This'll cost ya

There's something I forgot to say last week to the driving examiner who refused to test me due to the death of one of my brake lights. In the words of Nicolas Cage after being battered senseless by a gang of thugs in the wonderful Wild at Heart : "I'd like to thank you fine gentlemen, you've taught me a valuable lesson here today."

And the lesson is this - never take your car for granted. Especially when it's a 14-year-old machine with six previous owners.

Now, I'm not knocking the car. It's patently not culpable - the fact that it's an inanimate object absolves it from all responsibility. The blame is entirely mine.

For I am as ignorant of the mechanics of my car as I am of those of the inner workings of a nuclear reactor. I'm pretty adept with bicycle maintenance - I could strip my beast down to its component parts, polish them and reassemble them within half an hour.

But my car is a different critter altogether. The rules governing what's under the bonnet are like those of a secret society to which I have not been invited. Not that I've even bothered trying to get past the initiation ceremony. I'm sure I'm not alone.

Take, for example, the carburettor. I wouldn't be so insulting of either your intelligence or my own as to pretend I thought a carburettor was a type of Italian bread, but I'm close. It may well be a device with little legs that come out and run along the road to help me overtake for all I know.

When first told of my busted brake light, a cold wave of financial fear washed over me. "Aw, no. Is that going to cost me a fortune to fix?" I asked the tester. He looked at me very strangely, like I'd asked him to show me how expensive it would be to get someone to tie my shoelaces for me. "Err, no, it's a fairly simple matter. You should be able to do it yourself in a minute."

And - surprise, surprise - he was right. I did work it out. Admittedly, it took me slightly more than a minute. I even had to - horror of horrors for a pigheaded male like myself - read the manual.

But a brief perusal of said book opened a whole new world of pain for me. It may as well have been written in some obscure dialect of Aramaic. I realised how utterly uncomprehending I am of this machine I relied on so heavily. I was most disheartened that there was no chapter on "Blind Faith", which up until now I had regarded as the be-all-and-end-all of my car continuing to cart me and my surfboards around some of the most remote parts of the West of Ireland and, most importantly, get me back again. It was frightening. I suddenly felt very vulnerable.

I had a look under the bonnet, just out of curiosity. The engine was covered in cobwebs and bits of old leaves. The pile of twigs near the battery may or may not have been the remnants of a bird's nest, I wasn't sure. "Don't even go there," said my brain, in a particularly whiny and annoying Britney Spears voice. (Must get that seen to.) I closed the bonnet again, in surrender. I'm screwed.

Sooner or later, the Bavarian princess is going to break my heart. She's going to leave me stranded in a raging storm on a rocky headland, with nothing but a packet of Revels and some flat Cidona for comfort. All because I didn't take the time to try and understand her.

I will eventually be rescued by a local garage-owner, furious that I've dragged him out to this godforsaken place just as he's sitting down to a feed of porter. He'll then tow me to his workshop, open the bonnet and emit that horrible teeth-sucking noise that is the first thing they teach all mechanics, plumbers, builders, painters etc in apprentice schools.

Then the dreaded words: "This is gonna cost ya."