Reliability
Bertie strikes AGAIN
After last week’s examination of progress in the automotive sector, I suppose I should confess that modern cars do possess one tiny advantage: they occasionally make it home without collapsing in a French lay-by. Mind you, if any of today’s cars are still running in fifty years, it’ll be less a triumph of engineering than a minor miracle. Even so, on a day-to-day basis, classic motoring does have its drawbacks.
We’d sailed through Spain without drama. Then, just north of Montpellier, dear old Bertie started juddering like a man who’d eaten a bad moules marinière. I blamed the fancy new electronic distributor, but swapping the rotor arm and cap revealed a healthy spark. Disconnecting the fuel feed to the carburettor revealed something rather more troubling: only the occasional squirt of fuel. A few enthusiastic thwacks on the fuel pump bought me another ten kilometres, but there are only so many times one can squeeze under Bertie before one's knees decide to join the pump in retirement. I even ran a wire straight from the battery. It helped, but for only as long as a politician's promise!
Eventually, I coaxed the old boy off the autoroute at Lunel, and limped into the nearest hotel. They had a room, which was a relief. What they didn’t have was an SU fuel pump. SU pumps are now about as common in southern France as a sober Englishman in a football shirt. Thankfully, Nathan at FlyingSpares had one in the post within an hour. That meant I was now at the mercy of DHL, a delivery company that makes Bertie’s reliability look like a Swiss watch.
So we settled in for an unexpected weekend in the south of France. This sounds glamorous, and in brochure form I’m sure it would have been. In reality, my heart was broken. The Mrs had lost faith in the old bastard and, if I’m honest, so had I. Divorce papers felt imminent.
To be fair, Bertie had never subjected me to the full humiliation of a recovery truck. Most of his sins were really mine: lazy, optimistic, tight-fisted me refusing to replace parts that were plainly on their last legs. That SU pump, incidentally, contains two pumps in one body. Both have to fail before you’re stranded. I had been ignoring the warning signs for the best part of a year in the manner of a man who has looked Lord Mandelson squarely in the eye and pronounced him sound.
The French, bless them, take a gloriously practical view of cars: buy one, drive it until something drops off, then patch it up with string, shrugs and a Gauloise hanging out the mouth. Their mechanics still know how to fix proper old metal for sensible money, instead of demanding your firstborn and a kidney. Which is exactly why I was more than happy to let René earn his living. Replacing that pump without a ramp is not so much a repair as a form of punishment. It lives above the rear chassis crossmember in a position that can only have been chosen by a man with a deep hatred of knuckles.
So I left it to the professionals, opened a cold rosé, and quietly wondered how much longer Bertie and I had together. Some relationships run on love. Ours, apparently, runs on SU pumps, denial and blind optimism.