Miracle

I am having a Weekend Off.

Obviously I am still at work, some things cannot be avoided, but Mark has come home, and he is doing so many things for me that I have taken advantage of the excuse and enjoyed a very fine shirk.

He has brought firewood and emptied the dogs, combining the two activities very neatly, because of chucking the dogs out of the taxi on the last bit of road before the farm for them to belt along behind for the last mile. We have a yard full of beautiful split logs, smelling gloriously of resin. The dogs have been so busy hunting rats and rabbits in the field that they have been absolutely exhausted when they have returned and have spent the rest of the day fast asleep on their cushion in front of the glowing log fire, stretched out and snoring and being no trouble whatsoever.

This has meant that I have not been anywhere near the fells. Instead we have stayed in bed late in the mornings instead of needing to crawl out wearily in order to get on with the day, which has been the way of things over the last few days of my solitude. Everything is very much easier when there two people are doing things.

The late mornings have been gloriously idle, and I am beginning to feel quite refreshed. We made coffee and took it back to bed this morning. When I am going for a walk over the fells I can’t do this because there are no available bathroom facilities suitable for an elderly bladder, but Mark is taking the dogs out at the moment, and being a gentleman does not suffer from such limitations, and so it had been all right.

Hence this morning Mark went downstairs and raked out the fire and made coffee, much to the rapturous excitement of the dogs. They are allowed to join us on the bed when we do this, albeit on the top of an extremely large protective towel, because they are smelly. They expressed their delight with a rather noisy bout of wrestling-and-ear-gnawing until we got fed up of not being able to drink our coffee and obliged them to desist.

After that we did not emerge until one o’clock this afternoon, which sounds less shocking if I add that we did not get into bed until six, because of the Saturday night cash-raising adventures. These turned out to be a lot more adventurous than we had intended, and almost disastrous, because at about ten o’clock I was driving along a street not far from ours when there was a shocking bang, and the taxi shuddered all over.

I had no idea what this might be. There had been nothing noticeable in the road, apart from an unexceptional sort of pothole, but even that had hardly been sufficiently objectionable to cause such a hideous impact.

I dropped the customer off and leaped out to see if there had been any damage.

My nostrils were instantly assailed by the horrible smell of diesel.

It was pouring out from underneath the taxi at a great rate.

I jumped back in and hurtled home at high speed, calling Mark as I drove. He came dashing home from the other direction, and a few minutes later we were in the alley at the back of the house with an old washing up bowl shoved underneath the leak, and Mark was peering up at it with a head torch.

Apparently diesel makes a little journey of its own en route from the fuel tank to the engine, taking in a minor detour via a miniature cooling radiator on its leisurely way.

The pipes into this, and the radiator itself, had all been crushed and severed.

Fortunately Mark has spent the last few weeks mending a leaking oil rig, and so a clapped out taxi is small potatoes in comparison. He shoved a bung into the leak and hunted in his shed for something to fix it.

He is very clever.

He found a bit of old copper gas pipe and shoved the leaking bits into each end of it. He wound a bit of tape around the whole lot and miraculously the leak desisted. Then he clipped it all up underneath the taxi and covered the spilled diesel with sawdust.

We rushed off back to work.

To my very great relief the whole thing held together, and all was well.

We went back to the road where the accident happened afterwards a to see if we could see what might have caused it. It was easy to see exactly where it had happened because there was a long trail of leaked diesel from that point, as if Hansel and Gretl had accidentally eaten all their sandwiches instead of crumbling them into their pockets, and had nicked a handy-looking can out of the back of their father’s garage as a substitute. All the same, despite some determined searching, we could not see any impediment that might have been responsible, and in the end were obliged to give up.

It was something so lethally sinister that it has cut a hole through the floor of the taxi.

I could not contain my horror at what might have happened had Mark not been home. The fuel tank had been full, and I would not have had a container sufficiently large in which to collect it. I would have spent my whole night in a stinking mess of diesel, emptying it out of a washing-up bowl. After that I would have been off the road until he came home again.

Instead of that awful fate, I have a taxi which still goes, we have earned some money for going on holiday next week, and I am not exhausted and covered in diesel, but well-rested and bright in a house which is smelling wonderfully of hyacinths and daffodils.

Truly the Gods have been very kind to us.

I hope they don’t get bored with it.

I have got the job interview tomorrow.