Had Alex and I picked up hitchhikers as we drove home through France last week, (hypothetical of course as the Golf couldn’t take another half of rosé), they would have been mystified when she, at irregular intervals, would say “Bollocks” in a testy voice as she stared out the passenger window, then again – a little louder and more aggressively this time – and finally turn to me and shout the word in my ear, at which point I would jab a button on the steering wheel, the abuse would instantly stop and the journey continued as if nothing had happened. Had the hitchhikers, however, chosen to perform a parachute role out the rear door as we slowed at the first roundabout in a bid to retain their sanity, they’d never have discovered the cause of this bizarre ritual……
Our second-hand Golf, you see, came with a coloured satnav map in the central console plus a cruder arrow guidance system by the speedometer. Trouble is, they occasionally disagree – Alex’s will say fork left, mine will say fork right – and at such times my arrow system has proved more reliable than her prettier rolling map. That said, during such discrepancies the air turns blue as we debate the choice and it was during one of these shout-ins that I somehow pressed one of the four mystery buttons on the steering wheel and my second-opinion navigation aid was replaced with a screen offering average mpg, estimated arrival time and remaining fuel. So Alex took the wheel and somehow got it back, but every time she passed 53 mph there’d be a warning buzzer and she’d lose it again, finally learning by elimination that in hitting the bottom left mystery button, the trusted guidance arrow returned. (Check the satnav manual, you say? Please – to us technophobes, it could be written in Urdu).
So when I took over the driving again with strict instructions to touch nothing, I had to either maintain 54 mph through sleepy French villages and 52 mph on autoroutes, or continue with Alex’s obscure solution. In a bid to lighten the mood I likened the situation to ‘Speed’ where Sandra Bullock, (or ‘Bollocks’ as we affectionately know her), has to maintain 50 mph driving a coach or a bomb planted on board explodes. Sandra, though, doesn’t have failing hearing like me, hence the need for Alex’s urgent calls whenever she heard the buzzer and why, but for a full load of wine, there might be a trail of gibbering hitchhikers still lying in our wake.
We’re home now, the glitch remains but there are definite signs of goodwill returning and the Golf’s due for a service soon where there’s bound to be a lad at the garage who can read Urdu.
Maybe you should never have sold the 2CV it would have felt more at home on the roads of France.