Broken Down

My car broke down today, on Shoot Up Hill in Kilburn, a place absolutely heaving with elderly men walking angry dogs who are delighted to find a girl in a mini skirt and woolly tights bent over a smoking engine with her bum in the air. It gave them an opportunity to polish their sharpest chat up lines.

“Broken down have you, love?”

“Need a hand, love?”

“Must be the fan belt, love. Tell you what, you take a stocking off and I’ll fix it for you, go on, I won’t look.” This last one from a man with approximately half the teeth God gave him, a ratty little Jack Russell and a sticking plaster holding his spectacles together.

Finally the AA man arrived and explained, “Must be the fan belt, love. Tell you what, you take a stocking off and I’ll fix it for you, go on, I won’t look.”

No, he didn’t, but he might as well have done for all I actually understand about cars. He drove me home and towed my car off to be – oh, I don’t know, chucked off Beachy Head or whatever it is they do with knackered cars these days. Recycle them into hard-as-nails Scottish local councillors perhaps.

So I’m a pedestrian again. I really do need a new car because it’s costing more to run and repair that old Mini than it would if I just bit the bullet and bought something sensible like a 2 year old Golf. But I loved the Mini, it was my first car, it’s held together with willpower and string and it’s four different shades of green. I’ve had 2 accidents and 3 men in that Mini and once, when I got lost in the Lake District, I had to pull over and sleep in it wrapped in a travelling rug and waking in a thick mist with an interested sheep looking in the window at me.

On the phone I tell D about it and find my voice wobbling. D is sad too. “I’ve still got a dent on my shin from the handbrake that time in Wales.”

“I warned you, didn’t I? I said it was only designed for blow jobs, not penetration, but oh no, Mr ‘I know better’ had to try.”

“And succeeded, if I remember.”

“Yes, you can still see my footprints on the inside of the roof if you look carefully.”