Being a naturally negative person I make it my business to subscribe to something called ‘Marty Dow’s positive-thought service — We can change the world one thought at a time!’ These are nice little ‘affirmations’ which arrive in my personal email exhorting me to breathe, fill my thoughts with light, visualise myself as a child of God, and so on. The other day a particularly inspiring thought arrived, all about making a conscious decision to think of a world filled with love and hope.
I did the guided meditation which followed, relaxing, letting go of past experiences, releasing the old patterns, becoming open to God’s design for me. The problem was, I then had to deal with the Peugeot garage. I don’t know if Marty Dow, writer and spiritual teacher, author of How to soar above the crisis!, has ever had to deal with the service centre of a London Peugeot dealership. I think she lives in Florida, heading up something called the Institute for Creative Living, so she probably hasn’t had to take a car with a malfunctioning catalytic converter into a repair shop on Stockwell Road.
If she had, her positive-thought service might include something like this: ‘Today I make a conscious decision to think of a world free of little men in overalls droning on about diagnostic charges.’ And her guided meditation would be: ‘I allow myself to relax and visualise all the people in Britain who can’t speak English properly being taught how to pronounce words so they can be understood…’
Of course, I was already in a state by the time I phoned the dealership. My car had broken down on the A3 on precisely the day I paid off the loan from the Alliance and Leicester with which I had bought it. I had been so pathetically excited. I had ripped up the piece of paper detailing the final payment and rung the bank to cancel the standing order with a sense of real accomplishment. Literally the next time I got into it, it started rasping like a sick dog. Having never had a single thing wrong with it in all the time it was owned by the bank at 6.4 per cent, it now spluttered and coughed and chugged its disgust at being taken over legitimately by yours truly.
I suspected the exhaust, made a mental note to take it in some time and kept driving. Madness, I know. It gave up just as I crawled along in the permanent traffic queue on West Hill in Putney. The screen flashed up ‘pollution alert!’, it dragged as if I was in the wrong gear, and stalled with a bang. I nursed it home by pumping my foot against the accelerator and doing something brutal with the clutch. Goodness knows what further damage I caused but I really couldn’t face fighting my way through the automated waiting line for Sheila’s Wheels recovery service.
I rang my local Peugeot garage and explained what had happened. Now, in the old days, when people were nice to each other, and still in some parts of Britain where they adhere to normal rules of human contact, you would have got a cheery ‘Don’t worry, love, bring it in and we’ll have a look at it.’ Perhaps even a ‘Sounds like your front exhaust’s gone, madam. Never mind, we’ll sort it out…’
Not any more, not in Metropolitan Britain. People are too frightened of being held legally accountable for every promise they make, or of being swindled, or of being done for sexual harassment even to think of speaking to a customer nicely. They are also incapable of stringing a sentence together that’s not on their official crib sheet.
‘If you bring the car in ver [sic] will be a £60 diagnostic charge,’ is all he said. No reassurance, no banter. Just ‘these are the terms on which we will engage with you’. A small print statement. I tried again to reach him. ‘You will fix it for me, won’t you?’ ‘As I said ver [sic] will be a diagnostic charge.’ ‘Yes, but it’s probably something fixable and you’ll be able to do it, won’t you?’ ‘You need to bring the car in, and ver [sic] will be a diagnostic charge.’
I’m afraid that at this point my positive-thoughts visualisation went out the window and I made much the same noise as the undercarriage of my car. I begged him for any hint he could give me that the garage contained humans who might help me. It was no use. He wouldn’t say anything that wasn’t on the sheet. He booked me in for my diagnostic test and reminded me that it would be £60.
Seriously. How am I supposed to visualise light and life with this sort of thing going on?
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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