Goodness, as if this week had not already had its share of calamities.
We have had a calamitous calamity, disastrous disaster, it has been a difficult sort of weekend, the sort where you need headache tablets.
To begin at the beginning.
Things started to go wrong on Friday night when Mark started to have trouble with his taxi. The Lake District was full of people. It has been hot and close and still, and there were people everywhere, milling about in the roads and spilling off the pavements and generally getting sticky with ice-cream and spilled beer and unaccustomed exercise.
About halfway through all of this, Mark’s taxi developed a fault. It was not a new fault, it was a fault it has had on and off for ages, with the tiresome electronic body control unit.
This is a gadget which is fitted to a vehicle by manufacturers in conjunction with the drug companies and the banks, the idea being that its malfunction first leads to stress-related illness, followed by massive expenditure. It has no other function. We know that this is true, because the camper van does not have one, and everything on that works perfectly well without it.
It controls everything useful on your car. It controls the windscreen wipers and the catch for the boot and the windows going up and down and the headlights and, in a taxi, the power supply for the meter.
Mark’s body control unit has been malfunctioning for ages, causing the boot to open at surprising random moments, the windscreen wipers to switch themselves on and refuse to go off, and just occasionally, for the car to lock him out and refuse to readmit him.
I have no idea why one might design such an addition to an engine, because it has no purpose whatsoever other than to go wrong, expensively.
We knew it was going wrong, and have bought a second hand replacement. You cannot just fit this to a car, however. It has got to be re-programmed to your own specific vehicle, either by the manufacturers at a cost of six hundred quid, or by the youth from the petrol station with an interest in cars and computers, who has organised some software on his laptop that will do it.
We have not had time to take the taxi off the road for long enough for him to do this, and so we haven’t.
On Friday night Mark’s body control unit began to play up terribly. It switched the windscreen wipers on and off, locked and unlocked the doors, and eventually started turning the engine off at important moments. Then finally, at about nine o’clock, it started turning the meter off, so that he was taking customers miles and miles away and discovering that he had only earned four quid.
Customers are not amenable to being told that things are more expensive than they appear to be, I can tell you, and the result was that Friday night was not very lucrative at all. It is illegal to charge a customer more than the meter price, and most of them know this.
We called the youth from the garage on Saturday morning, but he had dropped his laptop in a puddle and did not think he was going to be able to do anything for a few days.
In consequence, we occupied much of Saturday reading about body control units on the mighty Internet.
Mark reset it as well as he could, and we went to work, with a tow rope in the boot in case everything went wrong and I had to come and rescue him.
Fortunately it held together. The reset seemed to have worked, and the car carried on, the windscreen wipers swishing about at unexpected moments, but the engine only died a couple of times, and the meter, mostly, worked.
Then at ten o’clock disaster struck.
The battery light came on on my taxi, and ten minutes later my night was over. I limped back as well as I could, with neither steering nor very much in the way of headlights, reversing into the blackness of the alley from memory alone.
The alternator had stopped working.
Readers, it was not a good moment. Saturday night on a hot summer weekend is practically dripping with taxi gold, and would have paid off the credit card, which I recklessly emptied when all of our vehicles needed taxing last week.
Mark drove, anxiously, to the Penrith scrapyard today to purchase another. Another alternator, not credit card, obviously, although it might have been better if he had. As he brought it back, the heavens opened. The skies crashed and flashed with a very thrilling thunderstorm, and the rain pounded down as if God had changed his mind about where he wanted to put the sea.
Even Mark could not mend a car in that weather, and so I am still immobile even as I write. Mark has taken his collapsing taxi off to work, with everything crossed for it to keep chugging along, full of people who are too fat or too drunk to walk, and I am marooned here, staring out at the night and wishing I could be out in it.
I do not at all like being obliged to stay at home. I sometimes think I do not at all like my job, until for some reason I can’t do it, and then I realise that I want to do it very much indeed.
Tomorrow. Things will get better tomorrow.
Fingers crossed.
