IT MUST be something in the genes. For like my dad before me I’m really not having much luck with cars.

Get behind the wheel and I’m clearly jinxed. For our car is off the road again after the wheels locked at a junction on a road slick with grease and slid ever so gracefully at less than five miles an hours into the side of a car being driven by a German whose English vocabulary amounted to little more than ‘hello’ and ‘police.’ I wasn’t actually driving at the time, but given that it’s the family car that’s hardly the point.

So while it’s been having a new bumper, radiator and bonnet fitted, we needed to hire a bigger car than the whining equivalent of a microlight on wheels supplied by the insurance company, for a long and arduous journey with luggage and passengers.

Everything was all well and good until we switched on the satnav. Because try as we might to reset it, the hire car thought it was in County Wicklow instead of journeying down the A1. If the satnav system was to be believed, our journey took us north when we were driving south, through lakes and rivers, over railway lines where no road existed, and at one point veered into the suburbs of Dublin.

It also told us we were 337 miles from home and that our trip back would involve the use of a ferry, which was a tad confusing given that we were driving through Lincolnshire at the time….

Apart from being fatally attracted to a car that didn’t know where it was going, we once also had a long running battle with an estate car that would flash open its tailgate at the most incongruous moments, rather like lasciviously, loutish and drunken girls on a hen party flashing their knickers and knockers at anyone passing by.

This particular car wasn’t at all coy about keeping its windows firmly shut and its tailgate securely closed like all good cars should do when their owners blip the key fob. Oh no…this one once flashed its innards in the middle of York station car park when its key holders were nowhere near it, the little devil. For I was at home ten miles away and the Junior Manager was sitting in an office 180 miles away up the railway track.

But there it was, all four electronic windows down and its electronic tailgate up showing off the entire contents of its boot in the manner of a wonton exhibitionist. It also did the same thing when we thought it was obediently parked in an airport car park while we took a short break in Europe.

And it had so much fun raising and lowering its tailgate that the car eventually drained itself of all power in its battery to the extent that it wouldn’t even unlock, never mind the ignition fire, when we came to drive it away.

It also performed its antics to an audience of elderly ladies perambulating Pocklington market place, who were so taken aback they stood guard over the car until one of us could get back to it and put it in manual lockdown.

Cars, it seems, don’t do normal things for me and clearly have a mind of their own. Which is what my dad always used to say about his. As kids we lost count of the times he’d come home with a bumper or wing mirror clinging precariously to the bodywork courtesy of string or elastic bands and tell us “this bus just came out and hit me.”

One night the office van took it upon itself to roll off down the garden, winding up nose first in the boundary fence and he couldn’t work out why – probably something to do with the fact that he saw the handbrake as a tool for banging his pipe on to dislodge spent tobacco (yes, I know, pretty disgusting but we are talking of the 1960s) rather than a fundamental piece of equipment to stop the car doing a runner.

Mind you, my dad nearly killed us all once doing that. Only this time, the vehicle wasn’t empty but full of my mum and my brother and me while he’d sauntered off to buy ice cream. And it didn’t roll forwards but backwards. Plus there wasn’t a garden fence at the bottom of the slope but an extremely deep lake… No wonder I have this jinx thing about cars.