It's all over the front page....

...you give me Road Rage" as Cerys Matthews once sang. Right now I'm calming down after a day or two of the sort of trouble that makes you wonder why it is that we devote so much time, money and effort to the automobile.

It started on Friday really, with the discovery that I had actually been driving without an MOT for a month - my own fault of course. So the car stayed on the drive while I booked it in for the test on Monday.

Come Monday Morning, and it's Houston, we have a problem. The battery is flat, and it's only after we've got into position to try a jump start that we realise that actually the battery in the other car is in the wrong place to do this. Cue much aggravation (and like the Hulk, you won't like me when I'm angry), attempts to push the car back up the drive, and phone calls. I remove the battery and stick it on to charge; late in the afternoon I put it back and it starts fine. No problem, it's having a full service as well as an MOT so it should be fine.

When the garage rings back the news is not great, with an extra bill in the hundreds which we can ill afford - but I need the car, so....

With me due to be at College for the evening we let someone else do the cooking, so on the way back home I stop off at our local Chinese (very good by the way). I climb back into the car, and will it start? Will it heck!

On the plus side, our Breakdown Recovery (with GEM) proved to be well worth it, with a nice man on a motor bike appearing to not only get me started, but pinpoint the problem as being almost certainly the battery. On the minus side, the fact that the battery leads had been so loosely put back on by the garage that they could easily be pulled off by hand, and that the garage neglected to actually check the battery anyway (despite publicising free checks on them) does not fill me with joy. I won't name them as such, but suffice to say you expect better of a major national chain. I don't intend to let this go without having words with them, and if they think that just because it says "Student Minister" on my card that I won't have a go, they have another thing coming. I don't believe God calls anyone to be a doormat!