Anyone reading this who is over 35 years old may remember a weird, archaic and historical problem. Cars breaking down. Remember? Like, just ‘die’ on the motorway? Fan-belt snapped on the A23 just outside Brighton at 2am. Fan belts only ever broke on the A23 (because no-one lives within 50 miles of its entire length) and never before 2am. Then you first had to find a phone box (like an iPhone but 8 feet tall and concreted into the roadside. You couldn’t take selfies from a phone box. There again, you can’t take a piss in an iPhone.) Which could be 5 miles up an unlit, forested, country road, filled with vampires, crazed chain-saw murderers and princesses who would rescue you in their pink Porsches. The mind did funny things on the A23. Eventually you phone the AA, who wake up Kenny. He’s the on-call dude for ‘that area’. Lives 72 miles from you. But is on his way as fast as his Morris 1000 van can speed him there. 4 hours later he comes and changes the fan-belt. Hooray! I’ll be back in London just in time for the fucking rush hour.

Cars no longer break down. The cheapest model of Japanese owned, communist built eco-budget vehicle comes with the same internal computerisation which runs the space program at NASA. It tells you when things aren’t working properly and when to have a service and when to inflate your tyres. They’re just soooo clever.

I took Mel’s Mini for an MOT and asked them if it needs a service. So they plug it into a laptop which told them, and me, that it needs an ‘oil service’ and something minor changing over too. You can’t argue. So I had it done. And I know they did it properly.

Because this morning, in the space vacated by Mel’s car, was a fucking great oil spill. On the driveway. The new, lockdown project, driveway. All over our brand new, super, high grade marble, mined by 12 year old virgins from the SOUTH side of a hill in Timbuktu and floated across the Indian Ocean on the backs of hawksbill turtles, so as not to upset its essential marbleness. Even though its granite. Then each slab is wrapped in cotton wool and enclosed in silk. Then delivered by a gorilla with a crane all over the fucking flower-beds. This driveway was the holiday in India that we didn’t take due to… ya know.

Mel’s car is 6 years old, done about 20k miles and has never leaked or done anything bad in its entire life. The computers won’t allow such things. It’s either that the computers have been hacked by Russian money-launderers, Chinese cyber-bullies, or… some tosser didn’t tighten the oil filter properly. Technology can only get you so far.

Happy, oily Saturday

A xxxx