Amateur car mechanics can be a risky business; it can, for some, become a slow downward spiral from the heights of ecstasy to the depths of despair and hopelessness, writes Kilian Doyle
You start off full of the joys of spring, tinkering away to your heart's content, not a care in the world, enjoying every second of your new love affair with your car. There's nothing wrong with it, you say, everyone does it.
But then it starts to get serious. You slip into obsession. You begin hanging out with insalubrious, greasy characters, spending more time under your bonnet than with your kids, stubbornly ignoring the advice of others to seek help when help is needed. You don't need anyone else. This honeymoon period cannot last, no matter how much you delude yourself. Your grip begins slipping and things rapidly get unmanageable. You lose focus, start to neglect the little things, the very ones that keep you and your car on the road. The mechanics of your car start tumbling around you.
You start missing work and important engagements because of your car; getting into financial difficulties as a result. Inevitably, it all comes crashing down. Your car finally grinds to a halt, leaving you stranded in the gutter, bewildered, angry, scared and helpless.
Don't know where to turn? The AA can help - through these Twelve Steps - to get you on the road to recovery.
Step one: we admit we are powerless over our car - that our engine has become unmanageable.
Step two: we come to believe that the AA man could restore us to motoring.
Step three: we make a decision to pick up the phone and turn our car and its knackered engine over to the care of the AA man, hoping we can understand what he's jabbering about.
Step four: we make a searching and fearless inventory of what we think could be the problem.
Step five: we admit to the AA man, to ourselves and the meddling passersby dispensing useless advice that, actually, if truth be told, we haven't a clue what is wrong.
Step six: we become entirely ready to have the AA man remove all the defects of our car.
Step seven: we humbly ask him to fix our vehicle.
Step eight: we make a list of all the services we had missed because we were too broke, all the oil and water checks we had skipped out of laziness and all the times we ignored the warning lights on the dash, hoping the problem would just go away. We solemnly promise to make it up to our poor, neglected car.
Step nine: we make direct amends to our car wherever possible, except when to do so would injure it through our complete and utter incompetence.
Step ten: we continue to keep on top of regular servicing and standard checks, and when we haven't a clue what is wrong, promptly admit it.
Step eleven: we seek, through reading the manual, gleaning advice from professional mechanics and possibly even a night course in amateur car maintenance at the local community centre to improve our knowledge of our car, praying it will help us out when it comes to functional warning lights and a constantly charged battery.
Step twelve: we have a mechanical awakening as the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to other suffering motorists and lend a hand whenever we see them stuck on the side of the road. (Except when it is raining. Or we were late to meet our mates at the pub. Or we were on the bus, having resigned ourselves to the reality that we are, and always will be, terminally clueless.)
If ever you find your resolve failing and find yourself tempted anew to get under the bonnet to tackle jobs way above your abilities, recite the Amateur Mechanic's Prayer: "AA man, grant me the humility to accept I haven't a notion what's wrong with my car, courage to give you a call when I'm flummoxed and the wisdom to know when the only problem is that I've run out of petrol. Again."