I had something of a difficult night last night.
I was on my way home from Oliver’s school when the brakes on my taxi developed a terrible grinding noise.
Every time I touched the pedal, the most ghastly metallic shudders rolled through the car, accompanied by a hideous scraping noise.
The car still seemed to stop without any problem at all, but it was embarrassingly apparent that the brake pads were in their final death throes.
I told Mark when I got back to the taxi rank, and he thought about it for a few moments and suggested that I turned the music up, so I did.
I spent the rest of the evening turning Radio Three on to Loud as soon as customers got in, and hoping that they wouldn’t notice.
Of course all of the earlier customers noticed anyway. The later ones didn’t, because of the drink and drugs they had all consumed, in fact by two o’ clock I was even able to dispense with the music.
Obviously one can’t employ Berlioz as a cure-all for braking issues for very long, and so we set the alarm for nine this morning in order to get an early brake pad order in to Autoparts.
Fortunately they had got them in stock, and by ten we were gritty-eyed and yawning, but in possession of a set of new brake pads.
I had a different set of problems by then.
I had arrived at school with Oliver yesterday to the shocking discovery that he had forgotten his conker.
The Aysgarth School Conker Championships are an important event. You have got to keep the same conker for the whole event, and Oliver was through to the semi-finals.
The next stage of the competition was to be held on Wednesday.
He did not know where he had left it.
We hunted everywhere. We looked in the camper van and in his drawers and under his bed and in every single place we could think of, but no conker.
I sent him an email telling him to check in his rucksack again. It wasn’t there.
Then this morning in a piece of great good fortune Mark was stuffing Oliver’s trousers into the washing machine when he noticed a bit of string sticking out of the pocket.
Of course it was the conker.
I wrapped it up with his thermal vests and went rushing round to the post office. The man at the post office wondered if perhaps such an important item ought to go by special delivery, but it was eight quid, so I declined, he will have to take his chances with first class.
I sent the thermal vests as well because it is terribly, terribly cold at the moment. Mark put on his extra thick padded overalls designed to keep you warm even if you happen to be mending cars in the arctic, and went out to fit the new brake pads.
I pegged the washing on the line, but by the time I had finished I was so cold that I could hardly feel my fingers, and that was the end of my outdoor activities for the day. Instead I turned my attention to the pressing problem of my continuing relationship with all of you.
Once again my flat computer thing is on its way out. This is because although it is a replacement, it was an old second hand one when I bought it. It is just reaching the stage when the keys are reluctant to work, and every now and again it stops working altogether and refuses to do anything at all, like a baggage handler at a French airport on a bank holiday.
This could be an upsetting thing if I am miles away from home learning things for my new career. What would you all think if you got up one morning and I was simply not there? Especially when I had just started on a thrilling new life. You might all think that I had just got bored with you.
I have considered what to do about this, and in the end Mark remembered that we had got some old computers that used to belong to the children, before they went away to boarding school and graduated to laptops.
They are perfectly good computers, called Mac Minis. We have one downstairs plugged into a television screen in case ever we want to watch a film, and the other one was stuffed into the back of a cupboard.
I didn’t know if it would still work, so I dragged it out and hunted down an old television screen and keyboard from the loft.
It did work.
It turned out to have been Lucy’s computer, left over from her distant youth.
I spent an entertaining afternoon deleting countless pictures of My Little Pony and trying to get it to sign up to useful things like Facebook and Yahoo and these very pages.
I managed it in the end, but it was no easy task.
It would not recognise any passwords for anything. In the end it turned out that it had a self-defeating smug little instruction to itself promising that it would not allow anything dodgy to use the computer no matter how much I wanted it to.
I unchecked that particularly tiresome small print box, which, incidentally, was hidden in some ridiculously inaccessible computing corner. I doubt I could find it again should I change my mind. Not that I imagine that I need to worry. It is probably the sort of box that ticks itself, helpfully, every few months.
It took all day, but in the end order was restored to life. I have got a car which stops without any more than usual noise. I have got a computer which works, and Oliver has got a conker, or at any rate he will have when the post arrives tomorrow.
Life is carrying on nicely.
