The fuel crisis is no bad thing if it keeps my hideous car off the road

When I was learning to drive, my mother would sit fearfully in the front passenger seat every afternoon as I made the same slow circuit of nearby villages. She would regularly hammer her foot down on an imaginary pedal, or reach instinctively for a handbrake that wasn’t where she expected it to be, as my developing technique caused her to assume the worst.

In the end, I passed my test first time – but only because the examiner breezily asked me halfway through how I thought the light conditions were on that grey November late afternoon, to which I responded correctly by turning on my headlights.

Ever since I was able to get behind the wheel alone, I have loved driving. I had some anxious moments on hills in the early days, and my first car hire abroad was a tad hairy, but basically it is a joy to be on the road.

None of that is to say I really understand cars. I don’t know how the internal combustion engine works, I am alarmed if any light on the dashboard comes on, and I wouldn’t have a clue how to change a tyre. Nor am I an aficionado of car brands. I can tell a Porsche from a Peugeot, and a Vauxhall from a VW, but I couldn’t tell you why one might be better or worse than the other.

During our honeymoon, my wife and I hired a Saab 93 convertible, which was terrific fun and about a grand a car as I’m ever likely to drive. But it turns out that Devon in August is unreliable on the sunshine front, so we only put the roof down about twice.

We didn’t buy a car until we moved out of London, and for almost a decade it met our needs very well, until the engine cooling system died and the exhaust fell off. We replaced that second-hand Vauxhall Astra with another second-hand Vauxhall Astra because, aside from the aforementioned glitches, it had been absolutely fine. No more, no less, but better the devil you know and all that.

Two years ago, a job change meant we had to become – slightly to our shame, given our ingrained environmental guilt – a two-car family. Unduly stressed out by the prospect, for weeks I put off getting the required vehicle, even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to get to the office on public transport. I genuinely hoped that either my wife or my parents would buy me a car for my 40th birthday so that I wouldn’t have to sort it out myself – a four-gear 1995 Nissan Micra would have done the job. But apparently it didn’t occur to any of them. Meanies.

Instead, a week before the job started, I finally went online and found a vomit-coloured Ford Fiesta for sale at a local dealer. It looked vile, though as the salesman said with a charming smile, “you’ll never lose it in a car park”. It also drove like a tiny armoured personnel carrier, but as the Fiesta is Britain’s best-selling car, I decided it must be decent enough. Also, it was quite cheap and I didn’t really have another choice. I asked the salesmen if he could do me a good deal. He rubbed his hands together, looked sympathetically again at the pukey paint job, and took a hundred quid off the price – a prospective discount which they presumably build in from the outset.

In all fairness though, it’s done me well. I can’t say I adore it: you probably wouldn’t either, unless you like your cars to attract flies in summer and look like they have been sprayed with dehydrated urine all year round. Yet it has proved reliable, cheap to run and it has only been keyed once (in the mean streets of Bishop’s Stortford). It is, to deploy a car dealer cliche, a nice little runaround.

At least it was. But of course, it is no longer on active service, thanks to the fact that it rather unreasonably won’t operate on air alone. And since I basically ran the tank dry looking for petrol that was nowhere to be seen, I’m not entirely sure when it will be on the move again.

I reckon I can just about make it to the nearest garage, but they’ve seemingly had no fuel since the Thursday before last and despite government protestations that the situation is “stabilising”, it’s not clear when the next delivery might arrive. I suppose nothing happening is a form of stability, though I don’t think I’m being overly dramatic if I say that the present situation also resembles chaos just a little bit.

Mind you, perhaps being off the road is where I ought to be. For as irony would have it, while my motor was parked up outside, gasping for a drink on Friday, through the letterbox arrived a speeding notice. As a righteously cautious driver, I was duly mortified, and am taking the current fuel shortage as a kind of deserved flagellation.

If the penalty is confirmed, I guess I might have to go on a speed awareness course, and rightly so. But I may well need someone with petrol in their tank (or a battery) to please give me a lift.