Just when you thought that the Money Gods had got bored of hitting you with their disaster stick.
We had to call Lucy’s car insurance this morning to change her details. This was because you can’t get a permit to park your car at Lucy’s house unless you tell the council your name, address, date of birth, hip measurements, glasses prescription, National Insurance Number, name of your first pet, and then prove it all.
They wanted to see her insurance documents with her updated address on them.
We had parked there last night on the advice of the late night traffic warden, who told us that we would be all right until ten in the morning, which turned out to be untrue, and by half past eight we had a parking ticket.
The council were unsympathetic about this, although they did say that in that case we need not bother to get a parking permit, as the vast sum they were going to extract from us for the fine would cover parking for the rest of the day.
Mark went out to the camper van at two minutes past nine and discovered another traffic warden writing a second ticket.
That one was persuaded to relent, but we thought that we had better get Lucy’s car permitted pretty jolly quickly.
The insurance company agreed to send us the documents and charged us five hundred quid. This, they explained cheerily, covered changing her address and occupation details, and allowing her to use her car to drive to work.
I will repeat that again in case anybody missed it, five hundred quid.
How grateful we were.
We are not just broke, we are smashed to bits. We are in a thousand fragments and twitching on the floor. We are so broke that we could not even be repossessed.
The council charged Lucy a tenner to park her car whilst they thought about issuing a permit, and eventually we were sorted out.
After that the rest of the day was a doddle.
Mark and Lucy bashed her new bed together, and I cleaned up and tried to get the scanner working.
It is so warm in the south. I mean really warm. We had the door open. and the windows open, and the dogs lay on the floor and sighed, hotly.
All of my clothes are too warm for this weather. I have not needed my vest or my sheepskin boots at all.
In the end we were tidy and organised, and retreated to our parking-ticketed camper van for a cup of tea. We could have had a cup of tea in Lucy’s house, but we had all had enough of strange new places and wanted to be in our own travelling home again.
Once we had become restored we thought that it would be nice to find out where we were. We peeled off as many clothes as we decently could and went to explore.
Northampton is not very much like Windermere.
We were overwhelmed with the curiosity of it.
There are dozens of little supermarkets selling things from everywhere in the world.
There was a Polish one, selling cheese and sausage, and an African one, selling yams and bananas. These were not at all like English bananas, they were oddly shaped, and black. Some were enormous, more than a foot long, and others were tiny, peculiarly shaped knots of bananas no bigger than little curly toes. There were Jamaican shops and Indian shops and Kurdish shops, and the air was rich with the overwhelming scents of spices, mingling with the heavy, ever-present wafts of cannabis.
We looked and looked. We looked at butchers selling halal goat meat, and at frozen prawns as big as mice. There was bread laced with chilli and coconut lassi and a milk drink with fennel seeds, and a shop selling hot food that smelled so wonderful that even though we had just eaten our fill of sausages and smoked cheese and rosemary crackers, we all longed to eat some.
There were saris and drums and tattoo parlours and hairdressers and vaping shops. I thought that at least this was going to be an interesting place to be in the police, because just about everybody looked like a drug dealer in a made-for-TV drama.
In the end the sun started to sink, and we all knew that it was time to go.
We left her behind.
We left our little girl in the big scary city, among the Rastafarians and the Sikhs and the drug dealers and the loud music and the steaming, sticky heat.
I cried.
Obviously I did not cry whilst I was saying goodbye. That would have been a rubbish thing to do. I hugged her and told her that it would be brilliant, and then left her in her tiny house, bravely furnished with oddments and cast offs and other people’s unwanted things.
We waved goodbye and once I got round the corner my eyes started to leak, and carried on all the way to Tesco.
They leaked again after Tesco, because I spoke to Number One Daughter, and she was feeling weary and out of sorts with the world.
I had woken up this morning seized with a terrible panic about Number Two Daughter, who has no pension arrangement in place, and sent her a message even before we had coffee, to suggest that she does something about it.
She rang me back later, and could hear her eyes rolling all the way from Australia.
I wrote to Oliver, who has got homesickness this week, to tell him that we thought he was ace, and doing just fine.
The email back said, rather sadly: thank you.
I wish I could make all their lives better.
They are all so jolly brave.
Have a picture of Lucy’s house. We have not got home. The motorway is closed so we have parked at the side of the road to sleep until it reopens tomorrow. There are trucks thundering past us, presumably glad to be out of the hours and hours of waiting.
Home tomorrow.
