I started to smile and then it bubbled up inside me and I burst out laughing and so did Dad and we couldn’t stop. The Panhard was zigzagging all over the place, in that crystal-clear morning light. Suddenly, whole flocks of brightly coloured cyclists overtook us, swaying on their saddles and sweating from the pain in their buttocks. Dad wound down the window:

“Slackers!” he yelled. “Capitalists!”

And he put his foot down hard on the accelerator, making sparks fly out of the old car. It was a grand comic gesture, even if I didn’t completely understand the term “capitalist”. I just assumed it meant something similar to “slacker”. Then Dad turned on the car stereo and we listened to “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones: rock music at its very finest. It was funny to hear Dad trying to sing like Mick Jagger.

The Panhard ground to a halt in a little village. We got out and went to sit in a café. I admired the firm way that Dad shook the owner’s hand: he must have been one of his clients because Dad told him that the “goods” hadn’t arrived yet. I didn’t know what goods he was talking about, but the term didn’t surprise me much, because Dad used it a lot when he was talking on the telephone to his clients. I asked for some hot chocolate and a sandwich and looked at the notebook. I should have taken more notice of how the Panhard was running, because the whole point of being out on the road at dawn was to make sure everything was working smoothly. If you give the Panhard its head for two minutes it starts to go on the blink. It’s a thoroughbred car, renowned for its sensitivity, and there’s always some minor thing wrong with it. Its Achilles heel is its exhaust system.

My father came back from the counter holding a plate.

“My feeling,” he said, “is that the valves are making a funny noise.”

“A sort of clicking?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll make a note.”

I took a sip of chocolate and flicked through the Krebs manual.

“In my opinion,” he said, “we need to take out the cylinder.”

“You just need to be careful there isn’t too much play in the valve rocker arms. Because you know what happened last time…”

“Hey, you’ve got a moustache!”

He was smiling. I wiped my sleeve across my mouth to shave off the moustache. And then I smiled too.

“You see, Dad, the problem is that I’m all blurry.”

“Blurry?”

“That’s what I was thinking the other day, when the maths teacher sat me next to one of the girls in the class.”

He was smiling again.

“And so she was less blurry than you?”