Entry for December 20, 2006

I may not be available for blogging tomorrow, as the brakes in my car are making a spectacularly unusual clunking noise. I suspect that an agent for a rival law firm has sawed halfway through the hydraulics, and that as I drive home tonight I will be stamping ineffectively on the pedals in the manner of a 1970s spy.
If I make it home, I fear that tomorrow is going to be a rather bleak day of phoning round garages in a fruitless search for somebody who can fix them before the festive season. I have a sinking feeling about the cost of this. No doubt some the children of some lucky garage owner are going to have an especially large pile of Christmas presents this year.
Problems with the car are designed to make me feel useless and emasculated. It is a bit like going to see the high priest. Men with funny uniforms - generally boiler suits - speak gravely in a foregn language, before insisting that I make a bloody enormous cash offering to appease the Gods of the hydraulic fluids.
And inevitably, when I tell my dad what's happened, he will chuckle irritatingly before telling me that all I had to do was give the overhead spiggot valve a rub down with an oily rag.
It is crap being useless and middle class.