Low life | 21 January 2016

Putting old or contaminated petrol in a car needn’t be catastrophic, but in the Golf’s case it was. With 37,000 miles on an 07 plate, it was a tight, solid little car before I accidentally wrecked it. Someone offered £300 for scrap, and I was about to sadly take it, when a pal pointed out that one second-hand Golf door alone costs £300 from a scrapyard. He urged me instead to buy a second-hand Golf engine for a few hundred quid and simply ‘drop it in’ — as he so persuasively put it. He even found a buyer for a Golf thus renovated who was guaranteeing trade price sight unseen.

I’m no mechanic. So I made a few calls and found Roy. Roy was available and he had enough confidence in his abilities to set a price for the job that seemed as unbelievably low as the trade dealer’s offer was high. Ordering a used 07 Golf engine from a nationwide scrap dealers’ website was as straightforward as ordering Michel Houellebecq’s latest from Amazon Prime. Roy and I set the day (Saturday) and the hour (10 o’clock) for him to come and do the work.

On Saturday morning, Roy’s white Berlingo van swung punctually into the drive. He got out and went straight to work, like a worker ant emerging from the egg. There in the garage was the engine sitting on a pallet. And there on the drive was the 07 Golf. He needed no further cues. Standing in my slippers and dressing-gown, cradling my kick-start coffee, I observed his purposefulness and confident expertise with unreserved admiration from an upstairs window.

Then I showered and dressed, made more coffee, and took a mug of it to him outside. His head was under the bonnet, buried deep in the engine vault.