CLOBBERED

I had to pay the car tax again last weekend and, whilst it doesn’t seem five minutes since the last renewal, I was rather more shocked at the hefty wallop my bank account was getting from the numbers the direct.gov website was suggesting that I ought to hand over to them that I thought I’d better check that there hadn’t been some kind of mistake.

So there I was, strolling down to the road on a Sunday afternoon to have a quick look at the old tax disc on the windscreen of the increasingly inaccurately named “new” car, just to see whether I’d paid out a similar amount last year or my car had been shifted into a more unfriendly band of duty, when my neighbour intercepted me.

Now, I’m not generally the most “chatty” of folk, but if someone’s already outside, we’ll pass the time of day and chat a little, so this isn’t all that unusual, especially as he was outside doing some of those little bits of outdoor maintenance – clearing the cracks in the paving stones of new moss – that I somehow always fail to get around to as much as I ought to, and so I made a jovial comment about how he was making me feel guilty…

Ho, bloody ho…!

Anyway, he asked me whether I’d seen my car, which is never the best of opening gambits, and proceeded to tell me that he noticed that the back bumper had been scraped overnight and that he’d found a piece of bumper “From a VW Transporter…” lying in the road right behind where whatever collision it was had taken place.

There was also some comment about only one house on the row having such a vehicle, but I was prepared to let that one go for the time-being, given as proving it would be very difficult and it was just as likely to have been a taxi moving off or a pizza delivery van or even some passing Saturday night drunk.

In fact I was quite surprised at how calm I managed to remain, given that it was me, although I must admit that I was silently thinking about the laws of karma, inevitability and car parking regularly on the street, whilst being slightly grateful that I’d never been in the position to ever be able to afford a brand new BMW about which I might very well have been slightly more cross.

Anyway, I went and had a look, and he, in a very public-spirited moment, retrieved the fallen bumper out of his van and showed it to me, and indeed it was what he said it was. He also mentioned that his own car had suffered similar damage a couple of times since he’d been parking it there and we grumbled amiably about it being the nature of not having private off-road parking.

The scrape itself looked quite bad but was only on one of the more plastic parts of my venerable vehicle, and so I decided that it was unlikely to rust and muttered something about retouching it, even though I know that I probably will never get around to it. I made some light-hearted quip about my neighbour now being able to extort the other neighbour, checked that my road tax had indeed been just as extortionate last year (which, give or take a tenner, it had been), and we chatted about other things before I headed back indoors to spread the cheery news.

Later on, in the spirit of good neighbourly relations, he knocked upon my front door just as we were taking a break from that evening’s movie, to tell me that it definitely wasn’t my other neighbour who had clobbered my car, presumably so that I wouldn’t go around pointing the finger and shouting “J’accuse!” at an innocent party.

Granted, being so averse to confrontation, this was highly unlikely, but still, it’s good that such potentially embarrassing spectacles were avoided.

How he knew this for certain, of course, implies that further investigation had taken place and that he had taken far more interest in the incident which is, perhaps, what I ought to have done. In fact, I suspect that if he hadn’t knocked on, I might very well have forgotten all about it until I went out to get into my car and drive to work on Monday morning.

Mind you, it does at least prove to me that I actually have at least one good neighbour, and “new” car now has a lasting scar which will no doubt up its reputation as being one of the cooler kids in the neighbourhood when it hangs around on street corners with the other cars.

All that worries me now is someone else’s car getting clobbered in a car park near to mine, taking a look around and seeing that scrape, and thinking that it was me, because that could get pretty awkward giving as other people seem far less inclined towards avoiding confrontation these days than I do.

That and the fact that I can’t seem to keep anything nice any more…