Awful moment on the Pasty Highway when wheels came off our staycation smugness

SO YOU think it’s hot in Blighty? Be thankful you’re not in the Costa del Sol or the Algarve: the temperatures there have burst through the 40c mark and in Southern Portugal are expected to break the record of 47.4c set in 2003.

That was the year in which we, most unwisely, took our family summer holiday not in our customary Cornwall or the Isles of Scilly, but in Tuscany. It was all but impossible for our children to sleep in the infernal, sultry heat.

After a week we abandoned our villa and booked flights back to our home in Sussex. It was wonderful to return to the moderate heat of an English August: we vowed never again to holiday in the Southern European midsummer.

Over the intervening 15 years, there have been times — on days when the rain never stopped — when I wondered if we had been too dogmatic: especially as I am a foodie and have deep respect for French and Italian cuisine. Not so much for the Cornish pasty.

This, then, was the year of complete vindication. We have just spent a glorious time in the far southwest of Cornwall, near St Just. The coves have never seemed so beautiful, the light which has entranced artists down the years never so magical.

Purgatory

And, unlike in the Nineties when we first visited westernmost Cornwall, there are now restaurants in the area which yield nothing in quality to the best, anywhere.

Two in particular provided fabulous lunches for our family last week: Ben’s Cornish Kitchen in Marazion — whose breathtakingly brilliant cooking has attracted reviewers from far- distant London — and the Mackerel Sky Seafood Bar in Newlyn (the port at the heart of the Cornish fishing industry).

So it was with something approaching smugness that on the last day of our holiday I read out aloud to my wife from an article by a Guardian journalist, entitled ‘The sheer hell that is heading off on holiday from Britain’.

The author, Patrick Collinson, described the purgatory of Stansted (hub of the infamous Ryanair) in August: ‘The airport prefers to attract large rent from retailers rather than provide much seating to passengers, so as the flight delays piled up, so did the bedlam, as passengers fought for somewhere to rest, lying in aisles, grabbing any space possible, crying children in tow.

‘Not until 11pm was there a single word of information on my own flight, scheduled for 8.20pm . . . those bound for Italy seemed to have it worst. They were boarded on Ryanair planes, supposedly ready to take off, only to sit on the tarmac for hour after hour . . . then we heard of the “retrievals” — passengers ordered off planes, having spent three hours waiting for take-off.

‘The “retrieved” were usually cancelled, left to fester for days waiting for a rare available seat on other flights.’ And all to arrive — eventually — in a 40c+ furnace.

Meanwhile we (I, my wife, our two daughters and the elder one’s partner) had left home in East Sussex at 5.30am to avoid the worst of the traffic and got to our destination by lunchtime, in the airconditioned comfort of our admittedly somewhat battered 14-year- old Land Rover Discovery. So it was with light hearts that we started the return journey, also at 5.30am, last Saturday.

Then, at 7am, as we barrelled down the A30 — the so-called ‘Pasty highway’ — our car’s information panel suddenly pinged and flashed up the ominous message ‘transmission fault’.

Simultaneously the engine cut out and we came to a stop, somewhere near Bodmin. It was foggy — normal for that part of the county at that time in the morning — and the cars and lorries were traveling at speeds which made me think that at any moment one would crash into the back of us, even though we had put our hazard lights on.

We immediately rang the AA (of which we are both ‘family members’). The first person we spoke to at one of its call centres didn’t seem to appreciate the danger of the situation.

The second did, and contacted the Devon and Cornwall police, who rapidly arrived and towed our car to a safer spot by a minor road nearby. They then — in my presence — called the AA to give precise details of the stranded car’s new resting place.

Excuses

But whoever the police spoke to at the AA did not pass this on to the ‘garage recovery partners’ sent to pick us up. For we were told the recovery truck would be with us in an hour, but it took two hours.

When the charming Cornishman from the local garage arrived, he said it was only because he had called his wife to say that the Land Rover wasn’t at the location the AA had given him, and he had been driving round in circles, that she told him that she could see exactly such a car (with five people standing disconsolately outside it) from the field in which she happened to be feeding her horses.

So by 9.15am our rescuer had loaded on our conked out car and taken us to the nearest supermarket car park, where our elder daughter and her partner sensibly baled out, speedily booking a taxi to take them to the nearest railway station.

Having established that our car had multiple gearbox problems that were not readily fixable, the man from the garage took the rest of us and our car a few miles down the road to a spot where we would be picked up by a tow truck allegedly already arranged by the AA to be taken on to our final destination. He told us the AA assured him they’d be there with us within 20 minutes.

We waved him goodbye at 9.50am . . . and waited. At 10.23 we were called by an AA man who came up with an increasingly implausible series of excuses why no recovery vehicle either would, or could take us to our destination.

Then — and bear in mind that every time we rang up we got a different person from one of the organisation’s many call centres — we were told a taxi would be sent to take us to Exeter (about 50 miles away) where we would be provided with a hire car.

It was not until 11.50 that the local taxi arrived and in the intervening period when I repeatedly inquired of the AA why it was that my elder daughter had managed to get a local taxi immediately but they couldn’t do so within two hours, the person at the call centre equally repeatedly responded that she was using ‘the system we have’ and that, in effect, the system was saying ‘no’.

Clobber

This was hard to explain to our younger daughter, who has Down’s syndrome. Although she got the essential point, declaring the AA to be ‘useless’. When I passed this thought on to the latest voice at the call centre, he responded: ‘I don’t appreciate being called useless.’ (I was beginning to understand why, last year, the chairman of the AA was sacked after hitting one of his breakdown recovery service’s managers: it seems to be that sort of organisation).

When the taxi finally arrived, we were told by our final AA interlocutor that we should leave our vehicle where it was, with the keys placed beneath the front wheel arch on the driver’s side, or another hiding place we could vouchsafe to them — but that the car might not be picked up for another 48 hours.

And we had to agree that it was being left there entirely at our own risk (including any luggage we had to leave in it, since the hire car the AA had arranged in Exeter would not be big enough to contain all the holiday clobber that our Land Rover had been carrying).

So, as I write, I have no idea whether I will ever see our car (or its contents) again. We finally arrived home at 7.30pm — 14 hours after we had set off. ‘Almost enough time,’ my wife observed, ‘to fly to New York and back.’

Still, after a restorative drink or three, we agreed we would be driving back again to wonderful westernmost Cornwall this time next year. For all our experiences with the AA, I’d still rather break down on the A30 than endure the August horrors of Ryanair.