I feel, that after the small taster in the last column, I should reveal the full story (as best I know it) of Adam’s Car. This could take a while, so I won’t go into the details of, say, why he wanted to drive to Essex in the first place*, but all that matters is that he made a very commendable attempt to drive there. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t seem to like him very much.

Now, I may have got some parts of this tale out of order; it’s easy enough to do, and I only really know most of this story via Adam, but I’ll try my best to keep it all in order.

He was on the motorway when somebody hit him. It is normally my policy to name the individual, but for the sake of his anonymity, I’ll simply refer to him as Cretin. Adam and Cretin, as is the norm in these situations, exchanged insutance details. That is to say, Adam gave Cretin his details, and Cretin told Adam he’d just as soon pay for it himself, since it didn’t look like it would be far over his excess anyway, and he’d built up a nice no-claims bonus. Well, to cut a long story short, the car is now outside Adam’s house waiting for the police to look at it.

But then, it’s never been my policy to cut long stories short, either. When Cretin hit Adam’s car, it shunted the whole exhaust system forwards, causing all sorts of damage to parts of the car I’d never even heard of, but I’m informed they’re the sort of parts that you don’t notice are broken until a mile down the motorway a huge cloud of smoke rises from under the bonnet. It seemed like it would be a good idea to get Cretin’s insurance details from him. Cretin, it turns out, doesn’t answer his phone.

Considering Adam’s firm belief in not suing people, his lawyer is very busy these days. When he’s not suing the place Adam did work experience for slicing his arm open with a big piece of buckled metal, he’s busy either trying to get him some money from his inheritance, or tracking down Cretin. Adam spent a long time disappearing regularly, and coming back a few minutes later swearing or complaining his lawyer is always on a lunch break. It is a testament to Cretin’s persistance that, mere weeks after the legal deadline, he mailed Adam’s lawyer a hand-written insurance document, of which only his name and that of the insurance company were legible. That was the more helpful of Cretin’s alleged insurance companies, the least being the phone call Adam got last week. After a while talking to them, they told him they were “a non-insured loss company, investigating this no-blame accident”. Adam informed them that he hadn’t been involved in a no-blame accident. “Are you disputing our client’s version of events?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what your client’s version of events is,” He asked if they’d like to hear his version of events. They asked him to fill in a form. Adam decided it might be beneficial to point out that the form in question didn’t have anywhere to write his version of events, and they said to fill it in anyway. He said no, and eventually convinced them to take his details over the phone. When they had, he asked again if they’d like to know what he says happened. They hung up.

This had meant Adam’s car was out of action for quite some time, so it was necessary to get a hire car (well, a Corsa, at least, which is fine unless you want to go up a hill, in which case an engine would be better than the hairdryer that sounded like it was under the bonnet). In retrospect, this may have been a mistake. Firstly, the police decided they didn’t need to look at his car until the hire period expired. Secondly, it is very difficult to hire a car if you’re under twenty one. By two months. And as if that wasn’t enough, soon a dent appeared in his boot. He decided he wasn’t going to lose any deposit, and took a plate off the inside of the boot door, to knock the dent back into shape from the inside. This did not work. Quite the reverse. When he closed the boot to have a look at his handywork, the dent was at least as bad as it had ever been.

Adam’s car, travelling at its current maximum speed of zero miles per hour.

Meanwhile, Stavros had been getting slightly annoyed at everyone because he kept losing his screwdriver set. To this day nobody knows where the first one went. The second he had to give to his brother because he’d lost his too. The third one we lent to Adam to fix his computer, which had also broken. This was not promptly collected. Eventually it was, but I thought I’d hold on to it for a few days and not tell him we’d picked it up, because it amused me to do so. I took this set of screwdrivers to the car to help Adam remove the boot panel.

Stavros’ screwdriver set got locked in Adam’s boot, along with a piece of panel (but not the screws, which remained in my trouser pocket for a day or two), and, most infuriatingly, Adam’s keys. The logical seeming thing to do would be to phone the hire company or the AA, but there were two minor drawbacks: The phone numbers were in the glove box, and his phone was in the boot. He came into our house, hit things and swore a lot, then phoned two Vauxhall dealers (who told him the cars were impossible to break into), the police (who told him they didn’t do that anymore), a locksmith (who came round but couldn’t help), and the hire company using a number on a window sticker. The company didn’t open until Monday. So, first thing on Monday morning, Adam phoned them up. They said they’d send someone round, and to sit tight. About five hours later, someone showed up, unlocked the boot, asked why the panel had been taken off and where the screws were to reattach it, and left again.

