I have had an action-packed day and it isn’t over yet.
I am at work. I am going to be here until three in the morning, after which I am going to drive to Lancaster to collect Lucy, who is arriving back from Dublin at five.
She has had a lovely festival and has contacted me to warn me that she has a shocking hangover.
I can hardly wait.
Tiresomely, I have been to Lancaster once today already.
I have been on a mission in search of tyres.
As you know, the camper van is due its MOT this week. Mark has looked at it and decided that it needed two new tyres.
Unsurprisingly it does not need ordinary tyres but tyres that were popular in the nineteen seventies when it was first invented. There are not many of these left now and I had got to go to a specialist place in Lancaster to get them.
This was my job because I was going to Lancaster anyway. I had an appointment at the hospital to see a doctor about the progress or otherwise of Hard To Spell Disease. In any case Mark was engaged in dismantling and rebuilding the endlessly tiresome camper van brake project. These have been rebuilt a couple of times already and are not all right. This is because a bit has broken that we can’t afford to replace and so Mark has to keep mending it. They work all right for a while and then he has got to mend them again. This week is one of those times.
He took the wheels off and heaved them into the back of my car. He had got to do this for me, because the camper van wheels are enormous heavy things, and occupied the whole of my boot.
I chugged off to Lancaster, rather carefully, because my own car also needed a tyre. The front tyre has had to be blown up every day for the last month, and whilst I was at the site of all things round and rubbery, I thought I would resolve that little difficulty as well.
I could not find the tyre place.
I have only been there once before, about three years ago, and it seemed to have dematerialised in the intervening time. I rang Mark for directions, which were vague.
I should explain that Morecambe’s industrial estate might be better described as ‘den of scoundrelly behaviour and tax avoidance’. It is acres and acres of scrap metal merchants and second hand tyre shops and lorry dismantlers. It is not a clean Silicone Valley type of manufacturing site with trees and glass and tidy walkways. The roads are full of potholes, and second hand tyres and partly dismantled lorries are piled up everywhere.
Mark likes this. He finds lots of useful things every time he comes here. I do not much like it. It reminds me a bit of troubling American films, the sort where people wear stubble and an eyepatch, and stand on garage forecourts looking suspiciously at newcomers, except the roads here are worse.
In the end I had got to stop and ask somebody where the tyre place might be, and as it happened I had discovered the place where the gypsies go with their pick up trucks full of scrap iron and shovels and bicycles out of Windermere gardens. Two friendly whippets were chained up next to the gate, and a gypsy with stubble although no eyepatch came rushing out to be monosyllabic and suspicious, in case I was the Inland Revenue or the police.
He stood protectively between me and the entrance to his shed, presumably so I wouldn’t see the piles of illicit cash, dead bodies and stolen jewellery he was sorting out. He called the dogs off, which is what you have to do when you are being menacing, so I stopped rubbing their ears and tried to look properly intimidated before he started to be grumpy.
He directed me to the tyre place, which turned out to be next door. Unsurprisingly, since it was next door to the gypsy camp, the tyre place was staffed by an eight foot giant with a shaven head and a direwolf on a chain. He lifted the wheels out of the boot with one hand each, and swung them nonchalantly as he strolled across the yard.
My car, it turned out, needed four new tyres, which was unexpected and after being lost for half an hour, almost made me late for my hospital appointment. I rushed up to the clinic just in time, and to my surprise, was seen thirty seconds later.
I had finished roughly another thirty seconds after that, once the doctor had agreed that I was perfectly healthy, that the tablets were working, and that my own spare tyre was probably because I ate too much not a side effect of the drugs. Then he sent me for a blood test and told me to come back in six months.
I do not like having blood extracted, and wished that I had brought Mark.
I hadn’t, so I had to be brave all on my own. The nurse explained that she was deaf, and so could not hear anything I was saying to her. If I needed to say something then first I had to attract her attention.
Of course this also meant that she would not have been able to hear me screaming, so I didn’t bother, although of course, she couldn’t find any blood in one arm and had to have a second go at the other one. This always happens, and actually I was not very brave.
She was very apologetic, and I was very civilised, but I was not at all sorry to escape.
I took my tyres home and got ready for work, which is where I am now. It is two o’ clock, and in another couple of hours I will be going to get Lucy.
Only another four hours and I can go to bed.
I haven’t taken a photo. Have a picture of a security guard.
