Last night did not go according to plan at all.
You might recall that I left Mark doing fiddly things to Oliver’s Playstation whilst I was at work.
Shortly after I concluded last night’s diary entry I picked up some passengers who were going to Aphrodite’s Lodge, which is a couples’ hotel on the other side of Bowness. Nobody ever seems to be able to pronounce the name, still less understand its implications: which makes me smugly superior about standards of classical education in this country, did nobody else ever read Enid Blyton’s Tales of Long Ago?
Their advertising obviously makes things rather plain, however, you can usually pick out couples who are going there. Taxi drivers are humorous and unkind about them and once a couple left their digital camera in the back of a taxi, which was passed up and down the taxi rank before being returned to its owners.
Anyway, I was on my way there when suddenly there was an ominous ‘click, click, click, clunk’ from under the bonnet, and my taxi heaved a gentle sigh and collapsed wearily at the side of the road.
I squeaked with an awful panic, and tried to re-start it, which I couldn’t, but to my breathless relief, Mark rang at that very moment to see how I was getting on. I bleated and stammered, and tried to explain, and he hung up and dashed down to rescue me.
Of course he didn’t rescue me first, obviously the first thing he did was relieve me of my customers and take them back for their night of passion. When he came back he wanted to know all sorts of things, like what kind of clicks they were. I was fairly incompetent at that sort of explanation, because it is difficult to be precise when attempting to describe clicks, and in the end he got out his torch and looked under the bonnet and pronounced the timing chain to be no more, and explained that the clicks were something unpleasant happening to the pistons. It appears that this is a very serious thing to happen to a taxi, although happily it is in no way the fault of the idiot at the wheel, but it means that it needs a new engine
After that we had a lot of messing about where we had got to go to the farm to collect the camper van and a tow rope, and Mark attached the taxi to the back of the camper and I steered, slightly anxiously, along the narrow country roads and up and down steep hills and through floods, whilst he towed me back. He did not close the gates to the farm on the way through: there are three of them and they are an absolute nuisance when it is raining or when you are towing a broken down car with a big van, and I had quiet agonies about all the sheep running away whilst we were parking the taxi and the camper van in his shed: but they must all have been asleep, because they didn’t.
We went home then, because it was long past the middle of the night, but of course it meant that he had not finished mending Oliver’s Playstation either. We have rather run out of time for that now, because you might remember that he had planned to solve our boiler-related financial crisis by mending a car today. We are going out for dinner with our friends tonight, which is lovely and exciting and happy, and then tomorrow we have got to set off for the children’s schools, to have drinks and a Junior Play at Oliver’s school tomorrow night, and then Lucy and lunch out with Nan and Grandad on Friday.
We also have the small difficulty that since I don’t have a taxi at the moment there is going to be some difficulty in earning money, and I don’t mind telling you that when I woke up this morning I was feeling a bit despondent about the world.
However, things are never as bad as they seem, and before Mark went over to the farm to fix the other person’s car he called the scrapyard in Lancaster, who said that they had got the very engine for the job, and he could collect it on Monday if he liked, which is ace: and I called Lakeside Taxis who kindly said that if they had got a spare car this weekend I could borrow it, and that if Mark could not fix ours they thought they might be able to sell us one from their dad’s taxi company in Yorkshire: so all in all after a little while I was feeling very cheerful indeed, people are lovely.
What’s more, we are going to our friends’ house for dinner this evening, for a taxi driver night of wine and stories and nice food, which is one of my favourite things to do.
Mark is very clever at fixing cars, and he says that he will be able to get it sorted out, and as an added bonus he can get the bits to fix the oil leak and the radiator and the steering rack whilst he is doing it, so it will be absolutely as good as new and lovely to drive again. He says he will have another go at Oliver’s Playstation as well, in the morning before we have got to set off for schools.
Life is brilliant.
