I MENTIONED some little while ago that I have somewhat reluctantly become the owner of an ancient and disreputable automobile purchased for the sole purpose of conveying me to my pungent place of work.

It’s a Y reg Honda Civic, called Max, so named because that is what is helpfully written on the vehicle in several places.

It offers motoring at its most basic, with a screaming 1400cc engine and a capricious gearbox which finds it amusing to leap out of fifth gear for no apparent reason, and then screech in protest when I try to jam it back into synch again.

When I acquired the vehicle, Mrs Hextol sensibly drove behind me in the family limousine, in the sure and certain knowledge that Max would break down long before we got back to Bellingham.

But the Japanese junk heap made it, although she did point out the reversing lights kept coming on during my frantic attempts to find a gear – any gear – in my jerky progress along the Military Road,

Max was purchased because my proper car was growing entirely too odiferous for Mrs Hextol’s liking due to my horse wrangling activities, but she is far too embarrassed to travel in it, unless there really is no alternative,

When she is forced to occupy the passenger seat – once I have removed the several bales of straw and other detritus which accumulate there – she only does so wearing dark glasses, a woolly scarf and with her coat collar pulled up high.

“I don’t want anyone recognising me in this smelly crate,” she’ll say with a delicate shudder.

I don’t know what Max did in his previous life, but he is the dampest vehicle I have ever driven. He is fine when in motion, but as soon as the key is removed from the ignition, all his windows start to steam up.

They don’t just go slightly misty, they fog up like a London pea souper, giving the impression that someone is having a Turkish bath or getting rather frisky in the back seat.

I was forbidden from driving on doctor’s orders for several weeks after my recent stay in hospital, and Max stood forlorn, steaming quietly away in his parking spot outside the back door.

Mrs Hextol let him fester, and when I was eventually allowed back in the driving seat, I was a little fearful of what all that steaming had created.

Opening the driver’s door was akin to what Howard Carter must have felt when he finally got into Tutankhamun’s tomb. There was a foetid, musty smell, and fronds appeared to be waving from the back seat in faithful imitation of scenes from The Quatermass Experiment.

As the haze slowly cleared, and my glasses demisted, I could see that all the upholstery was thickly covered in so much mould, I had visions of opening a penicillin plant,

Happily, a brisk application of elbow grease and a stiff brush swept away the spores, and Max was restored to his former trendy shabby chic shape, although the fusty aroma of rotting bandages and embalming fluids still pervades the air.

The problem with driving two cars with a 15 year age difference is that they used to do things differently at the dawn of this millennium. Then they trusted you to have the nous to switch off your car lights when not using them rather than letting the onboard computer perform that onerous task for you.

So having driven Max one foggy morning, I noticed when I switched to my “proper” car in the afternoon there was a faint Toc H glow emanating from Max’s rear end.

I realised straight away I had left his lights full on for several hours, and when I tried to turn the key to start the engine, nothing happened.

Luckily, I had a set of jump leads in the garage for exactly such an emergency, but when I freed them from the nail in the garage roof, the metal clamps had rusted away completely.

Fortunately, a helpful neighbour had a functioning set, and with the aid of another neighbour who knows far more about these things than I do, Max was soon roaring away in rude health again..

In our short acquaintance, I’ve grown quite attached to Max, with all his eccentricities, and he has never let me down in my morning scramble over the dizzy heights of Hareshaw Common.

His MoT expires in July – dare I hope he will somehow make it through another?