Tick - the sound that every driver must dread

Within an hour the AA van arrived. "What's wrong?" asked the driver. "Won't go," I said, "Nothing but tickticking when I turn the key." "Flat battery," he said. "I know," I replied, "but it worked well enough this very morning with not the slightest indication that it was about to give up the ghost." "They don't."

I thought of saying that they used to, that they made some groaning effort that worked with a warm engine, that the headlights would glimmer instead of throw a beam, that one could uncork the compartments of the battery from time to time, check for buckled plates and top up the acid with distilled water, and that there had been good old days when even the most hapless motorist could tell when the tired old thing could no longer hold its charge. But I said nothing of the kind.

He tinkered with leads and the engine fired. "Can't do more than that," he said, "I'll leave the engine running and you can go and get a battery - the AA won't send a van again if you call them with the same fault. But you may not find one easily - not many of this type about." And off he went. Much rummaging in Yellow Pages and five phone calls later, I discovered this rarest of batteries. "No, we can't hold it," said the voice, "it's first come, first served. We close at five." To this the only sensible response was that I would come at once - "Please, at least, hold it for 10 minutes."

By this time I had spent almost the whole day on this trifling matter, but a day proved to be not enough. As I engaged reverse, with some clumsy clutch control the engine stalled and would not start again. I cursed the AA man for all he had done was tell me what I knew and leave me to get on with it. For an annual subscription of £141 it was pretty scurvy service.

And then I cursed the car for not having a starting-handle - with that I could have swung it into life, need not have denied the dogs their walk, need not have called the AA and could at once have collected the new battery. The starting-handle was the driver's friend when I was young; all my old Daimlers and Peugeots had them, but when the last of these died late in the 1980s, I could not find a single newish car provided with this simple twopenny tool.

But by then the carburettor had gone too, and the free-wheel, and with chips and computers, the bonnet had become the cover of a closed book. Before I die I would like again to take the wheel of the pre-war Rover 16 on which I learned to drive - all these years on, it seems an ideal car.