I have had a woefully difficult day.
It has not all been difficult. Some of it has been quite pleasant, really, I suppose, certainly when set against the rest of it.
The dog-walk over the fells was perfectly all right, in an enormously blustery sort of way, and the laundry is finally complete and dangling limply all over the house.
The difficulty arose from a wicked act of Self Indulgence.
It was all my own fault.
I have been grumbling for ages about the absence of a warm jersey for work. I have been wearing two alternate Working Jerseys since 2015, and although they have lasted commendably well, they have become rather pointlessly thin.
It is not nice to spend the first couple of hours at work grumbling and shivering, and I have been going on at Mark about it for some time.
Mark also needed some new working jerseys. His are not only thin, they have become ragged. They are the sort of garment that is embarrassing to hang on the washing line, and need to be dried in the house.
Today I thought I would be indifferent to the expense, and go into Kendal to do some reckless cash-blowing on two new jerseys each.
This is a considerable outlay, I can jolly well tell you. They are twenty five quid each, which is why we have not done it before.
Sometimes we purchase clothes on eBay but you can finish up with all sorts of peculiar rubbish in this way, especially if you are not concentrating.
I set off for Kendal.
Kendal seemed to be having some sort of traffic difficulty. I discovered later that it was roadworks, but I sat in a queue of traffic for almost an hour, waiting for my turn at the traffic lights. In the end I got bored and diverted down a couple of back roads. Happily, it turned out that hardly anybody else had thought of that, and so I abandoned the car in the multi-storey and went off to explore TK Maxx.
I do not like shopping and so if there had not been any nice jerseys in TK Maxx I would have given up and gone home, despite the endless boring traffic wait to get there in the first place. Fortunately, as it turned out the fates were on my side, and I found four entirely suitable jerseys for the carefully-considered budget of twenty five quid each.
Actually, they weren’t. In the interests of strict accuracy I should explain that one was nineteen ninety nine, but then one was twenty nine ninety nine, so it all balanced out to my happy satisfaction. I am going to keep the twenty nine ninety nine one. It is the nicest.
I popped across the road for some bags of coffee and chai, closed my eyes firmly as I walked past Waterstones, and headed back to my car, which was when my world began to crumble, because it would not start.
The car, not the world, obviously.
It would not start at all. It turned over perfectly well, because it has got a new battery in it, but the engine would not join in.
I sat in the car park for a little while and wondered what to do, and telephoned Mark, but in the end it was perfectly obvious what I would have to do.
I had to get the bus home.
I have been on a bus before, but it was a long time ago, and I am entirely in agreement with the chap who said that if public transport does not make you ambitious to succeed, then nothing will.
Buses have not improved since my last journey on one. They smell peculiar, are full of the sort of people you think perhaps you might like not to talk to, there is no first class or refreshment trolley, and all of the windows were inexplicably jammed open. This might be perfectly all right in August but in a howling February gale it seemed to be a peculiar choice.
It was quite interesting to see the world from a new vantage point, because of course I sat upstairs, there is no point in going on a bus and sitting downstairs, you might as well get the complete Public Transport Immersive Experience. I could see in through people’s bedroom windows and over their garden fences, and I looked with great interest. There are some very untidy people living in the Lake District. I had always thought Mark was messy, but I can tell you that he pales into insignificance beside some of the oiks on the bus route.
I am now home, and waiting for Mark to return from work in order that we can go and tow the stupid thing out.
I will have to tell you about that bit tomorrow.
