It was almost the trip that never was.

“Why does it smell so strongly of oil in this car?” she asked, scrunching up her face.

“I just topped up the levels.”

“But it stinks.”

“I must’ve spilled a little on the engine when I was pouring it in.”

Her eyebrows arched skywards. “A whole bottle?”

I shook my head. “You think it smells that bad?”

“I’m worried we’re going to blow up half-way along the motorway.”

I mulled it over; sighed. The missus has an uncanny knack for being right, and I felt it unwise to bet against her this time, especially considering that the entire family was potentially at stake. The kids were in the back, amusing themselves with daft little noises and the rare view of blue skies and sunshine outside of their windows. I pulled into a bus stop a few hundred metres from the motorway’s slip road (I wish I was American sometimes: on-ramp sounds so much better). Got out. Popped the hood (much more satisfying than opening a bonnet, y’all). Stared. Froze.

My mouth hung open.

If it wouldn’t have necessitated such a fiddly, finger-risking series of manoeuvres I would’ve done a movie-style double-take: closed the lid with a frightened look in my eyes, and then threw it open again to see if the horror was still there, or if it had all been a mirage. I kept staring. Stared some more. This was really happening. How on earth was I going to talk my way out of this one?

I decided I wasn’t even going to try.

“Come here,” I said, peeking my head around the side of the lid and beckoning to my partner.

The passenger-side door clunked open. I stood with my hands clasped behind my back like a drill sergeant, belying the unease that was bubbling in my belly.

She peered into the innards of the car.

“What am I looking at here?”

I pointed. She froze too.

“You fucking idiot,” she said.

Thank luck (sic) I hadn’t hit the motorway without checking under the hood first. Things might’ve been very much worse, not just in terms of our collective safety, but in terms of the half-life of the I-Told-You-Sos and Sees?? that would be thrown my way for probably the rest of my natural life. As it stood, my ears were being peppered by a machine-gun volley of snarls and snaps.

“That’s our day out ruined,” she said. “Ruined. By you.”

“It isn’t ruined,” I asserted, with very little evidence with which to back up my assertion.

I was starting to feel ever-so-slightly persecuted.

“I’m feeling ever-so-slightly persecuted,” I told her.

She snorted.

“Can you imagine if I had done this? You’d never let me hear the end of it. You’d go on and on and on and on about it.”

She had a point. It’s true that I’m something of a prickly character at home, especially when misfortune falls or I feel under pressure; probably due to the cauldron of anxiety filled with adrenalin that simmers away inside my blood-stream just waiting to be brought to the boil by the hot flame of stress. If we’re ever running late to leave the house for a day out – in much less serious or potentially ruinous situations than the one in which we found ourselves in the car that day – I’ve been known to spend an inordinately long time flapping, stomping, seething, fuming and swearing; ejecting torrents of bile-slathered hyperbole from my mouth like so much demon vomit. I was no stranger to the blame game. But still…

“Nice application of situational ethics, there,” I told her, “You should hold fast to your own core values, and not alter them based on whatever mood you happen to be in at the time.”

“Fuck off,” she said, or maybe she didn’t, but it would’ve been funny if she had, right? Just imagine she said it.

“You know what the difference is?” I asked with a hint of smugness. “I’m owning it. This is my fault, and I’m sorry. I. Am. Sorry. That’s an easy word to say, isn’t it?”

In my mind, I visualised a basketball slamming into the net for a three-pointer, because even my sporting analogies are American.

She shook her head. I started to speak again, and she shushed me. Tried again, shush. Again, shush. Aga…SHUSH.

“I don’t want to hear you talk,” she said, holding up a hand.

Being shushed has the same effect on me as being called a chicken has on Marty McFly. It makes me want to talk all the more, to rail, to explain, to justify, but once the shush train starts picking up speed it never shows any signs of slowing or stopping. It just keeps on shushing until one of us explodes. Eventually my partner herself sounds like a steam train gathering speed – SHUSHshushshushshush, SHUSHshushshushshushshush, SHUSHshushshushshushshush – and I’m sitting next to her providing the DOO-DOOOOOOOOOs, complete with steam coming out of my ears.

TICKETS, PLEASE! ALL ABOARD THE ARGUMENT TRAIN, Y’ALL!

“Daddy,” said my eldest, “Why are we going back home?”

“Shush,” I told him.

“It better be where you think it is,” my partner said after a long, frosty silence.

As we were leaving the house at the beginning of our journey we’d heard an almighty popping sound coming from the front of the car. I assumed I’d driven over a plastic bottle or something, but there was no longer any doubt as to exactly what that sound had signified.

When I’d pulled over into that bus-stop and looked inside the engine, I’d seen it straight away. Or, rather, I hadn’t seen it. There was nothing to see. Where the oil cap should’ve been was a hole. A dark, gaping hole, framed by an orgiastic oil splatter where the molten hot liquid had sprayed out, like someone had told the engine a funny joke just as it had just taken a drink.

“I don’t know exactly where we were when we heard that noise,” I said.

“Great!”

“You were in the car, too! Don’t you remember?”

“You’re driving! Why can’t you remember?”

“Because I didn’t think it was relevant. It’s relevant now, but it wasn’t relevant then. I don’t map every weird noise I hear incase it later turns out to be helpful. I’m not bloody Rain Man.”

She folded her arms. “Well, the day’s probably ruined…”

At least the status of the likelihood of the day being ruined had been upgraded to ‘probably’. Probably was quickly upgraded to ‘not’. There it was, the oil cap, like a disc of black diamond on the side of the road. I stopped the car, and we went out to retrieve it. I popped the hood again, propping it open with the wee metal thing.

“You idiot,” she said again, laughing this time.

I grinned. “How did I manage that?”

“You don’t know when to stop twisting. You never think you’ve twisted things enough, so you keep twisting them until you break them.”

She was right. I once ruined a little stool for our eldest’s first drum-kit (“And the last,” I can hear my partner saying in my mind) because I screwed it together to tightly that the wood warped and broke, and we had to throw it out, but not before I’d launched it across the room in a fit of childish rage. And I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve received an angry text from my partner, because she’s had to cut open a bottle of juice because I’ve shut the lid too tight.

The oil cap needs to be turned twice to lock it into place. Just twice. One, two. A bit of muscle memory must’ve encouraged me turn it thrice and more, till it had gone full circle from secure to just sitting loosely over the hole. Clumsiness paved the way. Combustion, pressure, gravity and hot oil did the rest.

I closed the lid and we got back into the car, both still smiling.

“I’m an idiot,” I said.

“You are an idiot,” she agreed. “But you’re my idiot.”

“Everyone ready for an adventure?” I asked.

The pressure had been vented. With a cheer and a song, we headed back to the on-ramp.

“What’s that smell?” I asked.

“Fuck off,” she said.