True to form the weather had was getting greyer by the minute as we exited the tunnel and headed for London. We didn’t have enough petrol to get in and out of London so we pulled into Maidstone Services, filled up and were soon off again and on schedule. Aimile managed about 5 miles before coughing and spluttering and I had to pull onto the hard shoulder as she ground to a halt. That was a bad moment in fact several moments. Please tell me I haven’t filled up with diesel by mistake. That would be so embarrassing and it was a ghastly place to stop with the heavy lorries thundering past only inches away and to cap it all, it started to drizzle.
There was nothing obviously wrong, that I could fix. We started phoning for a recovery vehicle. I had bought extra European cover to add to my Greek car insurance, so while I was phoning Greece, Jacky was phoning her bank as she had some cover with her account. Jacky got there first and they offered AA Assistance and said a recovery vehicle would be with us within an hour. My Greek insurance gave me 2 numbers, but insisted that I get a fixed quote and phone them back for their approval. I think you can guess which one we went with. Waiting outside the car on the other side of the barrier for an hour was not fun. A sweet young AA man who introduced himself as Connor, arrived (Jacky’s words not mine) and escorted her to his cab out of the rain and to warm up. I got the third degree. It is a real skill for a 23 year old to give me a ‘Dutch Uncle” look when I explained I had just filled up at the services. I got sent to cab to to hang my head in shame and ponder, what I had done poor Aimile.
His priority was to get us off the motorway and by then we were thinking in terms of somewhere for the night. He hitched Aimile up behind his van and we headed for a local Premier inn. No room was to be had there or any of the others in the area. Eventually he located somewhere near the Brands Hatch motor racing circuit. Jacky checked in and chatted with the receptionist while I went out into the dark and rainy night with the AA guy to do a few basic checks and see if the problem was fixable. Connor produced an empty 1 1/2 litre water bottle. Seems he’d encountered this problem a few times before and the bottle was standard equipment on AA vans. He removed the fuel pipe from the engine and I cranked the starter - we soon had 1/2 a litre of clean petrol in the bottle.
On the one hand I had not despoiled Aimile with diesel and frozen Jacky half to death due to my incompetence, on the other, it would have been easy to fix and now we didn’t know what the problem was. All good things come to an end. I had enjoyed chatting to Connor, who was a fund of entertaining stories and extremely helpful but he had to return to his natural habitat south of the M25.
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