Driving to Barnsley yesterday morning to do my teacher training, my car decided it'd had enough of boring, conventional, "square" roads and would much rather drive off into the hedgerow. For reasons yet to be ascertained, taking a sharp bend on a narrow country lane the steering wheel refused to respond and rather than continuing in the direction I was supposed to be travelling, I ended up crossing the road and driving down into a ditch, at a 45 degree angle, stopped only by a thick, spiky hedge and a farmer's barb wire fence. It wasn't that I skidded taking the bend, I've done that on icy or wet roads before and what generally happens when you try to correct the skid is that the back end of the car spins round and you end up facing back in the opposite direction. But there was no skid here: the road conditions were good and my tyres had plenty of tread. What happened instead was that the steering simply ceased to work and the car carried on forwards rather than completing its turn.
Thankfully I wasn't going particularly fast so the brakes and the hedge were sufficient to stop me from rolling the car over onto its roof. I'm just glad there was nobody else on the road or that I wasn't travelling in a built up area or on a motorway. I can't help thinking I've had a lucky escape: for all that my car is scratched and crumpled and broken, this could have been a far worse accident.
However, this is the final straw. I've had enough of this car now. It's one problem after another. I can hardly afford another one, but I can't afford to keep paying to have it fixed either... and I don't trust it any more. When the trust is gone, the relationship is over. If I can't even rely on it to stay on the road, it's time to say goodbye. When your car starts trying to kill you, put it out of its misery before it has another go.
Apologies to the poor roadside recovery man who had to crawl through a spiky hedge to attach the tow rope to pull the bloody thing out of the hedgerow - his arms were lacerated. And to the farmer whose fence I damaged, who was decent enough to show more concern for my welfare than the state of his field. I promise you both: that bloody car will see justice.
