that'll buff out, no problem

You'll recall my frustrated and directionless ire when some incompetent buffoon dinked my rear door in Tesco's car park. Well, after three and a half years of damage-free driving since then, the car sustained its second helping of damage a couple of months ago during a camping trip to Christchurch in the Forest of Dean. And to answer the obvious question, no, this one wasn't my fault either.

It was a dark and stormy night.....well, no, OK, it wasn't, but it was a torrentially rainy afternoon, and some water must have worked its way into the delicate electronic circuitry of the automatic barrier at the entrance to the campsite. So once I'd been into the reception area, handed over some money and returned to my car, blissfully unaware of the cruel fate that was about to befall me, I tapped in the barrier code I'd been given at reception, the barrier rose gracefully and I duly proceeded in a forwardly direction.

At which point all hell broke loose - the barrier, having risen in the designated manner, then decided to drop down sharply onto the top of my car and then rise and fall randomly while scraping along the paintwork, making that cackling OM NOM NOM noise that the big pot plant in Little Shop Of Horrors made. And we're not talking one of those flimsy plastic single-bar barriers like they have on the Severn Bridge either; this was the proper half a level-crossing gate job with the metal curtain/fringe thingy under it to inflict maximum damage. So there was a certain amount of scrapey and denty damage to the car:

Now clearly this was all the campsite's fault, and to be fair they shrugged and said, yeah, our bad, get it fixed and we'll sort you out, guv. So I availed myself of the services of Ali at ChipsAway, who in addition to being pretty cheap in comparison to other places will come and pick up your car from your house and deliver it back afterwards, which is nice. Here's the post-repair picture:

Good, isn't it? Unless you took some sort of laser sighting along the panel, you'd probably never know.