Those of you who know me may realise I never learned to drive. However, I used to take lessons in 2013, before I moved to Swindon from Reading. I never took the test as I didn’t feel like I can drive on the road at all (I was apparently very good at manoeuvres, but does that matter?)

A little bit later I was considering to resume my learning and wanted to work out how expensive it would be to have a car but I couldn’t find approximate prices of car insurance (between 25 and 150 a month is not approximate enough for me) so I ended up entering details of a non existing car into a price comparison website to see quotes. It was quite a while ago, possibly 5 years, so I was a bit surprised to get this yesterday to my email:

It absolutely made my day! I’m Magda and I have Mazda. Isn’t that hilarious? The Boyfriend also agreed on that.

It seems to me like I engaged in pretend play. It was not the same kind of play a neurotypical person would engage in – where they would probably pretend to drive – but pretend in a sense where I ‘own’ a make of a car as a word that I can later use to fill in imaginary forms. Or possibly even to discuss this with people saying ‘I have Mazda, look, it’s written down here!’.

That’s pretty much what I told The Boyfriend. I first shared that I received the above email and then, when he agreed it was hilarious, I added ‘I have Mazda’. Just like that. Not ‘the email stated it was Mazda’ but actually pretending the car belonged to me. We both laughed.

I think it only worked that way because it was me who started that ‘game’, by looking for quotes. If the email reached me totally out of nowhere I wouldn’t find it funny, I probably wouldn’t even pay any attention.