Goodness, what a day or two it has been.
I have not gone to work tonight. I am sitting in my dressing gown writing to you whilst Mark is in the shower, but I can jolly well tell you that I am very much looking forward to the moment when he comes out and we can go to bed.
It has been very difficult.
I think I last spoke to you on Friday night, which was already difficult, because of Mark’s taxi being smokily useless in a million rusty bits in the alley at the back of the house. By Friday the new bit had arrived and he was preparing the instruments for major surgery.
This staggered to a halt at lunchtime on Saturday when he staggered in, looking white-faced, and said that it had burned out the particulate filter and that he would need a new one.
We looked on the mighty Internet, and they cost six hundred pounds and would not get to us for a week.
We tried every scrapyard within a hundred miles
In the end we looked on eBay for people who were dismantling one, and finally found a garage chap who was dismembering one and selling the bits.
We rang him, and he said that he had one.
Mark rushed off down the motorway to get it. This took hours, and it was almost time for me to go to work when he came back to nail it on to the car.
Five minutes later he rushed back inside. This time he looked grey.
He had come to connect the particulate filter to the engine and discovered that there was not one. The garage man had sold him merely an empty shell with the filter bit disappeared.
He was not pleased.
Obviously the garage chap had gone home by then, so we could not call him to roar abuse at him. Instead Mark decided that he would try and resurrect his own burned-out filter. He did this, incidentally, and it will probably scrape along for another few weeks, with any luck.
I went to work whilst he bashed the car back together.
It is still not finished even as I write.
I worked until half past three in the morning. When I turned into the alley to come home I could see Mark at the other end, still lying under the car, at which point the steering on mine packed up.
I hauled it and dragged it along the alley as well as I could and yelled for Mark to tell him the woeful news.
We stood looking at our clapped out taxis with some concern.
We were unemployed.
It was not our finest hour.
We decided we would think about it in the morning and went to bed.
Today the world became a brighter place. Mark discovered that the alternator belt on my taxi had disappeared, and mended it with a new one that he had conveniently hanging about in his shed. Then we rang the bloke at the garage, who caved as soon as we threatened him with the police and Trading Standards. We are going to get the money back tomorrow.
He spent much of the day painstakingly rebuilding the taxi, whilst I dashed about organising dinner. My parents had very kindly picked the children up from Manchester and Lucy’s phone was very helpfully sending me updates of where they were. This is a very weird thing. The telephone has a little picture of the person and shows them on a map, moving all the time, at least until they stop at KFC for breakfast.
In the end they arrived, and then everything stopped. We spent the entire rest of the day loafing around eating and drinking far too much.
I can hardly tell you what a happy thing this was.
The children are safely stored upstairs in their bedrooms, weary from their adventures, which sound exciting, and my parents are safely stored across the road in our friend’s very nice guest house. I have got no more responsibilities today and tomorrow we might even get the car fixed and be able to earn some more money. I will be very glad indeed about that. The world looked a little bleak on Saturday night.
It is not bleak now and I have had a very happy evening. Oliver showed us some pictures of his sailing expedition. It all looks very rugged and manly.
The moment has arrived. Mark is no longer in the shower.
Thank goodness.
See you tomorrow.
