How old is your car? When you look around, there aren’t really a lot of what you would call ’bangers’ on the road.

Our current chariot, which will probably be our last, is a three year old Fiesta ’B Max’.

It is a variant of the standard Ford Fiesta that has slightly increased headroom and sliding rear passenger doors.

The advantage of the sliding doors is that there is no central door pillar to get in the way of ageing passengers.

But do you know what irritates me with modern cars? The ’bleepers’ or as they prefer to be called, audible alarms.

There are different alerts for different problems and if something starts bleeping you never know which one is which.

I don’t know about you, but I think that they are a pain in the neck.

And, to this day, I’m still not really sure how, in spite of a reversing alarm, I managed to back our three week old Honda Civic, the only car that we ever had from new, twice into a the same lamp post in Shoprite car park.

But touch wood, in 55 years of driving ourselves and each other around the island, we’ve never had what you would call an accident. But we have had some laughs.

I have some fond memories of one car that we owned, a white Ford Mondeo estate.

This was probably the most comfortable car that we ever had. I rarely used the Mondeo to get to work, because one of my ’perks’ was a well-worn Fiesta.

Another ’perk’ was a parking slot in a private car park in back Strand Street.

The parking spaces were each marked with a short numbered post that was like a letter ’T’ set into the ground. My post was about half an inch different in height to the front of the car. Now if it had been two inches higher, you would know when you had gone far enough, and if it was two inches lower, the car could safely pass over it.

The front bumper on the Mondeo was made from plastic and was designed to ’give’ if you bumped another car.

It was also perfectly designed to ’give’ if your car became hooked over a short, numbered post. No problem, I thought and slowly reversed the car.

The whole of the front and corner sections of the car complete with head lights, fog lights, indicators and number plate was pulled off and left hanging by a dozen or more electric cables.

I had to phone a garage to come and sort things out.

Now you know the saying that tells you to learn by your mistakes, Would you believe I did it again, the very next day?

Another time, I was collecting something from our shop, which was opposite what is now known as Clinton Cards. Me and my trusty old Fiesta had pulled into the side street, which was lined with those heavy plastic triangular ’no parking’ bollards.

Now if you have ever seen a delivery van touch one of these things, they just squash, then spring back to their original when the van moves on.

When I happened to drive over the corner of one of the things, it bent over and vanished. It had reformed to its original size and shape inside the engine compartment.

It would neither pull up and come out from the top or be bent enough to come out from the bottom.

I had to jack the car up as high as possible, then use a hacksaw to cut the intruder into small pieces. The evidence went into the bin.

The last comical event is more recent. We had been to Shoprite, loaded the boot and I had taken the trolley back.

I got back to the car to find that Brown Eyes was slightly annoyed to say the least. Our car, which is an automatic, just would not go into gear.

For what seemed like ages, we tried everything, but the selector just refused to move.

I was just about to phone the rescue service, when we both burst out laughing. My dear wife had forgotten to turn the engine on!