We have been trying to organise our holiday.
There are all sorts of things that we would like to do, and trying to fit them into a few days is very complicated.
Worse than that, when we woke up this morning it looked very much as though we would not be going anywhere at all.
There is a light on the dashboard of Mark’s car. It has been on for the last four years and we have never worried about it, because it was to tell us that a filter was clogged. We knew that the filter was not clogged, because it has been cleaned out, and is fresh and fine, but the tiresome garage man said that even though it is a service light and not a warning light, he was going to fail it anyway.
We turned the light off with a fault-detecting machine, but it came back in again, and further investigation revealed that there is a bit of engine missing.
We spent ages today trying to find a replacement bit, and discovered why it was missing. It was missing because they cost three hundred quid second hand, and if you want a new one from Peugeot they cost rather more than the value of the car.
Clearly some economical mechanic in the car’s past life has just hoofed the bit out and managed without, which it has done, very nicely, until now. It is not an important bit, the car has not had one in all of the time we have had it, but it is the bit that will put the light out. At first we thought that this would not matter, and we would just pinch and adapt the bit from my car, which has the same engine, but when we looked, unfortunately it had been to the same garage, and the bit was missing from mine as well.
This left us with a dilemma, which eventually we resolved by ringing Lakeside Taxis and explaining that we were having an emergency, so could we please have one of their old taxis.
I could hear them rolling their eyes on the telephone but of course, because they are heroic in a crisis, they have come up with one.
It is a Seat Toledo. I do not know what one of those is, and so looked it up on the mighty Internet, where there was a picture, but to be honest it looks pretty much exactly like that car Mark has got at the moment. I do not know what that is, perhaps a Peugeot, and so I am no wiser.
We will work out how we are going to pay for it later.
In fact this worked out rather well, because it meant that we could instantly stop worrying about how to piece Mark’s car back together and just think about our holidays. We are sanguine about this, because it was ten years old and not allowed to be a taxi for very much longer anyway. Of course we are going to have to insure the new one, but that is next week’s problem.
Instead we turned our attention to going on holiday, and had a House Meeting in the conservatory, where we thrashed out what we might do with our time.
This proved complicated and troublesome. There are lots of things that we would like to do and not much time.
We agreed that we should go to Waterstone’s, which is always the most important part of any holiday, and is usually done first so that every subsequent evening is contentedly occupied. There is no finer way to spend an evening than with one’s family around, reading books and drinking wine and eating home-made fudge.
Apart from that the only other thing that seemed to be truly necessary for a good holiday was that we should spend a day or two eating doughnuts and riding on things in Blackpool.
We were agreed that this must be a priority.
I do not think that we are likely to be able to leave our house until Monday lunchtime. I think this because I have had experience of trying to get our family out of the house and into the camper van before. If we pack everything up in Sunday night and just leave ourselves to pack on Monday morning it will still take us until lunchtime.
We are going to go first to York, where Lucy would like to go and see a friend from school. We are going to amble around York and look at things, mostly Waterstone’s probably, and we are going to call in and see Nan and Grandad on our way out.
We have not seen them for exactly two years, since Lucy left school.
After that we are going to have a few days in Blackpool, where we are meeting my parents. We have not seen them for ages either.
We are all heartened at the prospect of happy things to do and happy reunions, also by having a new car and a trip to Waterstone’s. We have got one more night to work and then we will be finished and can go.
I have got gate fever rather badly. I am looking forward to it very much.
I took the picture at work this evening.
