The childhood game motorists play at their peril

I SPY, with my little eye, one of the biggest threats to your summer holiday car journey. Something beginning with ‘I’.

Regular readers might recall that a few months ago I declared wasps as the single deadliest distraction to drivers, on the basis that having one sting you mid-drive is the only thing other than breaking down in a motorway contraflow which could provoke my genuine panic behind the wheel. That is, however, until a couple of colleagues and I decided to break up the boredom of a long journey by resorting to an old childhood favourite.

I Spy – the children’s game, not the adorable series ofMichelin-branded spotters’ guides – started easily enough. S, of course, was for sky, followed shortly afterwards by T for trees, so we upped the stakes a bit, introducing trickier in-car teasers like C for choke – yes, we were in something old enough to have one – and multiple word mind-bogglers like C E for Cat’s Eyes. Even though it was getting dark and we were a cold, noisy old classic car, the drive to our destination – Harwich ferry port, but that’s another story for another Life On Cars column – the miles just flew by.

By this point, we were feeling really cocky, throwing in I Spy absurdities which required some genius thinking of the truly lateral variety. It took a good ten minutes to work what began with S and “was all around us”, thanks to the answer being the entire county of Suffolk, while only the truly anal would have worked out A for Asphalt. Normally, by this point we would have stopped playing and gone to the nearest pub, but we had a ferry to catch and no choice but to plough into the night.

In fact, the game was so engaging we were still playing it when we pulled into the port – the Port of Felixstowe, which anyone with even the vaguest sense of geography will tell you is emphatically not Harwich and at least half an hour in the wrong direction. How did three grown men all manage to miss a major turning to one of the biggest docks in Britain? By getting completely lost in a game mst of us stop playing at the age of nine and only recommence well into parenthood.

While I’ve managed to get utterly lost on trips before – I knew, for instance, I’d missed the turning for the M25 the other week when I started seeing red double deckers and Cockneys loitering outside tube stations – it’s only thanks to the mind-distorting distracting powers of I Spy that we managed to end up in Felixstowe rather than Harwich, desperately late for a ferry.

I Spy a simple childhood game adults in a rush play at their peril.

How did I ever survive without air conditioning?

HERE’S one to ponder over your post-work pint tonight. Have you an invention so useful you hardly notice when you’re using it, yet to have it malfunction would prompt a crisis of unimaginable proportions?

My vote, obviously, would go for the internet. My first question at any hotel reception I end up on work assignments is what the WiFi code is; my second, when they tell me it’s a tenner a night, is how they think they can away with charging for a service that’s as an essential a part of your stay as having towels in your bathroom and a key for your room. Having access to Facebook and Twitter in one of those 21st century essentials you just can’t do without.

But there’s an in-car invention which – at the moment at least – I’ve been noting by its absence; air con. Even though my job primarily involves working with older cars, a lot of the journeys to shows up and down the country have been at the wheel of cars far newer than my own. Cars which, without exception, were a prod of a plastic button away from a refreshing blast of artificially chilled air.

Even the Chevrolet Captiva, one of the worst cars I’ve driven all year, was saved from complete condemnation because it came with a powerful air con system on a sizzling summer afternoon. When you’re spoilt with the option of an air con button after an afternoon of traipsing around a hot, sticky car show, you simply stick it on, whack it up to full blast and forget about it. Car makers know this and as a result offer it on just about everything; on a truly scorching day, getting air con right can rescue something that's unspeakably rubbish just about everywhere else.

So when I had to do a four hour journey in a car which didn’t have air con – my 17-year-old Rover 214 SEI – it was painful how absent the cool air I’d become accustomed to was. No amount of opening windows or using the power of thought to try and make the dashboard somehow grow its own air con button could help me escape the reality of being sat inside what was effectively a 70mph greenhouse for hours on end. Still, it could be worse – after 25 minutes of stop-starting through one particularly bad traffic jam on the M62, the gentle rise of the temperature gauge indicated the engine was enjoying it even less than I was!

My point is that air con, once you’ve become accustomed to a car equipped with it, is one of those brilliant inventions you can’t really live without.