. I also realise that, living in London, I can easily get shopping delivered, as well as order taxis and hire rental cars. Bus, tube and rail services are all on my doorstep. For me, giving up a car has been a different proposition to pretty much anywhere else in the country. I wouldn’t want to rely on the TransPennine Express or country buses to get around.

Yesterday, I looked up from my book. I was coming home on a bus filled with tired-looking people heading back from their shifts, women deep in their novels, a wild-eyed man shouting into his phone – London’s brilliant and dismal parade. I may have been a “failure in life”, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.