A few years ago I got the chance to take a very attractive young lady out for a picnic in the Dales.

Sadly, I no longer had my dashing, claret-coloured Jaguar but a rather more modest Nissan Micra. Anyway, I gave it a damn good clean and set about choosing all manner of goodies for the hamper.

At the last minute, however, I had a horrible thought. Despite having driven for more than 20 years I had no idea how to change a wheel or carry out any kind of basic car maintenance.

What if a tyre were to burst in a country lane in the middle of nowhere? The hapless, impotent, male look was not one I was anxious to cultivate.

I still had humiliating memories of a tyre blowing on the M62 as I neared Ainley Top a few years before. A passing police patrol car stopped and an officer brusquely demanded why I was not “cracking to it”.

He quickly realised I didn’t have a clue where to start, I wasn’t even sure where the spare wheel was. Grudgingly he stood over me while I fumbled around trying to understand his barked instructions.

Fortunately, on this occasion my 84-year-old stepfather, Bob, was only too willing to give me a crash course in wheel changing.

I breathed a sigh of relief and headed to the Dales reasonably confident I would not fall flat on my face if disaster struck.

I was ruminating on all this when Kwik Fit, the UK’s largest tyre and car repair company, sent me a press release extolling the virtues of their ladies only car maintenance night.

New research has revealed that an astonishing nearly two-thirds of female motorists don’t feel comfortable about visiting a garage for repairs, servicing or car-checks – with a quarter saying that they avoid going to a garage on their own. And nearly one-in-five motorists in Yorkshire & the Humber said they found a visit to a car garage ‘intimidating’ and nearly one-in-five admitted they’d sooner turn to a friend or family member than a professional for vehicle repairs.

James Morris, manager of Kwik Fit’s Huddersfield centre, told me: “The general belief has long been that women are less mechanically-minded than men, but our research showed us that many women in and around Huddersfield want to learn more about their cars.

“We want them to feel more confident when they need to go to a garage and that’s why we held the Ladies in the Driving Seat evening. The purpose of our event was not to teach everyone how to fit an exhaust or strip a gearbox but to help people save money by learning some simple car maintenance that they can do themselves.”

So, feeling ever so slightly apprehensive about getting stuck in to some serious wheel changing stuff myself, I met James for a crash course and was impressed by how patient he was as we set to work on changing one of the back wheels.

I helped him lift out the spare from the boot and he assembled the brace and the jack ready for the big moment. There was one slight problem though.

My Skoda had, in addition to a set of wheel nuts, a security device designed to stop some thief taking them off, apparently, and I had been blithely driving around without the necessary tool to release them. Fortunately James had the correct tool and I soon enjoyed getting my hands dirty as he introduced me to my car. It’s not difficult but practice makes perfect and I am naturally indolent.

But as Clint Eastwood famously observed: “A man has to know his limitations” and I know mine.

I am a stickler for asking for a particular type of beer glass when I order a pint.

Many is the time some long-suffering barmaid has patiently poured my beer from one glass to another as customers silently fume behind me.

Now I hear the dimpled pint glass, once a staple of pubs since the 1920s and beloved of fictional pubs of the 1980s – the Wool Pack in Emmerdale and the Rovers’ Return in Coronation Street – is making a comeback.

The glass came close to extinction in 2001 when the St Helens-based company that made the old-style glass tankard shut. They were associated with fuddy-duddy, ‘grandad-type’ men and were resolutely uncool.

But as the craft beer movement has taken off, hipsters and girls in skinny jeans demand them.

Personally, I don’t care for them – too cumbersome. I like a tulip.