Slowly does it

The adventures of the last few days have now caught up with us and demanded repayment, like a Payday Loan company on a council estate.

We have been terribly busy. We have trotted up and down endless stairs, and polished and cleaned and scrubbed. We have mended things and organised things and carried things. On top of all of that we have driven a jolly long way and drunk too much.

At the time of starting to write we are even now not yet home.

We got as far as about eight in the evening and collapsed.

Since then we have been travelling between service stations, sleeping for a little while at every one.

We did not feel nearly as dreadful this morning as perhaps we deserved to feel. Indeed, apart from feeling a trifle fragile, and disinclined towards loud noises and over exertion, on the whole we were fine.

It was an ace evening. We were sad to say goodbye to Lucy, but she is coming to see us in a few weeks, and we thought that she needed to get on with having her lovely new flat to herself. We did not want to start trailing up the motorway at six in the evening, and so we made a detour to Peterborough to visit the family.

This turned out to be a splendid idea. Even the dogs had a good time. They had hours of fun ambling about outside Lucy’s flat, sniffing the grass and barking at people: indeed, when we left, fortunately Mark looked behind him in the mirror, because Roger Poopy’s father had got out again for a last sniff, and was now belting down the road after us. After that we went to see my cousins, whose dogs are Roger Poopy’s brother and sister. Some indecent behaviour happened, but you have got to put up with that sort of thing because they are only dogs, even if they are clever enough to spell Walk.

I had a lovely time as well, although without the indecent behaviour, I think. I am sure I would have remembered, despite having had far too much to drink.

We explored my cousins’ house quite thoroughly. This started off its life as a little bungalow in Peterborough, and has now metamorphosised into a set for an American film about successful families in San Diego. It is truly amazing, with interesting things in every corner, and a spare kitchen in the garden, which you can hardly imagine.

Of course I do not mean a spare kitchen of the sort that Mark might have, stacked up on a pallet in the garden because he had got nowhere else to put it. I mean an actual garden kitchen, because it does not rain so much in Peterborough. It is next to the swimming pool, with a pizza oven and a glass fridge and a bar.

They have built all of this themselves out of scrap wood and bits they have found lying around. They are very clever indeed.

We were lost in admiration. Even my aunt’s house, which handily was just across the road, had the most splendid bathroom I have ever seen, the sort where you sit on the loo and keep an anxious eye open for an Ideal Homes photographer lurking behind the potted plants.

After we had crept into life again this morning, there were still more things to do. We bid a courteous farewell to the senior branch of the family. They were planning to spend the rest of their day visiting a health spa for the purposes of a massage.

I quite like the sound of old age sometimes.

We were not going for a massage. We were going to my parents’ house, where in their absence we were going to refill the trailer with my father’s old garden tractor.

This has reached the stage of advanced decrepitude where it is no longer of very much use without some very detailed repair, and so obviously they thought, quite correctly, that Mark might like it.

Mark does not mind nailing rusty things back together. Not only is there the camper van, but regular readers might recall that we have a digger which should really be called Lazarus.

He was very keen to have the garden tractor, because he said that the only thing wrong with is was that all the cam-belts had become sprocketed and fallen out of the piston, or something like that, I might not have been paying  wry careful attention.

Hence today, whilst travelling around with an empty trailer, it seemed the obvious thing to put a garden tractor in it.

We did a detour around to their house and Mark backed the trailer up to a high bit of ground at the back of the workshop, and drove the garden tractor straight on to it. This took less than a minute, although we have not yet worked out how we are going to get it off again, that is a problem for another day, and brings to mind a very difficult few weeks in the distant past, when our only transport was a lorry in which we had parked our car, and could not seem to find anywhere we might get it out again.

Having collected the tractor we shared a cup of tea with my brother. He has also had bat flu, and we had absorbing stories to share of mutual infirmities, before we started, once again, on our endless travels.

We went through the centre of Manchester in the rush hour. This is always difficult, but with an ancient camper van and a trailer full of garden tractor, it was yet another adventure. We stopped off at the Midland to give them some cash towards our Christmas adventures. It is always important to do this sort of thing. We have been saving this with very great determination and careful squirrelling, and it would be awful if we accidentally spent it on something else in the meantime.

By the time we had fought our way through the lines and lines of Manchester traffic, it was almost seven o’clock. We were hungry and tired.

We stopped and ate, and then exhaustion and probably delayed hangover, overwhelmed us, so we pulled into the next service station for a sleep.

We had two hours and then we had to drag ourselves back into life and move on.

It does not matter.

There is another one coming up.

The picture is us outside Lucy’s flat. Lucy is driving the police car. She put the blue lights on specially for us. We have become very used to those lately, except everybody must be reading the notice on the back of the van, explaining about the MOT, because today we have not been stopped at all.

LATER NOTE: We got the trailer off.

I need to go to bed.