Radioactive sausages in the glovebox

There are few things I'd like to do less than crashing to death on the motorway.

The wife's car developed an interesting fault the other day. If you went over 20mph and then tried to brake, as the car slowed down it also switched off. Completely. Yes, you can be doing 70mph on the motorway, come down the sliproad and before you've reached the end of it the whole car can go dead. Shortly followed by you.

It was like a low budget British version of Speed only without bombs, buses or Ted from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (and if you don't know these films - please do see them, they are great).

There were three main solutions to the problem:

1 - once travelling over 20mph, don't stop.
2 - do number 1 and crash the car, claim the insurance
3 - get it repaired

Call me old fashioned, but we went for the third option. So I drove the car the 2 miles to the garage, pausing only for the 11 times it stalled. I must have really annoyed the people behind me. Good, some of them were BMW drivers.

I left the car in on Tuesday and had a phonecall on the Wednesday. I knew it was going to be costly when the garage man started with. "Morning Mr Colman. How are you today?". In asking for my state of mind he was clearly looking for me to say something that would indicate how I might take bad/expensive news.

Perhaps I should have said "Not good, I've just been made bankrupt" and he would have taken pity on me. I didn't and he broke the bad news, £800 worth of bad news. Seems the engine was, erm, the linking things were..oh I don't know, it could have been radioactive sausages in the glovebox for all I care. Expensive radioactive sausages at that of course.

I went back to the garage today to pick up a courtesy car whilst the sausages/engine/whatever was being repaired. I imagined as I walked in that the man who ran the place would be wearing a crown whilst the mechanics drank champagne off the back of my expense. They weren't of course. It was Prosecco.

Still, at least it can be repaired. When the engine literally fell out of another car on a motorway the repair bill cost twice what the car was worth. So I got it towed to a nearby garage, ordered it to be scrapped and got hammered on cheap lager at a snowdome in Tamworth waiting for a lift.

And that, I can assure you, is one of those few things worse than crashing on the motorway and dying.