OneAndOneIs2

I had an event to get to last night. It's an hour's drive away, so I left with an hour and a half to spare. I noticed petrol was low, but I always get 400 miles from a full tank before the fuel light comes on, and I'd only done 350, so I wasn't too worried: I'd get petrol at the other end no problem. I'd put the road address into my satnav and it knew where we wanted to go, so off I went. Plenty of time.

Halfway there, at only 375 miles since the last refill, the fuel light comes on. It's NEVER come on at so low a mileage before, not ever. But I'm on the motorway and there's no fuel stations on the M25, so I figured what the hell, there's still 4 litres left in the tank when the light comes on, that's enough for 40 miles, I only need to get 25. It's fine.

Carry on, and just as we approach the satnav's "Destination" flag I see that right beside it is the icon denoting a petrol station. Great, I think, I'll fill up there, I have plenty of time.

Only, there isn't a petrol station there. Just a car sales place - it often seems to get those two mixed up. Plus there's no sign of the place I wanted to get to. The tricky bit is, you see, that they gave me a name but no street number, so the satnav could only get me to the road, not the exact part of it.

And it's a long road, and it's dark, so I pull over and grab my laptop, which has mobile broadband and so can get online and find me directions.

Or so I thought, but despite having full-strength signal, it was so slooooooow! It was painful, grinding slowly away and even at one point telling me that it couldn't locate google. FFS!

Expecting to be pulled over for about a minute, I hadn't turned off the car engine - it takes more than a minute's worth of petrol to start the engine, etc. But I was waiting longer than that for the web to help me, and suddenly I notice a flashing light - the petrol light giving me its warning that the tank is no longer low, it's down to fumes. Uh-oh...

Satnav, don't fail me now: Take me to the nearest petrol station. No, not that one, I already know you're wrong about that one. The NEXT nearest one. Just half a mile around the corner. Off we go. But around the corner is a solid line of traffic and some traffic lights.

Lights and cars slow progress to inches. At one point, I turned off the engine and just coasted down the slight slope in an attempt to keep fuel use to a minimum. Slow and painful, and very worrying because altho the car is small, it's heavy enough to not want to get out and push if it runs out of petrol. But progress was made and at long last, I got to the petrol station. Blessed relief!

Refuelled, I again tried in vain to get my laptop to tell me where on the road the damn conference venue was, and resorted at last to asking a bloke standing by a street light where it was. He was very helpful, and I got to the conference place, which I had driven right past earlier but been unable to see in the dark due to the crappy signposting, and was only a minute or two late.

It was a great evening. Really.