We are having a Difficult Moment.
We are due to arrive at my parents’ house this evening. Tomorrow there is a clan outing to give evidence at a planning meeting about where local footpaths have and have not been for the last fifty years.
We promised my parents that we would attend and tell the chap in charge about our experiences of the hiking availability in the vicinity of Noonsun Hill. I am not expecting to be very good at this because it is a long time since I have lived in that part of the world, and if I am honest I am not completely sure which bit of footpath everybody is worried about and will have to be shown in the morning. However it is terribly important to my parents, because of course they live there and not out of the way of it all at my house in the Lake District, so we are going to go and make encouraging noises and hope not to mess things up by saying something stupid born out of not having been paying enough attention.
It is half past ten at night as I write and we are not at all there yet.
We are not even nearly there.
Actually we are not really out of Windermere.
We set off in the camper in good time but unfortunately broke down at the Plumgarth roundabout which isn’t even almost at the motorway.
Since that dreadful moment I have spent some time holding a torch for Mark whilst he looked underneath the bonnet, and learning a bit of interesting background information about engines and some new swear words.
I have retreated into the passenger seat now to tell you all about it whilst he pokes spanners about under the bonnet and makes scary metal-crunching and rattling noises, and grumbles.
He is grumbling a lot, partly because he was lovely and clean and smelling of aftershave, and now he is covered in oil again, and partly because everywhere has started to freeze and it is really, really cold.
I think he is very brave and I am very glad that I am married. If I had been on my own with a broken down camper van I would have just sat in it and cried, possibly for the rest of my life. As it is I can sit in it peacefully and know that he will make everything all right and soon we will be on our way again. Being married is a lovely thing.
It is a lovely thing in lots of ways because as well as fixing cars he makes coffee in the morning as well, which is always wonderful, because I feel very grumbly myself until I have drunk some coffee and had a quiet think about life. It is very nice not to have to get out of bed until I am full of coffee and have found a natural equilibrium in my life.
When we got up this morning Mark went off to tidy everything up at the farm after his taxi-repairing adventures last week, and I stayed at home and paid the mortgage on the Online Banking thing, which is a marvel of modern wonderfulness, by the way, what an ace world we live in; and packed up our smart clothes and carried on making curtains.
Of course because it is an Important Thing we will need smart clothes, which are things like suits and ties and shiny shoes, which took me a lot of the day to achieve, because it is not often we need to be smart and formal like that any more. This is a good thing, because it has been an awful lot of messing about and I would not at all like to have to do it every morning.
We packed everything into the camper van and hung the new curtains, which was exciting, and went for a swim, and sauna and shower, before we set off, so that we would be clean and fresh and not need to shower either in the camper van or at my parents’ house, because in the camper van shower you have got to be quick so as not to use all the hot water, and if we shower at my parents’ house we have got to scurry outside afterwards with wet hair through the frost in our dressing gowns back to the camper van.
Then we broke down.
I am now happy to inform you that during the time it has taken me to write this diary entry Mark has done something to the engine to make it work again, and we are now back on the road and heading south at some surprising speed. He has explained it to me but engines are not my strong subject so it all went a bit over my head, and anybody curious will have to ask him themselves. The important thing is this.
We are going to visit my parents tonight. We are having a night off work and going away in our camper van.
It is going to be splendid.
