| A Mild Car Crash |
| Pix's Column | |||
| Tuesday, 21 July 2009 10:18 | |||
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Don't eat and drive at the same time. You might break your car.Don't drive with your knees. They don't tell you that one at motoring school, but they should. Mirror, signal, manoeuvre, don't drive with your knees - that's what they ought to say. I must have been given a duff instructor. I was driving home from a pub quiz. Completely sober, I should add, which negates the point of going to a pub quiz and which probably also explains why I was in a bad mood. I stopping off at Subway to pick up a sandwich - nowhere else was open - and then headed home. It's a nice drive: some interesting hills, a couple of stupid junctions, a handful of speed bumps to make you slightly annoyed and, once you're out of town, a pleasant scenic jaunt through the countryside. I should be more specific: it's pleasant in the daytime. It's less pleasant in pitch darkness when you're trying to eat a sandwich. I used to drive an automatic car, a process so unfathomably simple it's achievable while asleep, on fire or both. There's just one button for go, one button for stop and a big wheel for going to the side. No clutch, so your left foot's free to tap in time to the radio, and no gear stick, leaving a spare hand to use for eating or swearing at cyclists. You can't do that with a manual car. You try, though, at which point you find yourself trying desperately to direct the contents of your dinner into your mouth instead of onto your trousers, while simultaneously hurtling down an isolated back road which boasts enough twists and turns to make a Roman faint. Lap dusted with ranch dressing and lettuce, chunks of olive tumbling into the footwell, a perilously overstuffed sandwich teetering on the brink of collapse as you realise you need to change gear. There's nothing for it. You're going to have to use your knees. Bang! Clunk! Clunk clunk clunk! Clunk. That, to clarify, is the sound of a pothole meeting a Skoda Fabia at speed. I pulled over and sheepishly inspected the front left wheel. The rim was badly distorted and the tyre was flat and lifeless. I looked around at the landscape. Cold. Dark. Lonely. I opened my wallet and took out my RAC membership card. Pulled my phone from my pocket. Looked around again. Still cold. Still dark. Still lonely. The sensible - indeed, the legal - thing to do would have been to stay put. But I wasn't thinking straight. I'd lost a lot of sandwich. I sighed, put back my phone and wallet, climbed inside the car and started the engine. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk clunk clunk. It sounded like a steamroller, a dented chunk of wheel rim clanking against the road through shredded rubber with each rotation. I tested the brakes, which worked. I tried out the steering, which was functional. I took the car up to 30mph - clunkclunkclunkclunk - and felt hope fire up in my heart. Against all odds my traumatised vehicle was working, perhaps enough to survive the journey home, although it would be close. I wound the window down so I could listen to the deteriorating health of my wheel. After a while the smell of burning became annoying, so I wound it back up again. Things were going well, relatively speaking. My car rattled through a tiny vllage like a four-door pneumatic drill, but soon the village was behind me. I noisily trundled and flumped my way through the next village, buoyed by the growing proximity of my house, undeterred by the growing stench of torched tyre. In the last village before my home town, a couple of drinkers leaving a nearby pub ogled my vehicle, baffled and concerned. I ploughed on regardless, the battered but determined Skoda shaking with exertion. A few streets later, I pulled into my cul-de-sac where, as luck would have it, three whole families were standing outside their front doors. They would have heard me coming for half a mile, wondering what on earth the noise was, and as the answer presented itself, they looked on with fascination and pity. I, however, looked steadfastly ahead. I was home. Two weeks later my Skoda is back to its old self. Quite aside from costing £400 to fix, it has also dawned on me how stupid it was to attempt to struggle back in a car with a scuppered wheel, even at 30mph with nothing else on the road. I won't be doing that again. I still eat at the wheel though. I've just stopped shopping at Subway. Get a chunk of RollZero delivered direct to your inbox with the weekly Electric Letter. Sign up in the header at the top of this page.
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DerBart makes this comment
Tue 21 Jul 2009 15:26:27 CDT
Jonathan makes this comment
Sun 26 Jul 2009 06:33:47 CDT