I think it would be reasonable to say that our holiday has not got off to the most flying of flyingly good starts, and I am writing these words from the back of a breakdown truck.
Something is amiss with the back axle. It may be the diff, or it may be the half shaft, or it may be simply that I did not light a candle to the Motorway Gods, which, under the circumstances, was rather remiss of me. Mark has explained his various theories about the problem, but since none of them made the least bit of sense to me I am none the wiser. We will not know for sure until he has looked at it. All I know for absolutely certain is that Mark is in the truck with the nice Pakistani gentleman, and I am by myself in the camper van on the back of it, there being only one passenger seat in the truck.
I do not mind this in the least, this shindig is a Man Thing if ever there was one, and in any case it gives me some peace and quiet and an opportunity to tell you all about it. It is very wobbly on the back of the truck, but I am not anxious, because Mark and the truck driving man organised it all nicely between them and they both knew what they were doing and will probably be friends for the rest of their lives over it. Certainly they have had some happy Male Bonding moments already.
I am very high up. The truck driver wanted to measure the camper van because the truck is big and the camper van is big and you are only allowed to be sixteen feet high if you are a truck. Fortunately the whole rig comes in at fifteen feet, so that is all right, but I thought I would be better not to travel on the top bunk, just in case.
I am not exactly sure what is going to happen to the rest of our holiday now. We are still going to have one but it will take rather more ingenuity than we had planned for. If it is one thing then Mark will be able to fix it, but if it is something else then he won’t, and so we will have to wait and see.
It has been a bit of a flat-out rush even to get here. Considering all the packing was already done it has been a very lot of faffing about. I had to go to Kendal to collect my dresses from the tailor, and Mark from the MOT station where he was abandoning his taxi. It failed, but not on anything terrible, and he will be able to fix it easily enough when we get back.
After that there was washing and conservatory-watering and hoovering and hasty fixing of all of the things that needed to be fixed before we left. We rushed around as fast as we could, and it still took us all day. I am very glad now that I took the dogs up the fells first, they would have had a terrible day otherwise.
Eventually, just as everybody else in the world was settling down for their dinner and putting their feet up, we were ready, and set off.
We got almost to the end of the motorway but not quite, and suddenly everything stopped accelerating just as we got to the junction. It was a bit of a nuisance, because you have got to stall it to stop it because Mark’s light switch improvisational ignition has finally stopped working, and we couldn’t turn the engine off, so he went round the front to disconnect something under the bonnet.
After that we rang the breakdown man and had to wait, but fortunately no interfering Traffic Officers turned up to give us Hard Words and even Harder Stares, so that was very lucky and it was not so bad.
We are going to be towed back to my parents’ house, where they will probably hardly notice a massive rusty camper van on their drive for the next month, at least I hope not.
After that we will have to contemplate our next steps.
I will keep you posted.
