My wife and I plus our (then) two small children were driving though France from the UK. I was towing a caravan and suddenly realised that the van had got a flat tyre. No worries, I thought, I have a spare, a jack and a wheel wrench. So, I pulled over and got to work changing the tyre. To my horror, I immediately discovered that my car’s wheel nuts were bigger than the van’s, so my car wheel wrench was useless for the flat van tyre! And all I had otherwise were small hand tools.

I should add that this was back in the days of dumb phones, long before GPS devices were common in cars, so all I had was a small-scale paper route map of France. I had no clue which way to go to find help, and no way to find a phone number. It was late afternoon, and we were still a long way from the campsite. I was starting to sweat.

But then a French woman with her daughter pulled over in a small car and asked if we needed any help. Using a mixture of my poor French and sign language, I indicated I needed a wheel wrench, which she pulled out of her boot. My joy and relief were obvious. I change the van wheel in no time, thanked her profusely, and off she went.

But there was twist in the tale: my hazard lights had been flashing so long that when I tried to start up the car, all I got was that sickening tick-tick-tick sound of a dead battery. Could my day get any worse? But then I remembered that my van had its own battery! A quick battery swap-over later, and we were back on the road, and had a great holiday, all thanks to the kindness of a big-hearted French woman who was kind enough to stop and offer help to foreign strangers stuck in the middle of nowhere.