Today began brightly, and I prepared to change the oil filter and install the liquid gold TWS 10W60.

This was a simple operation, the only hiccup being my selection of an oil catch tub that had a hole in it.

Upon restarting the car, as expected, the Vanos was quiet, then very loud for about a second, then quiet. Good. I took the car for a drive, and lo and behold when warm, the Vanos rattle came back. Oh well, it was only a £100 experiment.

On the bright side, the Vanos is now extremely quiet on start-up. On the down side, I found this in the front right tyre:

Fortunately it was repairable, so £16 saw that sorted.

During all this, the car’s habit of ‘bonging’ at me to say ‘key in ignition’ when the driver’s door is open officially got on my tits. Therefore while I was queuing to check the tyre pressures I got under the foot-well panels and disconnected the ‘bong’ sounder. The main disadvantage of this is that it can no longer ‘bong’ to inform me that the lights are on, but then due to the ‘crying wolf’ aspect of the ‘key in ignition’ warning, I tended to ignore that too.

Finally, I stuck £70 of fuel in, cleared the DME codes, and went for a good blat – averaging a massive 21.4 mpg.