previously published on December 1st, 2007
“’T’was a dark and stormy night—” but we went as planned to dine at The Royal Standard of England, a 900-year-old pub as in my illustration. Above the festooned hops sitting in the rafters you may descry a skeleton drinker wearing a Roman soldier’s helmet and holding a pewter tankard in his left hand. I was drinking the local Marlow Brewery’s “Rebellion Mild”, a suitable ale for my temperament.
The pub is hard to find on that kind of night. The last time was a sunny afternoon when we rambled the local footpaths and fondled native Shetland ponies, shaggy creatures no higher than my 
waist. When we left the pub the narrow plunging lanes (like a roller-coaster) had turned into little rivers. Joshing K as is my wont, I said it was lovely weather to stride out and be kissed by Nature in full force. K was suitably provoked and the Universe must have heard my prayer, for we stopped somewhere a few miles from home and the car wouldn’t start again. 
It’s a Volvo I’ve had since new in 1993 and the more I nurse it through old age (its and mine) the more I get attached. The dashboard instrumentation doesn’t work properly so I assumed we’d run out of petrol. This is where my walk in the wild weather took place, which I’d jokingly craved only minutes before; and very fine it was too. As in the Christmas carol, Good King Wenceslas:
When a poor man came in sight
Gathering winter fuel.
Sometimes the rain stopped and that was even better. But when I poured the contents of the can into the tank, the car still wouldn’t start. I assumed the plugs had got wet in those flooded plunging lanes so I called up the AA (Automobile Association) and after an hour or so they sent a van. The mechanic said the ignition coil had died and he did not carry spares because they are model-specific; but as part of the service he would call up a tow-truck. After a further 90 minutes waiting the 
AA phoned apologetically: the truck would be delayed another hour or so.
The Universe always grants my unconscious prayers and I’d wanted to be closer to the elements. We weren’t too uncomfortable but in that situation, the windows lashed by the rain, we got slowly colder as we finished the Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword and played childish games and felt thirsty and hungry and discussed how much worse things might be. I was thinking of those who have suffered hurricane, tsunami, earthquakes, famine, road accidents, death, insurgents or coalition forces trying to install democracy whether it’s wanted or not. I thought that my car is only a car to the extent that its main parts are in working order. Otherwise it’s a complex of metal that wants to biodegrade. That will take quite a while and in the meantime I can be fined for parking, obstructing or littering.
After five hours in the breakdown spot (including my trek up the hill to a petrol station, which proved pointless) we abandoned our wait and took a taxi home. Next morning I read a Conrad novel on the bus and reflected on this superior form of 
transport: jolly driver, jolly elderly passengers. I even have my pensioner’s pass which gives me free bus-rides all over the County. I made my rendezvous with the tow-truck man who brought the car home and left it pointing the wrong way in our one-way street. I could have instructed him to drop it outside a workshop but I’d decided to try and fix it myself. This involved hunting in several spares depots and then returning to them twice more: firstly to exchange the wrong-size spanner and secondly to tell them the old coil didn’t look like the new one. They realized they had given me the wrong one in the right box. Finally this afternoon, the rain and hail lashing down, fortified with white rum in my coffee and some white wine (K and a friend were drinking this in the warm indoors) I managed to bolt things back together.
I’d given myself a week to fix the car and could have left it till the weather improved, for our daily needs are within walking distance. I was prepared for a possible misdiagnosis where the new coil didn’t help and where I’d traipse to spares depots for days, replacing parts one by one with still no spark at the plugs. I do think it is a miracle that cars start at all. When I was fourteen I had a little model aircraft engine – a diesel that ran on ether – that I kept screwed to a bench in a shed. I’d turn over the propeller till my finger was blistered and raw, constantly adjusting the throttle and compression, but it never quite worked properly. Ah! Those fumes! Those stained hands! That sore finger! I remember them as if it were this morning. That’s when I understood how obsessively introverted I can be, battling with the inanimate, wanting that moment of triumph when it fires up and I have proved a mastery over things.
Aha! That triumph happened today. I turned the key and it started first time. Oh, how I love my dented old car, reprieved at a stroke from the scrapyard crusher! I’ll never trade it in. Being a Swedish Volvo, it deserves a Viking funeral when its time comes. Those who live by gasoline shall die by gasoline. Its last journey shall be to a bluebell wood (see the pictures in this post), where it can rejoin Nature, decomposing into its elements.
And this is not the piece I intended to write at all.