Car breakdown insurance UK - You really need breakdown insurance for your car, and if you can bear to read my (editor) account of 30 years ago then getting insurance should make the it top of your list. In cases like this it normally rains, but on this occasion we were fortunate, in a sense, and since then I have bought annual car breakdown cover, most recently from LifeSure

As I said, it was roughly 30 years ago, the summer of 1978 to be exact, and we had set off from home in the middle of Derbyshire for a day out at Chester Zoo. I had a Morris Marina 1.8 at the time which was loaded to the gills with my mother, wife, our 7 year old son and two year old daughter, though as it turned out weight wasn't the cause of the breakdown.

I had bought the car the previous year and thus far there had been no problems at all, so I risked taking the family quite a way from home without any car breakdown insurance cover. The damn car could have picked any other place on any other day when the family wouldn't have been in but it chose to go belly up just at the wrong time. The kids learned some swearwords that day!

Ten miles or so from Chester the beastly thing broke down, fortunately in the countryside where we could push the car off the road onto a grass verge. That was problem 1. Problem 2 was that I am not and never was a mechanic. Try and think back to those days - no mobile phone for a start, so problem 3 was to walk miles (thumbing a lift didn't work) to the nearest red 'phone box, which of course had been vandalised - how could anyone think otherwise?

There was another slight hitch in that although I had taken sufficient money with me for entry to the Zoo I most certainly didn't have enough to lash out on having the car towed all over the place, let alone and expensive garage. At that moment I hated that car but at the same time cursed myself for not taking the basic precaution of having breakdown insurance for an old car like mine, and vowed to buy it as soon as we were able to return home safely.

I was lucky only to have had to walk 2 miles or so to find another 'phone, and managed to catch my mate's wife just before she went out, explaining the scenario to her before the money ran out. Two hours later my mate Peter arrived like a ray of sunshine and complete with a solid tow bar to take us back home.

A spoiled day out and one which could have been disastrously expensive if we hadn't had Pete to fall back on, so the first thing I did the next day was to ring our insurance company and arrange an annual car breakdown policy.