Ted, the brother, is out in France at the moment cheering on his son Owen who is triathaloning in the Alps (with great success) and visiting his brother in Languedoc. On the way down his four-wheel-drive, automatic Honda ceased being an automatic, got stuck in bottom gear and generally gave up the ghost on the side of the autoroute about 100 klms north of Clermont Ferrand.
The emergency services arrived swiftly and hoisted the car, Ted and his wife Mary on to an ambulance and into the nearest garage.
The garage were mystified,beyond recognising that it was a computer problem that they couldn’t fix.
Their only sulution was to ambulance the car to the nearest Honda agent, in Clermont, and see what they could do.
Recognising that this would mean that they would miss Owen’s triathalon Ted in desperation decided to phone the man from whom he had bought the car, Finbarr in Johnson and Perrots in Cork.
Finbarr’s reaction was; “There is a trick that might work” and he told Ted to tell the French mechanics to do something quite ridiculous. This was to remove the positive and negative poles from the battery and hold them together(I am not sure that I have this exactly right but it is something like)
When Ted, in his best school French tried to explain this to the French mechanics they assumed he was a raving lunatic and were convinced that he was talking rubbish.
Ted got back on to Finbarr. “Hold hard” says Finbarr “We have a French mechanic working in the Emmet Place branch I’ll ring him, explain the situation, and get him to ring you, Pascale is his name.
Pascale duly rang Ted, and Ted handed the phone to the mechanics.
With looks of total disbelief they were reluctantly prepared to to follow these instructions if given by a French lunatic.
Two minutes later the car was fixed and Ted proceeded successfully on his journey, leaving behind some totally confused French mechanics and Ted blessing the advent of the Celtic Tiger which brought French mechanics to Ireland.