They had marvelled, at first, at the lack of other cars, although it did occur to them that there were an awful lot of buses. "I don't know why Marc is always whining about the traffic. If you know were to go it's a breeze," Mrs Leenstra said, having difficulty making herself heard over the screams of outraged bus drivers as they sounded their horns and waved their arms. They emerged, miraculously, at the other end without having made contact with any of the council's large yellow people movers.

Weeks later, she received a tersely worded note from Brisbane City Council along with a security camera photograph of them wheeling through the tunnel surrounded by buses, and a request to please refrain from ever doing it again.

I recalled this incident to my fiancée as we sat trapped in a traffic snarl on Coronation Drive. "I thought of it a few days ago," she said, "when Mum and I were driving from the city to Toowong."

It seems that they had barely begun to travel along the riverbank when their car slowed to a crawl.

   "There's something seriously wrong with this car," said mother.
   "Go faster," urged daughter.
   "I'm trying to!" yelled mother, pounding on the steering wheel and stomping on the accelerator.
   "Get your foot off the brake!" cried daughter.
   "I'm not touching the brake!" shrieked mother as trucks sounded their horns and her old friends, the big yellow council buses, tried to overtake her. "The car's obviously broken. It will cost a fortune to get fixed," she moaned as the duo travelled the entire length of Coronation Drive at five kilometres per hour in morning peak hour.

They arrived, finally, at the Toowong Village car park, having been passed along the way by elderly persons with walking frames and exchanged expletives with several dozen intolerant motorists.

The repair bill, as it transpired, was quite small - non-existent, in fact, as the mechanic felt he could not possibly charge for removing one elegant, and slightly crushed, Italian shoe from beneath the accelerator.

I told the story to a friend who admitted that while it was a good car story, it did not match that of his colleague, a man whose DIY handyman disasters were legend in his street. "Do tell," I said, ever eager to hear of misfortunes in this field which exceed my own considerable achievements.

His friend, it seems, was having problems with his television reception and decided to fit a new antenna to the roof. Aware of his predisposition to disaster, he determined to take no chances, tying a rope around his waist lest he slip. He then looked in vain for something solid to which to secure the other end and was on the point of despair when inspiration descended. "The car!" he thought, regarding the Commodore sitting in the driveway. "I'll tie the other end to the towbar."

He had almost finished bolting the antenna to the roof when he heard a sound that chilled his blood - the opening and closing of a car door. The engined fired on the first turn of the key. A nanosecond later he flew up one side of the roof and was halfway down the other when his girlfriend heard his screams of terror and hit the brakes.

She found him clinging to the guttering, a white-faced, trembling wreck of a man.