For the past month or so my car has been making a few odd grinding noises when setting off. Nothing major, and only when lifting my foot off the cluch to go into gear. I think something has finally worn off because just as I was pulling up to Amy’s house tonight my car emitted an awful screaming sound when in third gear. This went away when I drove back home, but while going down the motorway my car suddenly shot out of gear.

So I’m shooting down the motorway doing 70-odd MPH and all of a sudden I’m not in gear and effectively coasting to a halt … on the motorway. Fortunately it’s dead at night and with nobody behind me I drifted onto the hard shoulder. After checking I could still get into gears I drove off down the hard shoulder, built up speed and merged back into the flow.

It did it again about four times during the rest of the journey, but being wise to it I now knew just to stomp on the clutch and put my car back into gear.

I’ll ring the garage tomorrow and get it booked in. I hope they have courtesy cars, if not I’ll be catching the 7am bus to work. I’ll see how it drives to work tomorrow too, I think I’ve worked out what’s going on – gradual acceleration and gentle gear changing seems to help.