The Nightmare of a Towing Breakdown

I didn’t really appreciate what it must be like to have a car breakdown when you’re towing a caravan until last weekend. I was away with the family on a trip to the Derbyshire Peak District, and when we ground to a halt about a mile from a roundabout there seemed to be no apparent reason. Thirty minutes later we were close enough to the front of the queue to see what had happened – a stationary caravan, a 4x4 with the bonnet up and a very stressed-looking mum and two kids standing on the verge. Dad was nearby, on the phone and presumably talking to his breakdown cover provider. Traffic was filtering slowly from two lanes into one to get round the blockage they were causing.

A clue to the reason why the mother was looking so stressed came from the group of young lads a couple of cars ahead of us, who were clearly shouting something unpleasant and unnecessary out of window at her. All I could see was her hanging on to her kids tightly and I could lip-read the word ‘sorry’ in her reply. Taking your frustration on someone who has broken down seems a bit stupid to me; I’m sure there’s a hundred places that family would rather have been than causing a tailback. And given the black smoke that was belching from the back of the lads’ ageing car, I would have thought the tables could have been turned at any point.