If you found your Fiat Uno full of pine needles one Christmas, I’m sorry - Bill Carmichael

It involves a Christmas tree, a snowstorm, a battered old Fiat Uno and a very embarrassed father who has never quite lived down the events of that day. And although you will find it hard to believe, it is entirely true.

Some years ago I was working in the old Yorkshire Post building on Wellington Street, and living in Burley in Wharfedale between Ilkley and Otley.

My children were very young then and I had promised them I would buy a real Christmas tree on my way home from work the following day.

During the next day the weather forecast got steadily worse, and heavy snow was expected before the evening, so I set off from the office for home a bit earlier than normal.

Snow was coming down steadily as I crossed the car park, and by the time I reached Kirkstall Road the windscreen wipers on my mushroom-coloured Fiat, which we called Bruno the Uno, were going full pelt.

Of course, as always happens when we have a few inches of snow in the UK, traffic began to snarl up, and it took me well over an hour to get to Guiseley on the A65, by which time a blizzard was blowing. Total white out.

I parked in Morrisons car park, and crossed the main road where back then a little grocery shop did a sideline in Christmas trees during December.

I had left it a bit late and there wasn’t much choice left, and eventually I had to settle for a nine-foot monster tree that was a bit battered and already losing its needles.

I cursed myself for forgetting to fit the roof rack, so I’d have to get the tree inside the car somehow.

I recrossed the main road with the tree on my shoulder, brushed some of the snow off the car and tried to open the door. No luck. The key wouldn’t even turn.

I thought the lock had frozen and tried breathing on the key - still no luck. I tried the passenger door with the same result, and I thought that lock was frozen solid too.

I went back to the driver’s side and tried again, wiggling the key back and forth, and suddenly the door opened with a click.

I opened the tailgate and pushed the tree in trunk first, and then went around the passenger side and pulled it in until the trunk was resting against the windscreen.

There was still about a yard of tree hanging out the back and I had to carefully bend this inside the car before shutting the tailgate.

I jumped into the driver’s seat and tried the ignition.

Nothing happened - the darned key wouldn’t even turn.

By this time I could have howled in frustration.

Nothing seemed to be going right, and I was envisioning having to call a garage to get me going again.

I glanced up at the rearview mirror and couldn’t see anything. The car was completely full of pine branches except for the driver’s seat.

Then something strange caught my eye. Dangling from the rearview mirror was one of those traffic light air fresheners. I frowned and thought ‘I’ve never noticed that before’.

A quite horrible realisation began to creep over me. The car was the same manufacturer as mine, the same model, the same year, and the same colour - but it wasn’t my car.

I jumped out and sure enough, a couple of places along the car park was my car covered in snow. I quickly opened the doors and the tailgate, and then pulled the tree out of the first car and into my own.

By now there was a good half inch of pine needles covering every surface inside the stranger’s car.

I thought of hanging about and explaining what happened to the owners when they returned to their car. But I couldn’t imagine what to say.

So I took the coward’s way out and drove off.

For some reason, and in hindsight this was the cruellest trick, before I left I managed to lock the stranger’s Fiat by wiggling the key around a bit again.

I imagine there is a family in Yorkshire who at this time of year look at each other and say: ‘Remember that time when we went to Morrisons and when we got back the car was full of pine needles. It was locked too. Wasn’t that weird.’

All I can say is sorry, and to wish you, and all readers of this column, a very Merry Christmas.