Real life | 28 January 2012

The Volvo only went in to have a parking light changed but, of course, it ended up being taken to pieces.

Somehow, whilst fitting a bulb and then securing the exhaust pipe, which had come a bit loose, they found a leak from an indeterminate origin. It was probably the gearbox fluid, the mechanic explained. They would have to keep it in for a few days and send me a courtesy car.

A boy wearing an iPod turned up on my doorstep an hour later and nodded mutely towards a shiny new BMW coupé parked outside my house.

‘Oh no, I asked for a hatchback,’ I complained. ‘I need to be able to put the dog in it.’

‘No, is not this one,’ said the boy. ‘Is one before.’

‘One before’ was a strange, blue, bubble-shaped thing, of a design I had not seen since the first generation of vehicles adapted for wheelchairs, circa 1970.

I do understand that courtesy cars operate on the same basis that my old school used to keep baggy old spare swimming costumes in a smelly box in the sports hall in case we accidentally on purpose tried to forget our own. They are meant to shame you. Otherwise people would just claim their cars were broken in order to get a BMW. Even so, the Tacuma was something else.

The best that can be said about it was that it was so utterly without style or feature that I could probably park it on a double yellow line and the parking warden wouldn’t notice it.

‘Chevrolet?’ I said, as I walked around it.

I found it distressing that the same car company that featured in a tribute song to the late, great Buddy Holly should have produced this sorry lump of metal.