Oliver has been fixing his car.
You might recall that the brake caliper had seized and was becoming hot and troubling. Brakes are useful assets to vehicles, and although we managed without them on the camper van for a great deal of the time, we would prefer it if Oliver’s car had a complete collection.
I have not been very helpful. I have occasionally popped outside in order to hover about next to him making incompetent suggestions and feeling relieved that it is not actually my problem.
He was obliged to give up for the night after one bolt proved particularly recalcitrant, and it went dark, so he is going to have to try again tomorrow. Jack has volunteered to come and help him if he gets really stuck, which I thought was the most magnificently generous offer, because Jack and Lucy live miles away, we are so fortunate to have such a splendid family.
I have mostly left him to it, because it has been Clean Sheets Day, and I had to take Guffy the kitten for another visit to the vet.
Her last visit was not exactly a rip-roaring success, and this one was hardly an improvement. I was trying to persuade the vet that she is in possession of at least functional good health, and that she is living a life of good fortune and thoughtful nurture, but Guffy was having none of it. She was absolutely terrified, and did the thing that cats do when they want you to think that they are not worth attacking because actually they have already died. She buried her nose in my jersey and went limp.
It was a different vet this time.
What a cuddly little soul she is, the new vet said, obviously talking about some other creature than the lightning-fast savage murderous killing machine with which the misfortunate dogs have become so familiar.
I unhooked her claws from my clothes, earning myself a brief, and bitter, glare, and pinned her down for the vet to stick the needle in her, which she ignored as if it had not happened, in order that we would not guess that she wasn’t actually dead. Then the vet tried very hard to persuade me to spend a great deal of money on a Cat Healthcare plan, which would enable me to spend twice as much on cat welfare as I actually intended to spend, but which would entitle me to a reduced-price chat with a veterinary nurse every year, presumably to find out why I persisted in bringing a dead cat back to the surgery.
I declined, politely, paid the already extortionate bill and we departed.
I released her back into the conservatory and an onlooker could have been forgiven for imagining that the vet had actually given her a quick sniffle of cocaine instead of some worming drops, because her energy returned in a blaze of traumatised fury, and she killed everything, from the dogs’ tails to the battered, often-slaughtered cat lure.
In fact I had not been too concerned about the colossal vet bill, because as it had turned out I had had a stroke of good fortune the night before.
I had just been contemplating abandoning the taxi rank in favour of sloping off to bed when a large gentleman with a huge mass of dreadlocks appeared next to the taxi, and requested, in a distinctly London accent, that I convey him to the police station in Kendal, immediately.
Of course I agreed, with some pleasure, Kendal is a jolly good fare, especially at late-night rates, and he smoked a cigarette and got in.
It turned out that he and his girlfriend had, rather inexplicably to my mind, driven up from London for the day, and had been intending to drive back now, late at night as it was.
They had gone back to their car and his girlfriend had mistakenly climbed into the driver’s seat, intoxicated as she was. This was, he assured me, a complete error, because they had intended that he would be the driver, he having gallantly offered to do so in order that she could drink as much as she liked with a clear conscience.
She had just started the engine, again mistakenly, obviously, when the police appeared and tapped on the window, having been summoned by concerned bar staff in the pub. They breathalysed her and discovered that she was very intoxicated indeed, so they arrested her.
Her boyfriend explained, in the expectation of some sympathy, that he had been going to drive, and it had simply been a minor error on their part.
They breathalysed him then, and discovered that he was over the limit as well. They said that they were not going to arrest him, since he hadn’t been about to drive anywhere, but they were not going to return the car keys to him.
They took his girlfriend and the car keys away in the police van and left him hovering beside the road, simmering with rage at such an unjust turn of events, and unsure about what to do next.
Then fortuitously, he spotted my taxi, and decided to go to Kendal to see if he could rescue her.
Being from London he would not believe that there was absolutely nowhere open for the purchase of cigarettes and a bottle of water. I could do nothing about the cigarettes, but explained that here in the north we have water in the taps, and the police station would probably supply him with some.
He was unconvinced, and insisted that we went to the one garage in the area which was still open, which involved a long, and very costly, detour.
He bemoaned the injustice of the nit-picking northern police force for the whole way, and I made lots of sympathetic noises whilst feeling remarkably pleased with my good fortune.
He paid me with several twenty pound notes peeled from a surprisingly substantial roll in his wallet, and I suggested that once he had managed to spring his girlfriend they might consider booking in to the Premier Inn across the road from the police station, since their car was miles away and they were too intoxicated to drive it in any case.
Then I left him, determined to tackle the cruelty and unfairness of the northern police force.
I have crossed Copper off my list of things I would like to do when I grow up.
