You may have read an earlier blog of mine this year called That Schumacher Moment where I described my 230 mile journey from Harlech to London in Yvonne’s MGF, stuck in fourth gear.

It was simply a clip, said the MG garage, and charged just £65 to fix it.

I thought that was brilliant, until yesterday afternoon outside Swiss Cottage when the gear lever suddenly selected nothing. It was stuck in gear, and even a man of my mighty physique and rippling muscles can’t push a car which is stuck in gear. The car had travelled just seven miles since the repair.

And I’d left my mobile at home. So I left the car abandoned in the middle of Avenue Road, found a phone box and made a reverse charge call to Yvonne, to ask her to call Britannia Rescue. A reverse charge call from a BT phonebox now costs £3.90. Yikes!

Von made the call, and kindly drove over to Swiss Cottage to deliver my phone, then left me to go and record the Six Nations rugby in case it took longer than we expected. So I stood in the middle of the road with the awful BlackBerry, glaring at the oncoming traffic and waited for the breakdown lorry.

It took an hour and a half to turn up. In that time:

• 3 drivers hooted at me pointlessly
• 8 drivers offered assistance (including one ravishingly glamorous lady in a huge Mercedes who wasn’t satisfied with my cheery ‘Everything’s fine’ but persisted with ‘There must be something I can do to help?’. Must have seen those rippling muscles under the fleece)
• 14 drivers were using mobile phones
• More than 20 Bentleys came by
• 3 Rolls-Royces
• 2 Maseratis
• 1 Aston Martin
• 1 Ferrari
• 1 police car (after an hour and a quarter) who offered to direct the traffic but I refused, saying I was already ensuring the traffic was flowing more smoothly than normal
• Every other car was a Range Rover, Mercedes M class, Porsche Cayenne, BMW X5 or a clone of one of these. 95% of them were black.

Eventually the breakdown lorry arrived. An agreeable Slovak driver hoisted the MG onto the back of the truck and we delivered it back to the MG garage. The car broke down at 20 to 2 and I got home at 10 to 5. I missed the France Scotland match, but managed to see the Wales England game.

Which Wales deservedly won. So it wasn’t such a bad day after all.

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