I HAVE got a new car. It’s a gleaming, sparkling white with pristine leather interior. And it smells wonderful. “A new car is wasted on you, you’ll have it wrecked in no time,” said my eldest when he heard. “It’ll be in as much of a state as your last one before long,” chipped in son number two. “You won’t look after it.”

Excuse me? When I got my last car, more than 11 years ago, I needed a seven-seater to fit all the boys in. In its last years, as I hauled the old jalopy in and out of the garage for various repairs, it was beginning to look like it was destined for that great big scrapyard in the sky.

The boys loved pointing out that my particular model was one the UN uses in war-torn countries, earthquake zones and inhospitable landscapes... and which is always praised for its durability.

“But you’ve managed to drive yours into the ground along the gentle leafy lanes of rural North Yorkshire,” they’d laugh.

These are the ungrateful boys I have ferried to and from football and rugby practice, coated in mud and, occasionally, bloodied wounds. I have also had to transport their dirt-covered bikes both inside and outside of the car they tell me I haven’t looked after.

When I first got the vehicle, our youngest was only two years old and the others five, eight, 11 and 13. I started out banning eating and drinking in the car. That lasted about two days.

Crisp crumbs, half-eaten sandwiches wedged between the seats and juice stains on the upholstery soon became the least of my problems. I remember one particularly hellish journey home from Kent when one boy was projectile vomiting while another was suffering from particularly bad diarrhoea.

We have endured many long and gruelling road trips, with all of us, along with suitcases, body boards, wets suits, fishing rods and other paraphernalia squashed inside, to the far west of Ireland and the South of France.

As the boys grew bigger, it became harder to fit their long limbs, which would invariably end up in a tangled mass, into the space allowed.

I have lost count of the number of times I have had to do an emergency stop because they were larking about, thumping each other or taking off their seat belts in order to reach over and change the dial to Radio 1 or to open the sun roof.

The smell of the new was soon replaced with the lingering stench of testosterone mixed with sweaty trainers and the whiff of cheap Lynx deodorant which, no matter how much I vacuumed and wiped or how many air fresheners I hung from the rear-view mirror, I could never mask.

There is a dent on one door where one of the younger boys had a temper tantrum and bashed it with a jar of marmalade as I unloaded shopping in the supermarket car park. A dent in another was caused by someone kicking a football while it sat in the drive.

I decided it had to go when it broke down a few months ago on my way to Ireland. I missed my ferry, had to be towed home and it cost more than £800 to have the drive shaft repaired. Given that it had also got rust around the wheels and was sinking on one side where the suspension had gone, it was in a sorry state by the time I took it into the garage to trade it in for a new motor.

I took 14-year-old Albert, once he’d showered, put on a set of clean clothes and taken his shoes off, for his first run out in my new, shiny five-seater car to drop off the old log book at the garage the next day.

The salesman was cradling his hand in a cloth. He showed me a sore and blackened thumb: “When I went to start your old car this morning, the battery was flat. And when I put the jump leads on, it blew up on me.”

I asked Albert if he wanted to say goodbye to the old jalopy. But we decided it was best to get out of there before the people at the garage changed their minds.

He wanted to stop for a takeaway burger on the way home, until I reminded him nobody would be eating or drinking in the new car. Ever.

I wonder how long that will last…