Not that I don't get pissed off with other road abusers (you've never got a .45 and a shovel when you need one), but I'm truly glad to have escaped all those years spent cycling into hailstones, waiting for buses on windswept rainy nights, being sardined into London Underground tubes against people, who really needed to know the truth about short falls in their hygiene regimen, and hitch hiking at night in the middle of nowhere (and being arrested for suspected terrorism as a result, but that's a different story). My wife and I fully realise how very fortunate we are to have a car each with our ipods linked to the stereos; it's disgusting really. But then, as Sonny Barger said (the guy credited with starting the Hell's Angels) 'if it's got tits or wheels, you're going to have trouble with it'.
Just before Christmas, both cars were running a as rough as a badger’s arse, and needed a good servicing. So I put one in, just for a minor service; the diagnosis was that it also needed a new catalytic converter, which may have explained why shop windows rattled as I drove by and birds were falling choking from the trees in my wake. And it was going to be costly, because it was a foreign car. “Okay” I said, “you must do what you must do.” But I wasn’t carless; if I gave my wife a lift to and from work, I could have her car, a zippy VW Golf, to drive around in. Excellent. I’d just been talking to a friend about cars – and the fact that I’d been in 6 car and motorbike crashes (none of which were my fault - only two of which big ones, and one of which physically rearranged me) And that I'd been in 6 cars when the clutch had gone. No one I know, other than drag racers, have this record. You see, is it just me or what. I left my friend and drove home.
Yep, you’re way ahead of me; I put the clutch in and nearly put my foot through the bulkhead, as something under the bonnet went bang. I was in second gear, so I accelerated, barely passing the road works with the walkie talkie traffic man flipping the handheld ‘slow’ sign to ‘stop’. I came to the roundabout at the bottom of my hill and, thankfully, with no cars to wait for, I just drove up the hill, parked with a bit of a lurching chug outside my house and stepped out into the afternoon sunshine. Fortunately, it happened to me where it did when it did. It could just as easily happened to my wife in rush hour traffic in the pouring rain in the middle of the city. And the last time I had car bother, it was the accelerator cable in a different car, which snapped outside my house at the top of a ridiculously steep hill, in a different city. So the gods must be smiling on me; even though they do seem to have a rather sarcastic sense of humour. So does this stuff happen to other people, or is it just me?
