After a day spent ‘catching up’ with chores, news & matters of state, late yesterday afternoon I took the bus to Teddington in order to collect my car from the garage that had been working on it whilst I was away - indeed the repair booking had been one of the reasons that I chose to go away when I did.

When I entered the front office there was a conversation taking place between two gentlemen of average means, presumably also paying for & collecting a repaired or serviced car, and a thirty-something garage workman who was standing behind the counter. At the outset I stood against the back wall waiting for my turn, not paying a great deal of attention.

Then, out of the blue, as they chatted whilst waiting for a document to be photocopied, one of the ‘collectors’ asked about a specific Fiat model of car and whether – after its widely-acknowledged problems of a decade or more back – the manufacturer had now resolved its ‘early rusting’ issue. This was a cue for the garage workman to begin a ten minute tour de force on the subject of quality of parts & workmanship generally - plainly offered from a position of considerable knowledge & experience – that was both inspired & exceedingly amusing … worthy of supporting him in a new career as a stand up comedian (or certainly justifying a spot on a television variety show), as I later took the trouble to inform him.

The gist of his thrust – and here, dear reader, I shall skip over the gaskets, sprockets & other sundry motor vehicle parts & terms that he covered in considerable detail as he powered on, not least because I didn’t understand the half of them - was that anyone considering the purchase of a French or Italian car should only buy new … and then sell as soon as the warranty expired … because after that they became progressively expensive liabilities.

As he warmed to his theme, in passing one of the gentlemen at the counter said that he’d once owned a Rover, which he used to take to a specific garage that specialised in Rover and MG servicing & repairs (“He’ll be busy then …” was our comedian’s withering response before dissecting in excruciating detail the inbuilt design faults from which, in his opinion, such models always suffered). The only manufacturers he was prepared to endorse whole-heartedly from an engineering point of view were both Japanese – Honda and Toyota, in that order – whom (he said) traditionally produced cars that would run forever without breaking down.

However the cause of greatest mirth for me personally was the image called to mind when – in passing – he referred to the hard-sprung sports version of a particular mid-range model produced by a very well-known French manufacturer which, beset by poor quality parts & workmanship, as it was being driven around by its proud owners was effectively doing no more than grinding its own suspension to dust.