Clapped out

I have spent the day trying to calculate our finances.

I got Mark to telephone Barclaycard to ask about some cash, but quickly dismissed him as being worse than useless.

If you are macarooned on a deserted wintery fell side at midnight with a collection of useless clapped out engines, he is the chap for the job, but he does not do paperwork at all, and has no idea how to talk to banks in a sensible and authoritative manner.

In the event he could not talk about his account, because he could not get through the security questions. I expect we will be flagged up for an investigation for fraud on the account now, and am entirely expecting that we will find it has been unexpectedly closed.

He could not remember his email address or telephone number, struggled to spell his middle name, and did not even know how old he was. He thought he was probably fifty two, but the chap on the phone said that if you have to ask your wife it doesn’t count.

The reason for the financial deliberations is obviously related to yesterday’s travelling misadventure. My taxi does not go any more. This is a problem in need of a quick solution, because until we are in possession of a working taxi, we will be broke. This is a most undesirable outcome. I can make money disappear as fast as Roger Poopy can hoover up a dropped sausage.

We spent the morning telephoning scrapyards to see if anybody had some bits of engine that they might wish to sell. We found one chap in Carlisle, who had a broken one, but it was still a thousand pounds. Mark said that we had got a broken engine of our own, and hence they could get lost.

We tried the nice chap at the engineering company in Lancaster, who was more optimistic, and Mark went outside to dismantle the broken engine to see what its casting numbers were. I do not know what a casting number is, but it if you tell an engineer what it is, he will know how to polish your valves, or something. Mark explained what they did, but obviously the information failed to take root, so if you want to know you will have to ask him

In truth, I think I might have been a bit shell-shocked after yesterday. It was a very exciting adventure, and  it was lovely to wake up this morning and be safely in our own bed, where I was not at the mercy of malignant policemen whilst trucks thundered towards me at a hundred miles an hour. It was even nicer not to be fastened to the end of a bit of fraying orange string being dragged away from all of these perils behind a lurching camper van.

Mark inspected the car, and we talked and worried and thought about it, and then in the end the Gods decided that they had got bored with watching us flapping, and my friend from Lakeside Taxis sent us a text.

Lakeside Taxis are a large and infinitely more successful taxi company than we are, mostly because they like having taxis and take it very seriously. They are interested in bookings, and care about the customers, and do not just show up to work, reluctantly, at times when they have spent all their cash. They invest, and employ, and pay VAT.

We had a proper taxi company once. We sold it to Lakeside Taxis when we realised that they were always going to try much harder than we did.

The owner is my friend, and knows us well. She said that she had got a clapped out taxi that they could not be bothered to fix, and that we could buy if we liked.

Obviously we are not short of clapped out vehicles, in fact we have got them in abundance at the moment, did I tell you that Lucy’s car has decided to stop firing on a full complement of cylinders as well?  This repair is part of next week’s disaster management project.

Anyway, this particular clapped-out taxi  was of the sort that goes. There was an engine management fault, and a flat tyre, and a large rusty hole in the boot, but nothing that some welding and bashing with hammers would not fix.

We went to Kendal to look at it. Mark turned the key and the engine started and everything.

I explained to my friend at Lakeside Taxis that we were impoverished peasants. I could hear her rolling her eyes even by text, and she said just to give her some cash when we had some.

We have bought an awful lot of clapped-out cars from her with this arrangement.

We are going to collect it tomorrow.

We are going to be mobile again.

Everything is going to be all right. We will have a brand new clapped out taxi to replace the other clapped out taxi.

I am very pleased and relieved indeed.

I have attached a picture of it.