AA, eh?

I MET a cyclist once who managed to get from Merseyside to Carlisle in twelve hours.

I mention this because I've just completed the return journey, but I had a broken car and some breakdown trucks instead. Despite having the M6 and the fourth emergency service at my disposal, my ride home took ten hours.

Admittedly the cyclist in question was made almost entirely of Lycra and bits of string but I'm still dumbstruck how it took the AA team just slightly less time to rescue and recover me.

While I'm not exactly a stranger to breakdown crews - my car is almost three decades old, after all - I'm used to the boys in yellow being a smiley service, who send you texts to keep you updated and apologise profusely if they're more than a minute late.

In the adverts they even sing, with some poor soul in a dead Vauxhall being serenaded by the company's entire workforce (although curiously, you never saw the car getting mended).

But last Sunday they sounded more Simon Cowell than Susan Boyle, with their lorry arriving four and a half hours after that first phone call. Even then, the car wasn't going anywhere, because the poor driver had just clocked off and needed a cuppa. That'll be another 45 minutes, then.

Yet what wound me up most of all was that we weren't even going to Southport - we were headed for a service station, somewhere on the M6, where I'd have to change trucks. I'm used to changing at Lime Street station, but between two yellow lorries somewhere near Charnock Richard is something else. Naturally, the second driver had just clocked off too.

I don't blame the truckers - in fact they were really were soldiers of fortune - but the rest of the AA-Team failed their mission this week. The dead motor eventually croaked onto my driveway at 8.30pm, a depressing ten-and-a-half hours after I first called them.

I think I might take the Raleigh Chopper next time.