AS of right now my Mini is a four-wheeled Schrodinger's cat. It is not just a car. It is a paradox of quantum mechanics.
For anyone not into their tricky brainteasers, Schrodinger's cat is an unfortunate feline which gets stuffed into a box*, alongside, say, a vial of poison, and then locked out of view. Said moggy is, until you open up the box again, both alive and dead at the same time. It exists in two simultaneous states. Just like the internals of the 19-year-old Mini Sprite now that I've booked it in for its MOT.
The box itself - the bits of the Mini I've been able to check out - are fine. The tyres are in good nick, all the lights and switches work as Austin Rover intended, the gaping holes that used to be the boot floor have been welded into a pleasing patch of clean metal and there aren't any rough edges you'd accidentally stab yourself with. The sills appear solid, but that's the problem. They appear solid.
To stretch a metaphor a tad too far, the "cat" is all the bits I haven't checked because I haven't had it up on a ramp, like you're supposed to. Has corrosion taken hold in places you can't see unless you've access to a proper garage? Are the shock absorbers shot to bits? Have the emissions dipped to dangerously carcinogenic level? Basically, my car mechanically is brilliant and rubbish at the same time, because I honestly won't know until tomorrow. This is why I, as someone who is rubbish at mending things, dreads the MOT.
Stay tuned to find out just how bad the news is when it emerges from the garage tomorrow morning...
* No cats were actually harmed in the writing of this article
UPDATE, August 11: The cat, it turns out, is dead, because the Mini has failed its MOT. The good news is that it shouldn't be too tricky or expensive to revive it. Cue the phone call to PartCo!