Blaise Tapp: Confessions of a man who admits to fearing the fuse box
It doesn't matter how old you are or how accomplished you think you might be, life has a canny knack of frequently reminding us of how little we actually know.
My latest such unwelcome reminder came at the weekend when, most inconveniently, my until now, reliable little motor failed to start one morning. A usually reasonably confident type, it was at that precise moment, when the engine spluttered and the dashboard flashed feebly, that I realised that bluster and bravado would be no use to me in this particular situation. There was no talking my way out of this predicament as what I required was just a little bit of knowledge and practical nous, but I was totally and completely flummoxed.
While I presumed that it was flat battery, it could have just as easily have been a starter motor, alternator or a banana up the exhaust pipe - think Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop - I wasn’t sure at all, meaning I did what I always do whenever I am faced with a challenge that is remotely practical, I summoned professional.
Thanks to the magic of apps it’s never been easier to get hold of an expert, even on a Sunday, and a very nice chap in a uniform turned up when he said he would. It took him all of 10 minutes to not only confirm that my battery was flat but also to discover the root of the problem - some daft oaf hadn’t closed his boot properly the night before meaning an interior light had been left on.
But unlike previous encounters with bumptious experts, this chap didn’t sneer at my incompetence and he immediately understood that he was dealing with yet another punter who knows nothing about cars; ‘that’s why I’m here’ was his reassuring response to my grovelling apology. In an attempt to demonstrate that I’m not a complete buffoon, I mentioned that I do know how to change a tyre and an oil filter - the only things I remember from GCSE Motor Vehicle Studies, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the only subject I failed.
I’m not sure how impressed he was but he suggested he’d met people who didn’t know one end of a spanner from another. His message was that we can’t all be good at everything and while this is absolutely true, I do wish I had paid more attention to teachers and to helpful relatives and family friends. I’m now just bracing myself for the next time I am expected to change a fuse in a plug………..