Last year, one of my New Year’s Resolutions was to buy an electric car. I’d been thinking about it for a long time, but there were various reasons why the options available were not practical for me.

For one thing I need a lot of space in a car as I need to transport children, dogs, tortoises and now parrots to Norfolk and back on a regular basis!

For another, the cottage we have in Norfolk does not have off-street parking – it’s down a very narrow lane which leads to the sea. This means over-night charging in Norfolk is out of the question, and the county seems to lead the pack when it comes to lack of availability of rapid chargers – the only ones which are really practical for significant charging.

And then, in the middle of the year, things changed. I found out that an enlighted small business in North Walsham, a few miles from Overstrand, had installed a Polar fast charger. Suddenly I had options.

So the search for the right electric car began.