WHILE I enjoy driving my own car, getting behind the wheel of an unfamiliar vehicle has always filled me with an unspeakable dread.

We have temporary custody of sailor son’s rather snazzy Ford Focus while he is on anti-piracy deployment in the Middle East until Christmas.

He has asked us to go for the odd jaunt in it to stop it deteriorating, and it is a prospect that continues to fill me with dread.

I was ordered by Mrs Hextol to use it to take my grandson for football training in Otterburn and discovered not long into the journey that I had absolutely no idea where the headlights switch could be found.

I applied liberal doses of windscreen washer to an already immaculate screen, set the hazard lights into overdrive, turned on the heater, assaulted my ears with Radio One, and reset the trip counter, but despite my best endeavours, the lights stayed resolutely unilluminated.

I finally discovered how to flash the headlights, so was forced to drive with one hand on the flasher to get us safely back to Bellingham.

I eventually found the elusive light switch just as we were passing the welcome back to Bellingham sign.

The handbrake was another problematic feature, simply because my own car has an automatic parking brake which comes on as soon as the engine stops.

I had quite forgotten that not every car has this handy labour-saving device, and wondered why the car was still moving when I tried to get out on more than one occasion.

The real problem came when I was asked by Mrs Hextol to take the vehicle into the garage in the village to top it up with diesel.

A simple task you may think, and one that I have done many hundreds of times before, but it turned into a performance that Mr Bean would have been proud of.

I pulled the car into the garage easily enough, but then discovered that the flap to the fuel tank was on the “wrong” side of the car, and the hose was not long enough to reach all the way across.

I had to drive out of the garage and turn the car around, but as I waited, every car owner in the village seemed to be queueing to fill up – all of them pointing the wrong way as far as I was concerned.

I finally gave it up as a bad job, and decided to return later.

When I got back to Hextol Towers, I decided to check whether or not it was a locking fuel cap – and was stunned to find that there was no fuel cap in situ.

I spent half an hour thinking someone had pinched it before working out that there never had been a fuel cap, and the tank contents were protected by a sort of sophisticated non-return valve.

There was a helpful diagram indicating the correct way to insert the nozzle of the pump, which had been deliberately made much too small to allow the common and expensive mistake – as was once inevitably done by me – of putting petrol into a diesel car.

It looked simple, and when I returned to the garage later in the afternoon, I was delighted to find it mercifully deserted.

I pulled confidently in ready to begin the delayed tank filling process.

I lifted the flap, jammed in the hose, pulled the trigger – and squirted copious quantities of diesel all over the forecourt of the filling station.

It went everywhere but in the tank, and I was quite amazed that the spillage was not ignited by the red glow from my burning cheeks.

I was eventually obliged to go into the kiosk to ask the cashier if she knew what I was doing wrong, and she happily said she would send out a mechanic to investigate.

The young man seemed quite bemused that a man of my years was incapable of putting fuel into a car without assistance, and his eyebrows rose a little higher when I was obliged to confess that I was no longer fully convinced it was, in fact, a diesel car.

He ran a few checks, and with a casual flick of the wrist, slid the nozzle into the tank as easily as if had been a bucket.

He returned to his duties with only a slight shaking of the head, while I filled up the tank with shaking hands.