Unexpected

Today has not gone quite the way we expected.

It all started at four o’clock in the morning.

You will not be astounded to hear that we were in bed. I know we are not always in bed at four in the morning, but last night we were, because of having to get up at seven for rural broadband.

Hence we were surprised when the phone rang.

It was Lucy.

Her car would not start.

This does not sound like a serious problem, but it is when you are only twenty, have your first house and your first car and your first job and are a million miles away from home with not very much money. Of course she needs the car very much indeed to get in and out of work. Work is a half hour drive from her house, and the times when she starts and finishes being a policeman do not coincide with any bus timetable anywhere

She had managed to get home from work, where she finished at three in the morning, by rolling it down the hill and bump starting it, but you cannot do that from the flat parking space outside her house.

We listened for a while, and Mark made her do things to it, and we made a remote diagnosis of a non-functioning starter motor.

I told her not to worry and that I would speak to a garage on her behalf in the morning, because obviously she had got to sleep until late because of working a night shift tonight as well.

We collapsed back into an uneasy sleep, and this morning I telephoned a man in a garage in Northampton.

He said that thanks to Boris and his pinging he had not got any staff and the waiting time would be between three weeks and a month.

Everybody else said the same.

I am very glad that Boris is looking after us all so well. I do not know what we would all do without him.

We considered this for a while, but it was not difficult to work out that really there were not a great many options. We would have to go to Northampton and mend it ourselves.

We rang the eternally helpful Autoparts, who were not sure which would be the right starter motor, and so they sent us three. We have got to send back the ones that we do not want and the broken one.

Mark went off to install rural broadband whilst I organised food and clothes and remade the beds in the camper.

I explained to Oliver what he needed to do if we were killed in a hideous car smash, which really was to empty the bank account before the bank stopped him. Then I made him a pizza and explained what to do with the dogs. Mostly this is not letting them die of starvation and stopping them from having accidents on the carpets.

I worried about whether Oliver would be all right but he said reassuringly that a night and a day is not long enough for a person to die even of thirst, and so even if I had not left a huge pile of crisps and a fridge filled with apple juice and orange juice and sausages and chicken legs and yoghurts, probably I would be back before things became unmanageable.

When Mark came home from work he filled the camper with trolley jacks and axle stands and spanners, and I filled the fridge with brandy cakes and Chinese chicken and fudge.

Lucy rang to ask us to bring some milk because her fridge was broken, so Mark said we would try and fix that as well whilst we were there.

At the time of writing we are still en route.

You will have to hear the end of the story tomorrow.

Have a picture of the Lake District. I took it from work the other night.