James May on cars

Cometh the hour, cometh the man' - English proverb, possibly related to John 4:26.

I think it's time this old saw was treated to a 21st-century update. Today, when the man cometh, he is likely to cometh by car. And when the car cometh, it is like unto a harbinger of the man, and revealeth much about him.

Now. We are all familiar with the idea we are somehow what we drive, and that a chap's choice of car reveals as much about him as the contents of his iPod or the secret bits of his hard drive (I'm leaving women out of this for the moment).

But I think this is too general. I now think it's not the model that defines the bloke, but the individual example from which he steps. And this brings me neatly to my mate, whom for the purposes of this piece we shall call Bill*.

Bill is a man with whom I entered into a daring and potentially life-changing business partnership three years ago. By combining our strengths, and cancelling each other's weaknesses (my business acumen, for example), we would become commercially strong, competitive, blah blah blah.

This being the media, there was no conference suite, PowerPoint presentation, feasibility study, management consultancy, round of golf or any other of those impenetrable things advertised on big posters at the airport. We met in a café, scribbled on a bit of paper, and agreed terms.

I liked this man Bill. He had good ideas, a can-do attitude, a healthy contempt for normal procedure and scant regard for accepted wisdom. But he understood paperwork. We shook hands, he offered to drive me home. And then I saw his car.

Not a bad car, as it turned out: a 2002 BMW 3-Series, although an automatic. But then, he's in the media, so obviously he can't actually drive. But as we dribbled through the capital back to my house, I couldn't help noticing that the dashboard display was showing two rear bulbs not working.

"You've got a couple of bulbs out there," I pointed out, helpfully. "I know," he said, and continued talking about cashflow.

Let us now fast-forward to last week, three years of largely successful dealings down the line, and when, for complex reasons, I was obliged to borrow his car. I was stunned to notice that the same two bulbs were still bust.

Disquiet stirred in my breast. Times had been good these three years. Or had they? My fortunes were inextricably bound up with those of a man who couldn't be arsed to change a couple of lightbulbs on a car he uses almost every day. He is the business brain in this partnership. What else had he neglected?

"My fortunes were inextricably bound up with those of a man who couldn’t be arsed to change a couple of lightbulbs on a car he uses almost every day”

Then I slowed for a roundabout, and the dash display confirmed that one of the brakelight bulbs was out as well. Now rage exploded in the kernel of my soul like an over-inflated beachball. He clearly hadn't had the car serviced since I'd first met him, because no BMW garage would attend to the oil change, the brake pads and all the rest of it without noticing a few broken bulbs. I now had to assume that the MoT, if there was one, had been written at a testing station whose name begins with 'The' and ends with 'Arms'.

Moving over to the left lane on the dual carriageway, I saw that the nearside door mirror had been reassembled, like most things in television, with gaffer tape. What a feckless git. And the aircon didn't work - clearly out of gas - and the central-locking only locked three of the doors, and the boot had a huge dent in it and there were half-eaten bags of crisps all over the floor. "But I've driven all the way from London," he protested, weakly. We were in North Devon.

How can this man approach our business in a positive frame of mind when the minutest testimony to his failure as a human is illuminated before his eyes every time he puts his foot on the brake pedal? How can his wife love him?

My working relationship with a man who abuses his car is always going to be a difficult one, because I care about these things. Would you work with a man who kicks puppies? Would you bristle if you saw a peasant mistreating a mule? That's what it's like.

And the simple fact is that I've entrusted the administrative side of our venture to this hapless half-excuse for a business partner, and now look. Three years of not getting round to changing a bulb. What buff envelope from the VAT office or Companies House lies similarly abandoned on a desk somewhere? I'm absolutely terrified.

We've had a meeting, with an agenda. This month, Bill gets a new car. Or the deal's off.