'Moose'

Breakdown II
5 September 1998

Bizarre. Unbeleivable. Weird. Pain in the Ass. All words (amongst others!) that were used when Moose suddenly stopped in the middle of downtown London.

We were on our way to dinner at the London Hilton (my agent was paying, so who are we to argue?), all dressed up in our very best - new dress for my wife and new suit, tie and shoes for me). We had taken the long way to the restaurant (we got lost) and ended up driving straight through the middle of London - London Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Pall Mall etc. The Saturday night traffic was abysmal and it was a slow crawl all the way from the Bridge to the Mall.

We were nearly there, part way down Pall Mall, when there was a muffled THUD, and a complete loss of power. No Go. No Nothing. We managed to coast to a stop out of the way beside a long queue of parked cars, and I got out to take a look under the bonnet. In my new suit. In the darkness I could make out a tangle of spark leads and lots of oil glistening and dripping onto the road. It looked like the distributor cap had parted company with the distributor. But where had the oil come from?It took a minute to realise that the coil had exploded! I had never seen the inside of a coil before, let alone hearing of one that had exploded, so it was a bit of a surprise.

We pushed the car to the end of the queue of parked cars (in my hard new shoes), and I hailed a taxi to go in search of a new coil. Surely the local garage will have one ... This is London we're talking about here. In the Nineties. The two garages we managed to find didn't even have spark plugs, let alone a coil, and anyway, the attendants didn't even know what a coil was! So much for service stations. We gave up on looking for a coil and pushed the car around the corner (in new shoes) where we found a vacant Keep Clear zone. Out of the way at last, but now a prime target for being towed away. There was nothing else to do, and the AA wouldn't answer the phone. So we went to dinner and tried to forget that our car would be gone when we got back.

After a very nice dinner (albeit with loud piano and singers seranading us all night) we returned at about 1:00am with our dinner hosts to see if Moose was still there. Amazingly it was! :) And it wasn't even clamped! And didn't have a ticket! Talk about luck! Even better was that there was now an empty parking space beside it, so we quickly pushed the car into the space and our host made a 60mile detour to take us home. What a guy.

The next day, after buying the last Minor coil on the shelf at the local automotive store, we took the train back into London to rescue our Trav. Our luck was continuing because it was still there, no tickets, no wheel clamps, and it was Sunday so the parking was free! Ten minutes later, the new coil was fitted and Moose was a runner again. Jeeeesh! And to think that only 3 days beforehand we had had a spare coil in the boot. We had borrowed one just in case this sort of thing happened to us in the middle of France or somewhere else less hospitable (is that possible?).

Well, panic over, and with Moose up and running again, and seeing as we were in central London anyway, why not find some photo opportunities! We took tea with Her Royal Highness, checked the time at Big Ben, escaped from the Tower of London, went to the Circus at Picadilly, went Lion Hunting in Trafalgar Square, and stopped for a well-earned pint at the Minories Pub!