YOUR HOLIDAY DISASTER

I'D ALREADY spent a week in Munich enjoying Bavarian hospitality, which necessarily involved large amounts of beer since my stay had coincidedwith the annual Oktoberfest. For the past year, my brother had lived in Germany but now he was back in England, having had to return through ill-health. I had, perhaps foolishly, agreed to sort his flat out and drive its contents back home, visiting Paris on the way.

He lived on the 10th floor so I spent an exhausting day loading the car with his possessions. Much of the time was spent on the phone to my brother, trying to explain that, firstly, his Golf was not a Tardis, and, secondly, that his lucky 6ft yucca plant would not be making the journey with me. At about midnight I finally added the two mountain bikes to the back of the car, stood back and admired my handiwork. I wondered how I would ever manage to drive this thing the thousand miles back to England when all I could see through the rear-view mirror was a gap no bigger than a letter-box.

I secured the steering lock and retired to bed. Very early the next morning, I found myself in the driver's seat thinking that this was to be no Sunday afternoon drive. I looked at the lock on the steering-wheel and wondered why it seemed a bit odd. I soon realised it was supposed to go between the hand-brake and the gear-stick and definitely not on the steering-wheel. It had looked strange the previous night, but I had been tired and stupid. When I tried to release it, I discovered that it no longer worked. Nothing would release it.

On only the first left turn of the journey I managed to badly cut up a BMW. The driver was not happy and indicated this to me in universal language. I wasn't surprised since my visibility was verging on the illegal and I had a huge chunk of metal attached to my steering-wheel. The Munich ring-road was a nightmare but once on the autobahn my progress improved until I got pulled over by the police. The straps on the two bikes had come loose and now only a shoelace kept them attached to the car. After a stern ticking off I was allowed to continue. A stop for petrol also caused a minor panic when I wrongly began filling up with diesel. Once over the border I instantly became unpopular with the French drivers since the inaccessibility of the passenger window forced me to get out of the car at every toll station.

After driving for what seemed like an eternity, I finally hit the Parisian suburbs. Thirteen hours had passed since I had left Munich. When I arrived at my friend's house in Paris, I parked and we went for a well-deserved beer. The following morning, I awoke to find my brother's Golf had miraculously turned into a Fiat Uno. The words "oh dear" were not the first to enter my head as I wondered how I would explain this to him. Then, at my feet I saw the word "Payant" on the roadside. After a few fraught phone calls I was reunited with the car at the car-pound. I paid the pounds 100 fine and left Paris still wondering how I was going to explain that big lump of metal on the steering-wheel.