Of course we were still in York when we woke up. We ended yesterday with a massive dinner, and too much alcohol to go anywhere else even if we had wanted to.
The dinner was rather splendid. It was at little roadside tables. One of the great joys of Global Warming is that this is now possible, even in the frozen North of these chilly islands. It was warm and dry enough to eat outside without shivering very much at all. I was glad of this, because of not at all wanting to be compelled to try and eat through a hole in a bucket, or whatever the current rules demand if you go to an indoor restaurant this week.
They did want us to fill in a form with all of our contact details even though we were outside by ourselves, so we wrote Lakeside Taxis telephone number and Lucy’s email address, but they forgot to pick it up anyway so we kept it.
They served very nice cocktails and chips covered in a layer of pulled pork with melted cheese on the top. The divine taste of this latter more than compensated for its unfortunate lack of middle-class sophistication, and I can promise you that it was superb. I must try and work out how to make it at home.
We stayed up too late drinking after that.
This morning started at some time in the middle of the night, with a cheery blast from the whistling ostrich, and Ritalin Boy, who was wide awake.
I am in favour of letting small children watch Doctor Who DVDs all night if they want, because they do not then get up until lunchtime, but his mother disagreed and said that he would probably get up with the first birdsong anyway.
She was right about the birdsong, if you count ostriches.
We put Doctor Who back on again and made coffee.
Ritalin Boy wagged about happily and talked. He likes riddles at the moment, and the morning rattled along to a series of breathy questions along the lines of: If three men crossed a river in a boat and one of them caught a fish…
I couldn’t answer any of them.
In the end we lurched off in the direction of home. We could not hear either the whistling ostrich or Ritalin Boy chirping over the noise of the engine, so he retreated back to Doctor Who, and we put our story on.
After a little while the journey started to turn into an adventure. You do not expect an adventure on the very day after an MOT has been passed, but York is a long way, and our camper van is clapped out in all sorts of unexpected corners.
We first noticed the absence of brakes when we needed to stop rather suddenly, and then didn’t.
Mark swore a lot, and had to haul on the hand brake.
We proceeded rather more cautiously after that. The brakes started working again almost straight away, but the seeds of doubt had been sown, and we did not wish for another emergency stop surprise.
We were at Scotch Corner when we noticed the clouds of dense black smoke guffing off the front wheel and in through the open window.
Mark wondered where we had put the fire extinguisher.
Of course neither of us could remember, so we belched to a halt and sloshed a couple of gallons of water over it.
This seemed to work.
The brakes had stuck on and melted the brake pad. It had got so hot that it had also melted the grease in the wheel bearings
I made cups of tea and cheese on toast whilst Mark bashed it all with spanners and Ritalin Boy listened for new rude words to add to his vocabulary.
The ostrich whistled happily and did its little dance.
In the end we were mobile again and chugged down the long hill into Kendal to retrieve my taxi, and the garage man rushed out and reminded us that we had promised not to bring the camper van back ever again.
Finally, finally we reached Windermere, and the ostrich whistled whilst we unpacked. Mark had to dash off to fix some broken rural broadband, so he took Ritalin Boy off to his Other Grandma’s house on his way, and there was a sudden deafening hush.
I put things away and tidied up.
It stayed very quiet until the Peppers popped round later to help us use up some wine we had hanging about, and we exchanged stories of our activities. Things got quite raucous after that.
Their camper van has passed its MOT. We were very impressed. Mark has ordered a new brake cylinder for ours which he says will fix it. I do hope so. We will be going back to Scotland in a week or so.
I looked the ostrich up on line to find a picture whilst I was writing this, since I hadn’t taken one in the camper van and can’t be bothered to trail back now, in the middle of the night.
I discovered that they are rare and rather valuable.
I am glad Mark did not throw it out of the window at six o’ clock this morning.