Last night three chips appeared in the windscreen of the hire car. These were sorted out mercifully quickly, and now all he has to do is wait for them to tell him if his car is being repaired or written off, and I think he wants it writing off, so that he can get a nice new one he found on AutoTrader.

I haven’t seen Adam for a couple of days. I hope to God his cars are at least no worse than they were when I last saw them.

I would be lying if I said I hadn’t been expecting to come back to this story. I fully expected at least one or two things to go wrong. His hire car has been broken into. Or, at least, it would have been broken into, were the theives in his area up to scratch. Knowing precicely what tools were neccesary, but not quite how they should be deployed, the aspiring criminals inserted a screwdriver into the keyhole, and mashed up the lock without getting any nearer to having opened it. In addition to this he has shown me letters from various people asking for information to passed on within fourteen days, which had been sent to the wrong address, and the nice people at the insurance company, who apparently don’t know the difference between a 205 and a 205 GTi have valued his car at £600 and written it off. When he informed them of the actual price he paid for the car, they said it had depreciated, and asked when he’d bought the car. He’d bought the car a little over three weeks before Cretin hit it. They want proof. This should be fun.

In the end, his old car seemed to be fixed (after only a small amount of hassle when he thought it had been stolen). It cost him about a hundred pounds. The insurance comapany appeared to have just scammed themselves out of £900 or so.

Of course, the insurance company weren’t to know that there is an excellent, doomed garage a few streets away from Adam’s house. They don’t seem to know how to run a garage; they’re too nice. Mechanics are supposed to tell you that everything needs replacing, then ask you for lots of money. Instead, they tow cars for a tenner a throw, sell parts at cost, fix things for free, and talk you out of costly upgrades they could charge you to fit. The trouble is, they don’t fit alarm systems as good as Adam’s. This is unfortunate, since the car was broken into shortly after being fixed. They didn’t do any real damage to that car, but they managed to break the alarm to the point where if the battery was connected it would go off, and no amount of manual override would stop it, and detatch a wire. This had the effect that if he drove over a speedbump, the wire would come off, the fuel injection would cut out, and the engine would stall.

The other night somebody let the tyres down on his hire car. And stole a hub cap. And broke one of the valves. He put a dust cap over it to stop the leak and hoped they didn’t notice.

Adam was back in Leeds today. His day here was rather shorter than he’d hoped, partly because he arrived an hour or so later than he’d planned due to his radiator bursting (the seal which blew off amazingly landing on a rubber hose and balancing there until he got to a service station), but mostly because his original plan of having new brakes and suspension fitted did not take as long as the revised plan (to wit, driving around four garages — three full, one closed — and explaining to the nice people at UniCar that he wanted brakes and suspension and not brakes or suspension). And his new passenger seat is the wrong size. On the plus side, the people from the car hire firm have looked at the Corsa, and told him it needed cleaning. I guess I’ll see him next week.

What other road users see when they look at Adam’s car.

Adam just left. His insurance company have said they can’t, in fact, give him any money, because there has been a counter claim by Cretin. Cretin says Adam swerved to avoid a car in front, in slow moving traffic (in the wrong lane on the wrong day), and this would account for the back of Adam’s car hitting the front of Cretin’s, and Caroline’s whiplash. I wouldn’t like to be Cretin just now. Adam has decided that his policy of not suing people is perhaps more flexible that he first thought, and that “taking the bastard for every penny he’s worth” might not be such a bad idea after all.

