Salocin

When I say that it's 'cursed', I'm not refering to any car in particular, but to any and all cars that, at any point in time, happen to belong to me. I don't make such a claim frivolously, I have evidence. I'll explain and you can come to your own conclusion.

In December 2004, I bought a purple (naysayers keep trying to tell me it was pink) Volkswagen Polo. It cost me 1300 pounds, was 9 years old and had 70000 miles on the odometer. It wasn't the best buy ever, but when you absolutely have to buy a car in two days, you take the best of what's available.

The car appeared to be in reasonably good condition, and drove very well, until I had it MOT'd (The MOT is the annual test a car must be put through in order to prove it's roadworthy). It failed dismally on a very large number of items, ranging from tyres to brake lights, wheel balancing to various bits of the engine that needed replacing. I spent a lot of money getting it fixed.

Then everything seemed to be Ok for a few months, before things started to go wrong again and I had to take it back in for a service. I had it checked, things got fixed, more money changed hands, I got the car back.

A couple of months later, a strange noise seemed to be coming from the gears. I took it in for a service and was told that it wasn't the gears, it was the rear wheel bearings which needed replacing. The garage replaced these, gave me my car back, I drove it for 3 weeks, and then the gearbox died completely because it was running without gearbox lubricant. The garage I took it to told me that when he split the gearbox open, "a bunch of metal filings fell out". Not good.

Thus began a long and painful month in which I commuted to work by train (a 2.5 hour journey door-to-door) while looking high and low for a replacement gearbox. Unfortunately, VW have managed to ensure that there are as many varieties of gearbox as there are drops of water in the Pacific, and the specific type that I needed for my car wasn't obtainable second-hand. A new gearbox would have cost 1200 pounds - more than the value of the car.

Cursing my dreadful luck, I eventually sold the car for a pittance, and bought myself a very nice, 3-year-old Mazda MX-5. A silver convertible sports car. My philosophy was, when the world pushes you down, push back. This car came with a 3-year warranty, and I am very much enjoying driving it. I've had it checked by a Mazda garage and they could find nothing wrong with it.

I love my car.

I've had the hardest time getting a parking permit around my home in Notting Hill. The local authority requires paperwork that is very hard to obtain, and what I've had to do is put my car in pay-and-display parking spaces. These spaces won't let you park for more than 4 hours at a time, so when I've got to leave my car at home, on weekends or when I take a day off, I have to get back to the car every 4 hours to move it from one parking space to another and buy another 4-hour ticket. I have failed to get back on time 3 times in the last 6 weeks, resulting in 150 pounds of fines (two of which I am appealing). I have finally amassed the required paperwork (proof of ownership of the car, proof of residency etc) and the permit should arrive shortly.

Last night, after I got home from work, I found a great parking space near my front door. At 3:30am, my door buzzer rang. It's very loud, and I woke up about 3 feet in the air, in mid-subconscious-jump from my bed to the corner of the room, in a bit of a panic. I was not very courteous when I spoke on the intercom.

"What?" I barked.

"This is the police, sir. Could you come downstairs please? There's a bit of a flood and we think you should move your car".

I hung some random clothes on my body and made my way downstairs.

The road (Ladbroke Grove) had turned into a river. A water main had exploded about 2 feet from my left rear wheel and my car was sitting in the middle of a set of rapids, water breaking over the front wheels. The force of the water, bursting up through the pavement, had broken a massive concrete paving stone and brought up tons of gravel and dirt which was washing all over the allow wheels and the right side of the car.

I had to wade through urban rapids to get to the passenger door, the bottom of which was just above the waterline, and scoot over once I was inside the car. The water was higher than the bottom edge of the driver door because that's where the burst water main was.

About a dozen policemen and firemen were looking at this vast amount of water that was pouring down the road and into all the available drains in a 3-block radius, and looking at me as I drove my shiny new Mazda through the deluge. The water was full of gravel, sand and rocks which form the layers beneath the pavement. As I drove down the road, the ground felt like a gravel driveway beneath the water. I could hear rattling as stones knocked against the underside of the car, despite driving at walking speed.

After driving around for 15 minutes, I finally found another parking space, stood with the police officers in my mismatched clothing for 10 minutes, looking on in wonder at the incredible sight, as hundreds of gallons of water gathered where my car had previously been parked, before making my way upstairs and back to bed. Not that it did much good, I didn't really sleep much after that.

I am not very awake today. I feel like some of that gravel accumulated in my eyes and I get the occasional dizzy spell.

I got lucky. There's a little scratching to one of the alloys, but apart from that, the bodywork over which the water was flowing has no scratches. I think the stones stayed near the bottom of the flow of water, bumping against the tyres, rolling along the road and flowing under the car, rather than over the bodywork.

The road this morning looks like a truck carrying gravel and sand split it's load over a 500 metre distance, but to Thames Water's credit, they cut the water, worked all night and had everything fixed in time for the morning, when the water supply was back to normal.

Colleagues at work think I'm making this story up.

So what do you think, am I cursed when it comes to cars? What are the odds of the pavement spontaneously exploding a couple of feet from where you've parked your car?