Engine trouble stops play

Friday: Day 9 in SouthWest.

I’m always nervous about taking my car into the garage. There’s a fine line between getting overcharged because you’re a bolshie pompous guy who purports to know intimately the inner workings of the engine, or getting overcharged because you’re a clueless 20-something who knows more about the delicacy of the Middle East peace process than she does about what’s happening under her hood.

So it was with trepidation that I took my car in for its yearly MOT yesterday. They said they’d look at it in the morning and call me if it needed any work done, so by 3pm I thought I was home dry - enough to boast to a colleague about how my little L-reg had obviously sailed through its yearly medical, clearly down to careful ownership and model driving.

At 3.10pm and the call came. “Miss Wood? It’s about your car”. My faithful companion. How bad was it? I felt I should probably be sitting for the news. In the moments that followed I felt a good portion of blood rush to somewhere near my little toe. Something about a new exhaust. Something about a new headlight. And a further twist of the knife as apparently my number plates are too battered to be read according to legal standards (are you sure?). The damage? More than I’d budgeted for by a few hundred pounds.

It does make me wonder. If I had fallen somewhere in between bolshie know-it-all, and clueless-I-know-my-car’s-red-and-that’s-about-it, would I have needed so much ‘essential’ tinkering? Essential it is, however, as having no car in Cornwall is probably on a par with having no date for prom. You just don’t get very far.