EMISSIONS:LOVELY PLACE, Barcelona. Home of glorious food, funky little shops hidden down wonky streets, La Boqueria and the Camp Nou. Best of all, it is imbued with the spirit of unhinged nutters like Dalí, Gaudí and Picasso.
I’m inclined, therefore, to forgive the Catalans most things, including sneering at my pidgin grunts, gawping at my pasty skin and charging me €11 in tolls for the privilege of driving down a bockety motorway populated by crazed truckers racing fat bankers in Porsches.
But even I have my limits. In this case, it was the car foisted on me by a shower of shyster charlatans in Barcelona airport. I accept that they had me over a barrel of olives, because rental cars are as scarce in Spain as icebergs, but did I really deserve to be lumbered with the shed they gave me?
I have no idea what model it was. Nor did the gormless, monobrowed harridan who handed me the keys. By the shape of it, I suspect it had been a VW Golf in a previous life, before it was used and abused like a toilet brush in a service-station loo.
You know those diagrams they give you with the marks on it to show you the existing dings and dents? Mine was covered in so many ticks it looked like Einstein’s homework.
It appeared someone had dropped the car nose-first onto the Giant’s Causeway. The rear was so battered it may well have been used for target practice by Eta, and the front tyres were as bald as a cuttlefish.
The inside wasn’t much better. The handbrake gaiter was but a distant memory, revealing a grey, glutinous substance that felt like an inside-out mole. It was so vile that each time I grabbed it, a little bit of sick popped into my mouth. The air-conditioning was permanently set to stun, and the steering wheel had the texture of Spam.
There was a gaping hole in the dash where the passenger airbag once sat. After driving the banger and realising its suspension was so banjaxed it bounced about the smoothest of roads like a giddy kitten, I deduced that a previous occupant had unhooked said airbag and used it to be sick in.
The gearbox was, you’ll be astounded to hear, shot. Moving the stick was like rattling a spanner in a bag of rocks.
Worst of all, the whole thing was bathed in the odious reek of the cheap air freshener some lackey had sprayed – unsuccessfully – to mask underlying whiff of the sweaty Germans who’d previously been using the car to annex the Pyrenees.
And all this for the paltry sum of €100 a day? Where do I sign?
I asked about insurance. The delightful señorita informed me there was an excess of €700, but for a mere €18.60 I could get fully comprehensive cover and the freedom to plough the hideous crate into the side of the Sagrada Familia without fear of financial recrimination.
Still, to paraphrase PJ O’Rourke, a rental car can do things other vehicles can merely dream of. You can put it into reverse while going forward at speed, park it without looking, and take it absolutely anywhere. As he says, you can’t always get it back, but that’s not your problem, is it?
I treated the car with the disdain it deserved. PJ would have been proud. I won’t divulge any details for fear of arrest, but, suffice to say, it was fun.
Returning it the following day, the miserable attendant barely looked up. “Where eez car?” she asked as I tossed her the keys.
“That knackered death-trap is outside in your lot, burning away nicely,” said I, grinning. “I did you a favour and torched it so you can claim the insurance.”
She muttered something non-committal in Catalan and went back to reading her magazine. There’s gratitude for you. Some people, eh?
