Happy holidays

I regret to tell you that the brief scrapyard vacation proved to be all the holiday that there was to be.

We are back in the Lake District, and it is cold and wet.

We set off last night, and got as far south as sunny Harrogate, which it wasn’t, and stopped overnight.

This morning when we went to put fuel in, the tank would not fill. Fuel simply bubbled out of it and spilled. Mark said that this was because it was not breathing properly. I did not know that fuel tanks needed to breathe, you read it here first.

It turned out that a little valve which should let air out of the tank was bent. Mark did not do this, it was because the tank was previously the property of an ancient truck and had been removed by a gypsy in a hurry. Also one of the seals turned out not to be sealed and a little tiny bit of diesel was just beginning to ooze out of it.

We pulled up in something that looked like a lay-by but was actually a blocked off old road. Mark took the petrol tank off again and fixed it, and I took the dogs for a walk.

I had an interesting walk, actually. We explored the blocked off old road and pretended that we had survived an apocalypse. Well, I pretended to have survived an apocalypse. The dogs just charged about weeing  on things as usual, and Rosie found an enormous puddle and lay in it.

It was interesting to see what happens to roads when there are no people. There was a great deal of moss, and an impressive tangle of blackberries and dock leaves, and Roger Poopy chased something that might have been a rabbit. I almost picked some of the blackberries and brought them home to make next year’s jam, but we were quite close to the real road, and I thought they might be a bit grimy. Also I couldn’t be bothered. It was just too much trouble, and I thought then that we might be off to Cambridge at any moment.

Of course we weren’t. Mark had had to go to a hire shop and hire a drill for the day, because stupidly he hadn’t thought to bring one with him. He had to reposition the filling tube in a new place, and it all took ages.

It was well into the afternoon by the time he had finished, and washed the diesel out of his hair. We looked at the time and thought, sadly, that by the time we had fuelled up and taken the drill back, we still had hundreds and hundreds of miles to drive. We would not get to Cambridge until tomorrow, being Wednesday.

There didn’t seem much point then. We would have had to set off back on Thursday because of work on Friday, and it just seemed like an awful lot of dashing about for not very much holiday.

We thought that we would give up on the idea and go back to work. You know where you are with being back at work.

We came home and unpacked, regretfully. It was so late by the time we had finished that it was too late even to go to work.

We will have to go tomorrow.

It was a nice scrapyard, and a very nice disused road.

Happy holidays.