CAR MAINTENANCE

Well, with a bit of gaffa tape and a wing and a prayer, the ol' motor went through its MOT like a dream.

"It was close," beamed Dave The Mechanic. He went on to illustrate the rust, the bends and the holes in the exhaust, and why it's probably for the best if I get it all replaced sometime soon. Fair enough.

I'm not a huge fan of car maintenance. My Grandpa would be disappointed, certainly; he was a driver in the war and messing around with vehicles was always something he liked. But the genes never did quite flow in my direction. I tried - I had a few winters watching other people, trying to learn, freezing my fingers off. Once, I even spent several hours upside-down in the driver's seat, trying to reattach a clutch cable to the pedal of a Mini-Metro.

Do they still make the Haynes manuals? Before cars went all electronic and gizmo-complex, everyone had a Haynes! It was a book that basically dissected the workings of everything on pretty much every car there was! VW campers, Ferraris, metros... there was even a jokey one for the Millennium Falcon, for the Star Wars nerds at Christmas. You could look up any kind of car repair in a Haynes manual. I had one for the Mini-Metro, one for the Proton. After that I had a white Ford Mondeo I think, and by that time the world had become too busy for fixing cars in the cold - especially when there were mechanics you could pay to do that for you.

There was always an Atlas as well in the car - one of those ring-bound ones that covered every road in the country. That lived with the Haynes manual - a picture book of Britain's roads and town centres. These days, a satellite does that navigating job for us, and it's quite rare that any of us have to stop off in a layby and consult the tiny snaking roads in the book, under the single bulb of the reading lamp. I kind of miss getting lost like that, not being able to phone anyone to tell them how late I was going to be. There was a simple kind of freedom to those days.

Anyway, don't let me wax into nostalgia! My car's passed its MOT, I didn't have to get underneath it in the cold, and all is well with the world!