Stay of Execution

  One of the advantages of living in France, which would be the envy of you stay-at-homes, is that the controle technique, or MOT, is every TWO years, not one. Another and even more attractive, is that there is no Road Tax! The possible downside is that after two years, the Controle can throw up serious defects, serious enough to warrant scrapping the car...
  You can imagine our misgivings yesterday, when we turned up at the test centre to submit our aged Peugeot 106 to scrutiny. The little car has covered 137,000 kilometers in its 17 years of life, so it would not have been surprising to find severe defects. especially in the engine department. We were relieved to find that the examiner gave it a mostly clean sheet. It would be unrealistic to expect it to sail straight through, but the repairs look to be well worth carrying out to get two more years of life from the faithful machine, a tribute to Peugeot`s engineering!
  The most serious problem is that the left  hand side rear suspension has developed excess play and will need replacing. Three tyres will have to be bought, one damaged by the above fault. A rear seatbelt will also need changing. Laurent, our garagiste at Couture D`Argenson, is going to find second hand parts for the suspension leg and seat-belt. The little car will continue to mount up the kilometrage!
  The seatbelt problem is NOT the fault of PSA, but of Laika, who passed the idle hour just after we took her on, by chewing nearly through it. I had carried out a fairly effective repair using nylon fishing line, which was acceptable to me , but not, I felt, to the controle examiner. To circumvent his likely refusal of my homemade repair, I had securely sewn a seatbelt cover over both belts to conceal the job. I need not have bothered, the chap had obviously come across this little wheeze before, and neatly snipped them off again.. He took it in good part, however, explaining that a repaired belt was NOT acceptable, even if it was normally the dogs who travelled in the back....
   Lauret will give us and appointment once he has sourced the parts. We have a maximum two months to have the repairs done and the car submitted for its (free) re-examination. A very happy outcome even though the repairs will cost. Better than our friends at Matha , who paid 3,000Euros for MOT repairs!

 Bye now, going to stroke the car!
 











           Yes, you may well look ashamed!