We are recovered.
Our Bank Holiday PTSD is slowly beginning to fade, and already is little more than a vague memory.
This has been helped along by having emptied the yard today.
It wasn’t just the yard. The dustbins in the alley were doing a very poor job indeed at shielding all of the car-disaster debris from public view. Mark had tried to shunt them into the way so that nobody, by which actually I mean the traffic wardens, would notice the pile of radiators and bonnets, all stacked neatly around the centrepiece of the engine still dangling off the crane. I suspect they might have noticed if they looked hard enough, but at least the dustbins provided a little temporary camouflage.
He piled it all into the back of my taxi, and we went to Kendal. He went off to dispose of it all and to talk about engines at his uncle’s scrapyard. I have only minimal interest in engines, possibly even less than that, so I went to the coffee shop to replenish our terribly dwindled supplies of tea.
I shall need the tea for Cambridge next week. Studying is not nearly as much fun without a plentiful supply of tea. I was very tempted by a beautiful new teapot on eBay last week, but it is now out of my price bracket, and so it will have to remain a hopeless dream. I told Mark about it several times, in the hope that he would say Never Mind The Overdraft, but he didn’t, which I am reluctantly forced to admit was the wisest course of action.
It is probably the only course of action at the moment, our finances having been temporarily flattened, like the electronic green line you see in films next to people in hospital, which inevitably blips a few times before becoming irretrievably horizontal with a tragically whining noise just after the person in bed says I Always Loved You, and then you are tearful for the poor widow or parents or whoever it was. I do not know if they have these in banks as well, but if they did then our account would be there.
Probably the bank account would say I Always Wanted A New Teapot just before the flat line. That would certainly be a tragedy to me.
In any case, it does not really matter all that much, taxi driving being like the white-faced nurse and the handsome consultant in the next scene, who dash noisily in with the paddles and shout: No, wait, I’ve got a response. All we have to do is hang about here for long enough, and eventually, one way or another, we will be blipping merrily again.
In fact I am feeling quite pleased with our world. After we had been to Kendal Mark loaded the engine crane and the engine stand and took them off to the farm, leaving me to put the shopping away and write my story. He has had the engine crane dumped in the back yard leaving rust-marks on my washing for months now, and I am very pleased indeed to see it depart.
All in all the outcome is splendid.The yard is tidy, at least by Mark’s standards, and we are unlikely to be prosecuted for littering the alley, which is also pleasing. My story is progressing nicely, and I am about to go on and write a little more. I want to get it finished before I go to Cambridge, although it is looking a bit unlikely at the moment.
We are earning some more money and we have refilled the tea caddy. Nobody passing our house would ever have even the smallest inkling of the terrible misfortunes which have happened there this week. He has even scattered sawdust all over the oil slick, to be swept up in a day or two when it has thoroughly absorbed the oil.
Everything is all right.
Better still, next Sunday I will be off to Cambridge.
I might even be able to start feeling excited.
