I am having a very difficult moment.
It is not nearly as difficult as poor Mark’s moment, but it is difficult enough.
I have set off for Cambridge.
That is to say, I have put all of my things in the camper van, said my farewells, started the engine and put my foot on the accelerator, and then the brake.
The brakes did not work.
Mark had done some repairs to them over the course of the week, ready for me to go away, and had not managed to adjust them properly. It is difficult to do this when you can’t move a vehicle to check if something is working, and we can’t because of course we will lose its parking space if we don’t hastily put a taxi in it.
It is now two hours later and we are at the side of the road, a little distance from the house because we need to be somewhere quiet. Mark is doing things to the brakes and I am in the driver’s seat, occasionally putting my foot on them.
It is raining like the sort of rain you see in films, where it has been filmed in the Hollywood sunshine really, but they have made it look like torrential rain simply by turning a hosepipe on.
Mark is absolutely drenched.
I am not drenched, but I am jolly cold. The windscreen wipers and the heater were not working either.
It is a Difficult Time.
Especially for poor Mark.
***
A Happy Ever After has occurred, at least for me, so perhaps it is half of a Happy Ever After.
It is now midnight and I am in Cambridge. I am parked at the side of the road and I am tranquil and contented. I have driven down here with hardly any agonising moments of awfulness. The brakes worked, and the accelerator worked, at least after a quick squirt with WD40. The windscreen wipers worked and the heater worked and I did not bump into anything and only spent a couple of hours sitting in irritating roadworks.
It is even nicer than being at home, because the dogs leaped on the bed this morning with muddy paws, and it was too late to wash the sheets because they would not have dried in time. I have left Mark to agonise over the laundry and I am here, without a care in the world that I can think of at the moment, in bed in beautiful clean sheets. Roger Poopy’s elderly father is asleep underneath. We have had a quick empty and I have had a shower, and we are calm and clean and feeling very happy with our world.
I am going to go to sleep so that I am brightly ready to be educated in the morning.
Mark is probably all right as well. At least, I called him and he seemed to have dried out and was watching films on the taxi rank, which is probably pretty good.
I will try and get round to writing to you tomorrow but it depends on how intense the education becomes. I do not want to promise something about which I will feel grumpy when the chips are down.
It is all very exciting and lovely.
PS. It is cold down here, although not as cold as the Lake District. I do not feel that I should have brought my shorts.
