Knowing y

Last night ground to a halt unexpectedly early.

I was chugging along the road to the nightclub when there was a sudden alarming bang under the bonnet, followed by a hideous grinding noise.

I drove on to the pavement and stopped.

Fortunately it wasn’t raining. 

On a dry evening this sort of event serves as a magnet for taxi drivers, and we stood about watching and making encouraging comments as Mark crawled about underneath it, squinting in the light of the torch on his phone, trying to work out what had gone wrong.

It turned out to be a broken spring. 

This is a large important mechanism, responsible for keeping the car off the ground. Its snapping was not good news for this particular task.

The spring was sticking into the side of the tyre, so it would be possible to drive backwards without damaging the tyre, but not forwards.

I reversed through the car park and all the way along the road to the parking spaces, where we dumped it, and Mark took me home. 

He only did one job after I went, so that was all right.

This morning he rang Autoparts and ordered a new spring, which they delivered shortly after we got up. He said that it might have been broken for some time, which would account for some of the interesting eccentricities that the steering had developed. The bang was the whole thing coming out of its mounting with the consequence that the engine fell down.

He spent the rest of the day on the road to the nightclub, bashing the old spring out and then nailing the new one in.

I did not help. I stayed at home with Oliver and helped him to do his homework.

He has got some Common Entrance maths papers to do, and requested some moral support. You are supposed to complete one in an hour, but it took the two of us most of the day. It has become abundantly clear that I am not likely to be offered a place at Eton either.

They were awfully complicated. There were lots of the sort of thing with x on both sides of the equation. One, answers on a postcard, please, was: 

 y – 9 = 5y + 3.

I still don’t know what y is, and just for the record, it is a waste of time asking Siri, Apple’s helpful speaking computer. Siri is easily as thick as we are and will not be going to Eton either. In fact, he didn’t even make a decent effort at it. When asked, because I had forgotten, how you work out the area of a circle, he replied, kindly: “Working out is good for you. I’m there to help you work out at any time.”

Oliver and I stared at it in disbelief, before closing the lid firmly. I think we are a long way away from robots taking over the world. 

We ploughed our way through plotting points on graphs and calculating wages for trawlermen, until in the end we had finished it. Oliver threw down his pencil in relief and dived off to eat tuck and murder zombies, and I set off upstairs to clean the bathroom.

Fortunately I was temporarily saved from this horrible fate by the telephone ringing. It was Number Two Daughter, calling from Japan.

I have been obliged to inform both Numbers One and Two Daughters of their potential to inherit Hard To Spell Disease. Number One Daughter listened patiently, but does not seem to feel that she is in any danger from a build up of fat anywhere, and politely avoided commenting on my general lack of ability to be fit and eat vegetables.

Number Two Daughter was more interested, being in possession of a relatively normal lifestyle.

She was not interested in the sort of way that intends to do anything about it, of course. Actually, because it was not the middle of the afternoon in Japan, she was somewhat tipsy.

She is, it turns out, having the most magnificently wonderful time in Japan. Now that she has become extra-qualified, her wages have gone up, she is teaching the other instructors, and people are making requests to be given private lessons by her. This costs people a very lot of cash, and she is very pleased indeed to discover that her accumulated snowboarding wisdom is valued so highly.

All in all, she was gurglingly, cheerily, elatedly happy with her life, which pleased me very much. It is splendid to hear one’s offspring having such a magnificently good time.

Also she is earning lots of cash, and so I have moved her up the list of children likely to support me in my old age.

Attached is a picture of her at work.

PS. Answers on Facebook will be fine.

PPS. Mark fixed the car. I am at work.