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On Tuesday, as some of you will know, I flew up to Manchester from Southampton to visit my in-laws. This was an extremely effective exercise in time management, since the flight takes just 35 minutes. On the down side, it involved me getting up at 5.00am, an hour considerably earlier than 9.30am, and, as a result, has therefore been seriously detrimental to my metabolism. In my confused state, I’ll swear I passed Simon on his way to bed. Well, to augment a short story long, everything was booked online, including the hire of a car from Mr Hertz, who just happens to prostitute himself on the British Airways website and we took advantage of his blatant commercialism. Before you ponder on this possible extravagance, the cost of a day’s hire of a Ford Fiesta was £35 and taxis to and from Manchester Airport would have been £45. We would have transport throughout the day, so we could go out for lunch etc. Anyway, when we arrived at Manchester, we duly reported to one of Mr Hertz’s lovely assistants who informed us that they would have to change the hire car from a bright shiny Ford Fiesta to a drab brand new top of the range Jaguar XJ loadsmorelettersofthealphabet 3.0 SE Automatic. Just like this:- The last time I saw a dashboard like the one in that was earlier in the day when the pilot left his door open. We spent a good 20 minutes in the car park trying to work out what all the buttons did and it was a while before I discovered that you had to depress the brake pedal before you could set the gear lever to Drive, Reverse, or anything! So I told it that George Galloway could win Celebrity Big Brother and it worked! Hurrah! I pressed one of four buttons on the door which made my seat move backwards and I couldn’t get it to go forwards again. S found some knobs on the side of her seat and got out of the car to come round and fiddle with mine. Once my posture had ceased to resemble that of a hump-backed dwarf with a broken leg, I closed my door and started the engine. S then spent a few minutes banging on the passenger window as her door had inexplicably locked itself and I didn’t know how to reverse this procedure. I discovered this simply involved a slight pull on my door handle. S spent most of the journey to the in-laws reading out appropriate extracts from the Instruction Manual. Oh, and it even had a heated steering wheel! I'm serious! Now, I am not one of those people who drool over Lamborghinis, Porsches and suchlike; in fact, I find that kind of obsessiveness slightly irritating, but …… PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEIWANTONEOFTHOSE!