SHAKESPEARE’S car cannot ever have broken down because he didn’t have one. But a quotation from Hamlet comes in handy for those blighted by things not working – “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions”.

If you ask me, when things break down come, they come not single spies, but in expensive bloody battalions.

First, the cooker went on the blink. That has now been mended (one dent to the bank account). Now the old vacuum cleaner has developed a nasty rattle and mislaid its suck. It would be easy enough to buy a new one (another potential dent) except for two other contemporary malfunctions.

Our valiant old estate car is 12 years old and won’t see 100,000 miles again. A month or so ago a wheel bearing went (another dent) and then everything was just fine.

For a few weeks, anyway, until the ABS braking system started playing up and now the car is off the road while parts are summoned so surgery can begin (another dent, a big one).

So we couldn’t buy a new vacuum cleaner because we didn’t have a car, and in case that sounds pathetic to non car owners, another reason will be along in a moment.

Leaving for work last Friday, bicycle propped up and panting, I tried to shut the back door. It wouldn’t lock. Help!

A strategically placed chair in the kitchen did a temporary job and I dashed to work in a worrisome lather. A phone call to my super-handy father-in-law led to an emergency call out from Wetherby, but he couldn’t fix it.

So a locksmith was summoned (another dent, etc). But at least the door now locks even if the vacuum sucks in that it won’t and the car isn’t going anywhere for the moment.

Now these are in their way minor mishaps of the sort we all face, so no big deal. But as the bills mount, what strikes me, alongside wondering if it is too late to re-train as a fat cat banker, is the mildly malign synchronicity of things. There is an old Ry Cooder song wondering what would happen if things could talk. Well, I think our things are talking to each other and having a good old laugh.

I’ll have a stern word with the car about this. Once I get it back.

• TRICKY things, words. After my thoughts last week on what Lady Warsi had to say about militant secularism, someone responded on the internet with the tart observation that “secularism is not atheism. You can be religious and still be a secularist, many secularists are religious”.

It is not the way of columnists to confess to doubt, but this ticking off worried me. Had I shinned to the top of the wrong tree? I sought refuge in a book which has been with me since before I started batting words about for a living. The Little Oxford Dictionary backed me up, to a point at least, offering among its definitions “not religious; not sacred”.

Ah, one-nil to me then! But what’s this? Secular clergy or priests are “those not belonging to monastic orders”.

Does that make it a one-all draw?

On a national newspaper’s website, Giles Fraser, the former Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, points out that in the Catholic tradition, secular priests work in parishes, religious priests work in monasteries. “Secularism is not, and never has been, the political arm of atheism,” he writes.

So was Lady Warsi talking about priests running about being militant in the community? That seems unlikely. Perhaps she too doesn’t know the meaning of secular and had confused it with atheist, a no-nonsense foot-in-the-door word if ever there was one. Does that give me an undesired bond with Lady Warsi? [Argh! Insert loud scream here].

For the last word on this word, for now at least, here is Giles Fraser again, observing that “words like secular are not easy to fix”.

Well, Giles, you can say that again and thanks for not sorting that one out. Whatever secular means, I still think Lady Warsi was protesting too much.