Dialogue: Christmas lights I didn't want to see

I don't believe in Sod. I scoff at Sod's law. Indeed, some months ago I wrote an article mocking the common belief that anything that can go wrong will go wrong in the worst possible way and at the most inconvenient moment.

I even made a special trip to the zoo expressly to poke a stick through the bars and to tease the great Sod itself. I called it impotent and I called it imaginary.

And then I turned and strode away, ignoring the superstitious muttering of the other zoo-goers, who fingered crucifixes as I passed and buried their nostrils in lucky heather from the gipsy.

Behind my back they tossed propitiatory buns to the great shaggy Sod and whispered to their children that I was a bad, bad man.

Well, the zoo is closed for the Christmas holidays and the keepers have gone frolicking with their families, leaving only a skeleton staff to feed and water the beasts.

But I can only presume that the keeper assigned to Sod, overcome perhaps by the excitement of the season, left the door of his cage unlocked and beside it a map of Lyttelton with my house circled in red.

Because on Christmas Eve my car went wrong. All year it has been an obedient car. Though I have fed it only a thin diet of fuel, though I have neither buffed its skin nor brushed its upholstery nor paid attention to its workings, nevertheless for 350 days, like some biblical ass, it has borne me patiently and uncomplainingly past open garages and unemployed mechanics. And all the while the car was in league with Sod.

Together they were plotting its Christmas Eve revolt. Something beneath the bonnet of the car squealed for several seconds and then the dashboard became a Christmas tree of little lights.

I had seen these lights before. On that occasion, several years ago, I found them pretty and ignored them and the car died within hours.

This time I studied them. One said "At Oil Temp." "Exclamation mark," said another. "Brake fluid," said a third.

I thought of opening the bonnet, but at the same second as I thought of it, I dismissed it. I am not very good at opening bonnets and even if I succeed, I stare at the writhing tubes and organs in much the same way as the natives of South America stared at the ships of stout Cortes.

I turned the key and, to my surprise, the engine restarted. Bathed in the twinkle of warning lights, I nursed the car home, all the time expecting Popacatapetl to erupt from my tappet block.

Not only was it Christmas Eve, but it was Sunday. My local garage was shut like an oyster and, in common with every other garage in the land, it would remain that way for a week.

I rang the AA and they sent Derek. When I grow up I am going to be an AA man. He scours the cooling crust of the developed world like a big yellow saviour.

He carries a toolbox of happiness. When he comes into view all grief dissolves. He is the flip side of Sod. He is the automotive Jesus who succours the halt and the lame.

Derek boomed "ho ho ho" and sat me on his knee and wiped my tears and asked me what was wrong.

Within seconds he was hauling from my engine the shredded remnants of a thing he called an alternator fanbelt. Derek and I agreed that I needed a new one. Derek said it was up to me to go and buy one.

"But the car," I said, "it's kaput."

"It will keep going a while," said Derek, "until the battery runs down. Now off you go."

I felt as Hercules must have felt when told that he'd got 12 little jobs to do. But Derek was patient. He explained where I should go and what I should ask for and he even wrote down the engine type for me to show to the nice shopkeeper.

Every time I turned the indicator on as I drove into town I was conscious that I was sucking precious bits of electricity from my dwindling store.

But I made it to a shop reassuringly called Supercheap, where the assistant looked up my car in a riveting paperback called Numerical Specifications for Every Bit of Every Car in the World.

He sold me an alternator fanbelt for considerably less than the original price of the car and he wished me good luck and I bore the fanbelt home feeling like a man of world and I rang Derek and he returned to fit the fanbelt for me and the sun was shining and the birds were singing and the fanbelt was the wrong size.

I sensed a shagginess in the shadows. I tossed it a bun.