Hoping, waiting, praying – there is nothing more unbearable than taking your wheels for its MOT test
I’d be a hopeless sports coach. I don’t just suspect that’s the case, I fairly well know it, having spent a season ‘managing’ the Pear & Partridge FC, my local pub’s football team, 20 years ago.
Other than a notable 5-4 victory after being 4-0 down at half-time (local newspaper headline: ‘Lovely Pear For Comeback Kings’ – and yes, I wrote the match report), it wasn’t a spell that had Arsène Wenger looking nervously over his shoulder.
In partial mitigation, it wasn’t unknown for the Pear’s star striker to arrive for the match on a Sunday morning with a can of lager in his hand – whether still going strong from the night before or starting afresh that morning, I never quite knew.
It wasn’t the training or the tactics or team selection that bothered me – these were not high-stakes games – but the stress of watching and hoping. I found it unbearable.
I get the same feeling when I drop a vehicle in for its MOT test. Last week it was my motorcycle, but a couple of months ago it was my Audi A2.
You can check a vehicle’s MOT status online, so at some point during the hour or two my local garage had the car, the gov.uk website asked me to confirm I’m a human because I had refreshed the page so much to check up on the Audi that the system thought I was some kind of spambot.
The nervousness, the anticipation, the feeling of dread. I hate it all. It doesn’t matter how much prep or homework I’ve done: one of my vehicles is going in to be judged and I don’t know what the outcome will be.
It’s the motoring equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat. I don’t get the same feeling from the family Land Rover, because I don’t do any of the work on it. So it must be something about the feeling of being personally assessed.
What’s weird is that it doesn’t really matter: whatever is wrong I can just take home and fix. My job requires that I drive things, so there’s usually a car around if I need to go somewhere.
But knowing that doesn’t seem to help. I like owning, working on and using old vehicles. But there are a few hours every year when I think about swapping them for something new – a car or bike I wouldn’t technically own but whose problems wouldn’t belong to me either.
