Broken Down

This is a sight that our neighbours have seen twice recently, it's becoming some kind of common occurence - but it's to be expected since we have done 6000+ miles since we got him in October.
Going to the local classic mini meet, and just getting into the town it was being held in it started a god awful squeaking noise - something that can only be described as a loud EEK EEK EEK. First thought that it was the prop UJ's needing greasing or it failing again (we'd bought a second hand one to get us by - silly as a new one is only £35, but when it's your only car needs must and all). It was too late to turn back and worry about getting home or not we'd arrived and went into the pub.
Eventually we left at 10.20pm and got into Toni, all was well to start with, but after about a mile down the road it started again, we'd just got to the roundabout before our turning off to the road home and he completely locked out - leaving a nice number 1 on the left hand side of the road and smoke everywhere. It was obvious that we weren't going to get home tonight - so the AA was called - we ended up with a repair van instead of just a lift - after much discussion with him he'd called the centre and got a flat bed on it's way to us - estimated time was 11.50pm - so we weren't going to get home until 1am. We got lucky and the flat bed arrived at 11.10pm and loaded us onto the back - unfortunately the AA previously had moved the Land Rover onto the grass verge to get us 'out the way'. Meaning that once we had got loaded to the flat bed we where stuck in the mud in it! A lot of muttering and swearing by the driver of the flat bed whilst he tried to think of many ways to get us out - he'd tried wood, grit and sheer determination - and eventually called another one of his colleagues to pull us out. Whilst sitting waiting Chris came up with the idea of winching to a lamp-post which was behind us - this got us pretty much unstuck and just as this happened the other truck turned up - after an hour of this most frustrating amusement we where on our way home!

Current guess of diagnostics is that the rear differential is dead - haven't had a chance to check properly yet - but a quick check showed that there was too much play in it.

We've now managed to get a daily runner, something which we where talking about on the way to the meet - maybe that's why he broke down?