fter our rustbucket of a VW Polo was towed away from outside Marks & Spencer, I rang the car pound to ask how much it would cost to get it out. “It will be £250, sir,” said the man. “But it’s only worth £50,” I replied. He clearly thought I might have difficulty coming up with £250 because he added kindly: “A lot of people find that a challenging sum. But there’s no shame in it.” Absolutely, but that wasn’t the issue.
But without a car, would I really be a man? “A man ain’t a man with a ticket in his hand,” counselled the mod revival band the Merton Parkas, in their 1979 hit You Need Wheels. Margaret Thatcher is supposed to have said: “If a man finds himself a passenger on a bus having attained the age of 26, he can count himself a failure in life.
It was as if the universe was saying: go to the car pound and turn in your keys. So I did, like a suspended American cop handing in his badge and gun. It was symbolic castration in one sense, but personal liberation in another. I retrieved the foot pump and umbrella from the boot. I’m not Diogenes: I needed those.