Low life | 21 January 2016

Putting old or contaminated petrol in a car needn’t be catastrophic, but in the Golf’s case it was. With 37,000 miles on an 07 plate, it was a tight, solid little car before I accidentally wrecked it. Someone offered £300 for scrap, and I was about to sadly take it, when a pal pointed out that one second-hand Golf door alone costs £300 from a scrapyard. He urged me instead to buy a second-hand Golf engine for a few hundred quid and simply ‘drop it in’ — as he so persuasively put it. He even found a buyer for a Golf thus renovated who was guaranteeing trade price sight unseen.

I’m no mechanic. So I made a few calls and found Roy. Roy was available and he had enough confidence in his abilities to set a price for the job that seemed as unbelievably low as the trade dealer’s offer was high.