It’s quite early on a dark winter’s morning and I’m driving along a country road, heading for a business breakfast meeting.

It’s misty, though the further from home I get, the more I start to realise something quite significant. The mist is inside, not outside, the car.

I park next to the hotel and get out. It’s not great weather in the car park, but it’s certainly not as damp as it was in the driving seat. I don’t know why I haven’t noticed it before, but our 15-year-old trusty Audi has developed some qualities unusual in a car.

In its declining years it is becoming less of a pinnacle of German design and engineering, and more like a Turkish bath on wheels.

Two hours later I come back and get in the car. Perhaps it’s the sun on the metalwork or something, but the air inside has cleared. Still, I will have to phone the garage, I think to myself, as I slide into my parking space back at work.

I grab my bag and diary, and grab the door handle. There’s a snapping sound, and the handle moves alright, but the door doesn’t budge. I try again, but there’s no response. I can’t open the driver’s door.

I make my exit through the passenger door, ungainly thighs and arms flapping all over the place. If I haven’t got a bruise from the handbrake this time tomorrow, it will only be thanks to the protective properties of cellulite. Inside the office I pause for a large coffee before I ring the garage. Yes, they can see emergencies tomorrow morning.

Next afternoon, the mechanic rings back. I can tell by his soft tones and slow delivery that it’s going to be painful news. But, as it turns out, not quite as painful as I’d feared.

I have a mortal dread of buying replacement cars. I’ve never bought a new one in my life, after my father once idly observed to my mother when I was about 12 that you lose hundreds of pounds (well, this was 1969) just by driving a new car off a showroom forecourt.

The image of crisp pound notes (as I said, this was 1969) falling out of the back doors of the new car without the proud new owner even noticing has stuck in my mind ever since. So not for me the race for the new licence plates. Nor the smell of the pristine carpets or the sheen of the new body paint.

But I also hate buying second hand cars. No matter how few the previous owners, no matter how careful the one lady driver, a replacement car means absorbing loads and loads of unfathomable information about alien things under the bonnet and how to turn the indicators on. No, once you’ve mastered all that in your car, you don’t want to back to the drawing board. So when the mechanic gives me a list of things they need to replace, my heart soars. Just do it, I say. The list of bushes and brakepads and filters and other innards required to keep our Audi on the road is recited like a piece of mediaeval verse.

You don’t understand a lot of the words but the narrator’s calm authority makes you feel safe and comforted. The auto-electrician and some spare parts are booked for next week, and they’ve managed to do all the crucial work, so the car is ours again in the meantime.

That night, when my husband comes home, I drag him outside to listen to how that weird ticking sound the engine used to make has been fixed, and how you don’t have to wait ten minutes for the windscreen to de-mist. All in all she’s not in bad shape, I assure my husband, who believes that my reluctance to consider changing cars borders on the pathological.

I lean across him to adjust the heating vent on his side.

At that moment, the rear view mirror falls off the windscreen and catches me right across my head.