And you have no idea what “every penny” could mean. This could easily be made to mean compensation for the whiplash, six months of car insurance, compensation for lower grades, a year’s worth of wages (Adam having dropped out of the Year in industry scheme because of this), obviously his flashy mostly-new sports car, and the obligatory stress and court costs. Then Cretin would probably face a nice hefty fine, although it’s looking like he might be the kind of person who would sooner lie, drag the whole case out, and end up losing his job and/or going to jail, going directly to jail, not passing Go, and most certainly not collecting £200. After all, insurance fraud is bad enough, even if he chooses not to add perjury to the charge. We’ll see how this pans out. I may need to upgrade my bandwidth allocation for this one. If this page deosn’t update again, then you should assume it’s for the same reason newspapers don’t publish stories about ongoing court cases.

Cretin, you see, is insured on the same policy as one of his relatives, who runs a garage. If that policy is terminated, the garage is pretty doomed. This is the only halfway laudable explanation as to why Cretin keeps claiming new and difficult to verify things about the accident.

At almost one o’clock this afternoon, or “half past five in the morning,” as Adam’s in-car clock calls it, his engine made a loud snap noise, followed by a quieter seires of bangs (or, in Adam-ese, the lower engine mount snapped). Then the cockpit filled with a distinctly petrol like smell. When we opened the bonnet, the engine was shaking back and forth and sparks were flying between two pieces of rubber. The car is now reffered to as “totalled”. To cap this, he’s all but run out of money to fix it with, and now it seems Cretin’s got yet another company to sue him.

On Friday morning Adam dropped the car off at UniCar to have the brakes and suspension (which had finally arrived) fitted, and they said to come back on the Monday morning. On the Tuesday afternoon. On the Wednesday morning. And it was proptly delivered to the UniCar stor on the Wednesday afternoon, and apart from the rear being too high (which they say will correct itself) and a couple of new noises, the car seems to work fine.

The other day Adam went back to his car to discover that some skutter had stolen one of his indicators. They had to be replaced. This means, though, that once he gets his new engine (because his current one is burning a bottle of oil every couple of weeks), complete with new clutch and gearbox, and his new rear lights, only the body and wheels will be original parts.

A week after getting his car back from UniCar, Adam was back there, to explain to them that he had asked for stiffened and lowered suspension, and not stiffened or lowered suspension, and could they please put the back end down where it’s supposed to be? A few days later Adam picked up his nice, level new car, which no longer looked like a dragster with the back end three inches higher than it had any right to be. While he was picking it up, he asked about the forced-induction kit he had bought from them before, and whether it would fit onto his new engine he wants to buy. the man behind the desk looked in some files and announced that indeed it would fit, but would need an adapter. He reached under the desk and pulled out the adapter in question. “Happy birthday, mate. These are really expensive, but since you spend so much here, you know… These are like gold dust — that’s not the price on the side, there,” and I’d like to believe him, really I would, but the facts don’t work in his favour, particularly the fact that he had one under the desk, the fact that he gave it away without even noting it down, and the fact that it had a sticker saying ‘£9.99’ on the side.

Yesterday Adam got his new rear lights, which had finally arrived from UniCar, who in turn had been waiting for them to be delivered from a company which is run without the use of any computers at all. Then we discovered they had no wiring instructions. Then I found out that there were two types of 205s made; the Phase One and the Phase Two. This proved to be important because the lights were designed for the phase two. Can you guess what kind Adam has? The old lights come off easily enough, but thereafter we hit difficulties such as, say, how to fit a five pin adapter and three two pin adapters into a six and a two. Today we tried again with the benefit of wiring instructions from the internet. It turns out that all the rear lights are wired through the cluster on the passenger side, which is why in the phase two (an electrician presumably having taken one look at it and said “well that’s just silly,”) there are fewer adapters. Al the wires were removed and fixed on as seemed logical. At first nothing worked, then we got the indicators to work. Then Adam remembered that he hadn’t actually put any bulbs in the brake lights, and sure enough, they lit up the next time. Well, one of them did. The other did nothing for a long time. Then the driver’s side — which, in clear defiance of all reason, was the one that worked — decided to indicate instead of lighting the brake light. This was apparently a grounding error. Then, for no particular reason it started, stopped, started, stopped, and finally started working, so Adam now has a fully functioning set of Lexus-style rear light clusters. That is if they weren’t stolen while I was typing this.

Well, the good news is that nobody’s stolen the car, but then, who’d want to steal a car with a huge dent in the side?

