Emissions: Anyone who read last week's missive from Madeira (Hi Mum!) will no doubt be eagerly awaiting the denouement of our trip to the Isle of Motorised Horror.
Or not. Whatever. Well, it's not a tragedy. Somewhat comic - at our expense - but not a tragedy. But it so nearly could have been. . .
The good lady and I both managed to get the Renault Clio (nifty little number, well worth a test drive, punters) into not only fourth, but fifth gear before our two-week sojourn was up.
No mean feat, when you consider the island is like a scale model of a Scalextric set put together on a filthy steep hoor of a mountain by a paranoid schizophrenic who's in mortal fear of using the straight bits. Not to mention the kamikaze driving of the deranged locals.
But our idyll finally ended, and it was time to bring the little French princess home to her Papa.
We set out from Funchal, and after an hour of driving in circles around cobbled streets, found ourselves on the approach ramp to the airport motorway. Madeiran road builders have a pretty eccentric attitude to merging lanes - sometimes half a mile long, sometimes non-existent. In this case, they were - unbeknownst to us - the latter. A sharp turn from the ramp and we found ourselves - to our horror - in the middle of a motorway with a gorilla in a battered pick-up truck bearing down on us, horn blazing and steam coming from his ears.
He was unimpressed at our preventing him from achieving the land-speed record for a 20-year-old DAF truck. So he shook his fist, swore in Portuguese and tried to kill us. I kid you not.
He whacked the foot down, overtook us and swerved in front, almost leaving the Clio a front wing down, before slamming on his brakes. To top it off, he proceeded to drive in front of us for the next five miles waving a lump hammer out of the driver's window.
Eventually we tootled up to the rental car firm to be greeted by a young woman who looked like she was wearing barbed-wire underwear and lived on a diet of pure cod-liver oil and vinegar.
She didn't say a word about the wing mirror I'd smashed whilst avoiding an oncoming cement truck, nor about the surfboard wax all over the roof, nor about the fact that the car looked like it had just done the Paris-Dakar rally during a freak mudstorm.
But she was on the fuel gauge quick as a garda on a bag of bacon fries. "Is no full," she said, pointing at the arrow showing the tank was a mere 98 per cent full, like a schoolmarm at a naughty kid's dirty face. "Is mean to be full, no?" She wanted €4.50. On the spot. In cash. No messing.
For the first time since I'd paid €2.40 for a cup of nasty dishwater coffee in Dublin Airport two long weeks ago, I felt I'd been ripped off.
Perhaps she was just doing her bit to acclimatise me for going home. Or perhaps she was just a miserable cow in cheap shoes getting her tiny kicks from fleecing tourists.
I had to fight with myself to stop from grabbing her by the lapels of her crappy sub-air hostess uniform and asking her how it was supposed to be full when the nearest filling station, as well she knew, was 25 bloody kilometres away down a road populated by maniacs in trucks. But I didn't bother. I'd had enough.
We paid, we left, we exhaled. We were safe. We'd survived. Can we have some manner of a medal now, please?