The hills are alive…

Forget your 18-way ventilated massage seats, 13-speaker Burmester sound system or five-zone automatic climate control, your glorified quadricycle has but three jobs: go, turn and stop.

These three essential ingredients constitute the original motoring cake, onto which a century or more of marzipan, icing and other delights has been liberally ladled. Indeed one of the joys of driving old cars is that not only do they forgo decades of decorative addition, but the underlying cake itself may have gone somewhat mouldy in the intervening years. The first ingredient especially; old cars have an extremely fertile imagination when it comes to failing to proceed.

So when planning a European road trip in my partner’s gleaming, thistle green 1977 Mercedes-Benz 350SL, straight on the packing list goes a NOCO boost kit, a pair of jump leads and a can of Easy Start for good measure. What I wasn’t expecting was to have quite the opposite problem.