When Adam was driving into University today he was hit whilst truning right by a woman who was good-intentioned but not overly blessed with the power of concentration, driving a Peugeot 306. His car sustained a big dent to the onside three quarter panel (that is, the big red bit of metal at the back of the passenger’s side). Her car may have cracked a headlight cover. This is because, being a GTi, Adam’s car is apparently made of double-ply tin foil with a strengthening layer of red paint. It sais a lot about Cretin that Adam was able to have — and sort out — another unrelated insurance claim in the time it takes Cretin to change his story again (now he’s claiming Adam had to brake because the car in front braked suddenly, which wouldn’t mitigate him even if it was true). Adam is just hoping they repair his car rather than writing it off again.

Today Adam got his car back from the garage. He arrived in Leeds having had his psychotic brother drive him up. Said brother had quite a lot of things in the car, and was terribly worried about it all being stolen, so Adam agreed to put hs coat over it, saying “make sure I get that before you go; it has my keys and wallet in.” Adam has now been locked out of his house on four seperate occasions. Since only ony of his housemates was in, and she changes her phone number every other hour, Adam spent the night at our house being pestered by his girlfriend via. the wonderful if frequently bloody irritating technlogy of mobile phones and we all drank turbo-shandies as part of a stupid drinking game he invented which resulted in me (at odds of over fifteen hundred to one against) drinking ten fingers, of which eight had to be drunk upside down, at which point the game bagan to seem a bit silly. This morning we woke up, feeling slightly hungover, and went to the garage. The garage had repaired his bumper strip, and the panel, but not the window (which hadn’t been damaged in the accident, but had “exploded” at some point during the repairs) because somebody at Peugeot had ordered the wrong one by mistake. Adam took the car home with the wrong window (which also did not now boast his nice shiny PGAC sticker he’d put on the wrong way around the year before) because he had to get home to his keys and wallet. He’s going to come back to get the right window some other time. Meanwhile Cretin, six months and three stories after the crash, claims to have found a witness to back up his latest wheeze.

Last week someone drove into the back of Adam’s car while he was waiting at traffic lights. Fortunately, no damage was done this time, save for scratching Adam’s paintwork slightly and crumpling the front end of the other car. After a brief conversation about why Adam stopped in front of this guy, exactly what else he was supposed to do faced with red traffic lights, and oh, sorry, I wasn’t paying attention they went their seperate ways. Adam has also found a pub full of people who want to give him lots of things for his car and fit them for free in exchange for a pint of beer and his help racing in a rally (although naturally not in that order). Things are looking up for a change (at least as far as his car is concerned).

On Tuesday we went to a pub in Burley, and I’m still not certain why. Anyway, the part of the story of note here takes place in Burley. Those of you who read my wonderfully confusing column not long ago detailing the various Adams and Als I have met since coming to Uni will no doubt be delighted to hear that these are not the same Burley. We live in Burley, Leeds, a small part of the city where Richard Whitely works. The pub was in Burley in Wharfdale, a small town in Ilkley where Richard Whitely lives. It is also Lizzy’s home. But it is also largely irrelevant, as it was at a T junction here in Leeds that Adam’s brakes locked. Being a good driver he released and reapplied them and came to a halt. The reason for this slight hitch turned out to be a large diesel spill in the road, when the car behind, whose brakes were controlled by a computer, hit the back of Adam’s car. This is, of course, now the fourth time Adam’s car has been hit, each time by an increasingly large vehicle, and each time doing less and less damage. Adam was understandably furious by this point, and threw open his door, stormed out, and immediately slipped on the diesel and fell flat on his arse.

Now that his starter motor has broken as well, he is not going to insure the car next year. It is worth pointing out at this point that he doesn’t plan to drive it either, so he will not be driving around without insurance, like Cretin, whom he has hired another solicitor to badger for a while.

Footnotes and Disclaimers

*He was trying to get his car fixed there. Hindsight, eh?

While we’re on the subject, Adam has asked me to point out that publishing lies about him on the internet is illegal. He was not driving to Essex; Cretin comes from Essex. I apologise for any confusion this may have caused.

And yes, this is only one side of events, but since the other side would apparently come from a lying fuckwit, I think we’re safe enough.

All opinions in the above text are mine, and nothing to do with Adam.