'Nice!' Spud remarked, looking around Sharon's shambolic interior after we left the pub car park. 'Cosy.'

'It'll be even better when we tidy up a bit,' Flinty declared proudly.

'I like it just the way it is,' Spud told him. 'Reminds me of that week we had at Butlin's.'

Spud had dropped the phoney Irish accent as soon as we left the Roaring Donkey. I knew for a fact he'd never set foot in Ireland and, despite his surname, his parents were as English as mine. The brogue was something he'd developed as a teenager, thinking it gave him an edge for chatting up girls. I had to admit, it worked. Spud could charm the knickers off a nun.

As we rattled back towards the A419, with all three of us squeezed onto Sharon's front seat, Spud regaled us with memories of our week at Butlin's holiday camp on the Norfolk coast. We'd all left school in the June of '96 and gone in July as part of our leaving celebrations. Flinty had read somewhere they had the longest bar in Britain and never asked your age, so we'd begged, borrowed and maybe even stolen enough money to pay for it. It had been a typical English summer, bloody freezing, and the North Sea had about the same consistency as the gravy they served in the camp dining room.  We'd spent the week drowning in Double Diamond and trying to get birds back to our chalet, which had indeed, by the third day, resembled the inside of Flinty's fleapit.

While all this reminiscing was going on we had passed several petrol stations and I could see that the needle on Sharon's fuel gauge was bending itself around the empty stop.

'Don't you think we should get some diesel?' I suggested.

'Yeah, there's one just up here. We passed it on the way down.'

A few seconds later Flinty pulled onto a self-service forecourt and I started getting my wallet out, fully expecting to be asked to contribute.

'Save that for the important stuff,' Flinty advised me.

***

Flinty opened the glove box, took out a brown envelope and extracted a stack of credit cards. He started shuffling through them before selecting one.

'You've got an awful lot of accounts,' I observed.

'Yeah, well, you have to be financially aware in this day and age. I don't use cash unless I have to.'

'You haven't changed much then,' Spud remarked.

'You two stay here. I'll fill her up and be back in a couple of minutes.'

It was a chilly autumn evening and just getting dark. Flinty pulled the hood of his parka over his head, scrambled over the seatback and slid the side door open. We heard the gurgling of diesel disappearing into Sharon's copious tank and I watched the meter on the pump spin round to £68. Then we saw Flinty go into the brightly lit shop. We could see him examining the shelves of sweets and crisps before approaching the female cashier.

'He's either had a big win on the gee-gees or his numbers have come up on Euromillions,' Spud commented. 'It looks like he's actually paying.'

Flinty came back, calmly climbed in and we drove away. I was baffled.

'So what was the point of the mud on the number plates if you were going to pay?'

'Pay? I didn't pay for anything. The yanks can afford to donate some of their oil. Oh, I got these as well.'

Flinty started dragging handfuls of Twix's, Mars bars and Yorkies from the pockets of his parka and dropping them in our laps.

'You used a stolen credit card,' I twigged, not totally shocked.

'Of course not! Those cards aren't stolen ... they're just lost, and most of them are out of date anyway. No-one's going to get billed.'

'So how did you get the woman to accept it?' I asked incredulously.

'She didn't. She asked for identification so I said my passport was in the van and left the card with her. She can keep it ... they only cost me a couple of quid each from a guy I met in Weston.'

'Brilliant!' Spud exclaimed through a mouthful of Mars bar.

I had to admit that Flinty was a true patriot. He'd driven past all the BP and Esso petrol stations and waited until we got to a Texaco.

***

A mile up the road we stopped. Flinty climbed out and wiped the mud off Sharon's number plates so they wouldn't attract the attention of the law. Then we settled down for the hour's drive to Gloucester and the M5.

'Isn't this great?' Flinty said, turning the heater up to max, 'it's just like the old days in the Ratmobile!'

He was right, it was. I'd passed my driving test soon after my 17th birthday and invested my meagre savings in an ancient Vauxhall Victor station wagon. It was massive, curvy and black and, in our youthful minds, just like the Batmobile. The registration started with the letters RAT so, naturally, it was immediately christened the Ratmobile.

The Ratmobile had a bench front seat, just like Sharon. It was one of the reasons I bought it, thinking it would come in handy on hot dates.

We went all over Wiltshire perched on that big front seat. No-one was willing to be relegated to the back. In any case, I usually left the back seat folded down as it formed an enormous sleeping area for when I was incapable of driving home. We spent many a night in the back of the Ratmobile after a late-night session.

'Ah, they were grand days, so they were,' Spud rhapsodised, lapsing into his Irish accent. 'Why did it all have to end?'

'You know why it ended, Spud,' I answered before he could carry on. 'Nothing was the same after Paul died.'

Spud looked down at his feet.

'Poor kid,' he murmured.

***

We drove in silence for a while until I decided to lighten the mood.

'Flinty, why don't you tell us what you've been doing for the last twenty years? After that Christmas, I rang your house and your mum told me you'd gone off to Wales to join a commune. What was that all about?'

'Bloody hell! That seems like a lifetime ago,' he remarked, pausing to think. 'You remember I was working in Maccy D's, wiping tables? Well, this new lad started in the New Year and he told me about this place in Wales he'd just come from that was all free love and ganja. All you had to do was a bit of digging, pull up a few carrots, and you got your room and board and all the nookie you could handle. So I packed the job in and hitched to the Rhonda Valley, or whatever it was called.'

'So that's where you disappeared to!' Spud interjected. 'I called round at your house and your dad answered the door. Said you'd pinched 50 quid out of his wallet and buggered off to God knows where. Told me to tell you he'd be charging interest if I ever caught up with you. You must owe him a bloody fortune by now!'

'The silly old sod can whistle for it ... he never did me any favours. Where was I? Oh yeah ... the commune. So, I spent a couple of years with a bunch of crusties in this dump of a farm. But the lad was right about the nookie and the ganja. It was like an orgy every night but slave labour every day. I was wading through two feet of mud feeding pigs, planting runner beans and digging up turnips. In the end, I was half-starved and so knackered I had to leave. I'd wondered why that lad was as skinny as a rake and always stuffin' his face with Big Macs and I soon found out.'

'Where did you go after that?' I urged.

'I found a job at KFC in Swansea and stuffed my face with fried chicken for the next six months.'

We were still laughing when we got to the M5 slip road.