There was something hideously inevitable about the whole thing. I should have known it was going to happen. It was the most obvious thing in the world, when you think about it.
I picked up my car from the Peugeot garage, having spent £1,200 on repairs taking two weeks and more arguing with mechanics than the astronauts of Apollo 13 must have had to go through as they were fashioning an escape pod out of the lunar landing module. When they finally brought my car out to me it was all shiny and perky looking. Even the alloys had been polished. It was, to all intents and purposes, perfect.
I got into it, drove it into town, and promptly crunched the front right wing into a bollard at the entrance to an underground car park. You see, inevitable. There was just no way that the gods up above were going to let me enjoy that little bit of hard-earned perfection for longer than ten minutes. No way. They let me have my ten tiny minutes of satisfaction then snatched it right back. It was wondrous while it lasted. I felt like a woman in charge of her own destiny. I had paid a heap of money for my car to be fixed and now it was perfect. Crunch. OK, not quite perfect. I spent a good few hours weeping over the dented wing before deciding to leave it as it was so it would stand as a constant reminder to me never again to be lulled into a false sense of security about life. I needn’t have worried. Once the dream was punctured the rest of the illusion started to unravel pretty quickly.
The next day, I took the little motor out for a run on the A3 and on the way back it broke down in precisely the same place as it did before I took it in to be repaired. The same fault flashed up — ‘anti-pollution alert!…catalytic converter fault!…’ and we ground to a halt coming down West Hill in Putney. And so, humbly accepting my fate, I got back on the phone to the Peugeot garage. ‘I want to speak to the principal dealer, please,’ I told the implacable woman who answers the phone there with the express purpose of blocking the progress of all calls.
‘Wassit abaaaaa?!?’ she asked with her usual charm and sophistication. ‘It’s about spending £1,200 on a repair at your garage and my car breaking down the next day.’
‘Yeah, but wassit ABAAAAAAA?’
‘It’s about you putting me through to the most senior person there before I contact my solicitor.’ This was a mistake. She put me through to a call centre hundreds of miles away, as per instruction on the crib sheet — ‘If customer threatens legal action…’
But with a little ingenuity, and much swearing of the kind that has no doubt landed me on a private security contractor’s files and possibly the national DNA database, I managed to get myself directed back to the principal dealer. The conversation was a revelation. I had no idea how much I knew about the modern internal combustion engine until I began to argue with the Peugeot showroom on Clapham Road. I have been labouring all my life under the illusion that I am no good at science or technical stuff, that my head will explode if I dare to put more than three numbers into a calculator or fiddle for longer than a few seconds with a fuse and a screwdriver.
After talking to the ‘experts’ at Robins & Day in Stockwell for a few minutes I suddenly felt as if I had a PhD in mechanical engineering. I never knew I knew so much about engine management and catalytic converters and exhaust gas recirculation valves. ‘Did you tighten the wires after fitting the new coil pack?’ I found myself asking, startling myself as the strange sentence came out of my mouth.
‘Er…I did tell you there might be problems after fitting the coil pack…’
‘Yes, and I’m telling you why. Did you tighten the wires?’
‘Er…it might be something to do with the cat…’
‘Nonsense. Cats last longer than six years.’
I have no idea where this knowledge came from. I can only assume that when my father was discussing some of the finer points of his working week as a process engineer at the Sunday dinner table some stray bits of information drifted over the roast chicken and got wedged in my brain by mistake. I am now starting to wonder what else I don’t know I know. Are there other areas of untapped expertise inside my brain and how should I go about harnessing them? Do I actually know how to fix a plug? Or indeed a lunar command module? I think I should find out.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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