The temperature gauge needle heeled hard over into the red. ‘Not again,’ I said to Oscar, sitting beside me on his booster seat. Sunday evening, and I was returning him to his mother after having him to stay for the weekend. The distance door to door is around 20 miles: about 40 minutes along country roads. After ten miles, a steep uphill climb proved disastrous. Steam was pouring in through the heater vents and fogging up the inside of the windscreen. I tried the demist blower on maximum heat but only cold air came out. So I drove the car with one hand and wiped the steam from the glass with a sodden little tissue, searching for somewhere to pull over.
Oscar was as calm as an adobe wall in the moonlight, as Raymond Chandler once put it. He never knows what sort of car his grandfather will turn up in next, and this 1.3
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