We have got the camper van back at home.
It is not quite in its usual place, because there was another car parked there, but it is pretty close, and as soon as the tourists have gone we will be able to return it to its usual spot, and all will once again be well.
It won’t exactly be well, because it still needs a lot of work doing to it. It needs a handbrake cable and a lot of welding, but it is such a relief to have it back at home that these things almost seem incidental. It is here, and it can be driven, and that is the important thing.
We have been down to my mother’s to fetch it. This has taken up most of the day.
Of course I took the dogs out over the fells first, although it was a considerably shortened walk because we were starting to get late. Instead of my usual lengthy amble, I walked over the first fell and up to the top of the second, and then instead of taking the lengthy walk around them both to arrive back home, I just trotted down on the far side and met Mark.
He had gone to the farm to see if he could get his compressor to work, and so he just waited until I turned up and we went home together in the car. This felt like a huge cheat but it would only have been a downhill cheat so it didn’t matter very much really.
He didn’t get his compressor to work. Several years in a rusty trailer did not seem to have improved it.
I would not let him take it home and put it in his shed. He took it directly to his uncle’s scrap metal yard. We will purchase another compressor next time he gets paid.
In any case he got the motor for this one out of somebody’s old fridge. It has seen better days.
Once we had resolved the compressor difficulty we set off for my mother’s house, and found her getting cross with the Pensions Department. They seem to have borrowed the Inland Revenue’s Customer Service department, that is to say, one that works from home and is too busy baking sourdough bread and shoving the children in front of Peppa Pig, actually to answer the telephone.
They had not been answering the telephone for the last hour.
In the end we found their address and wrote them a letter. We posted it, in the properly old-fashioned thorough way of communicating with Government departments, and I got the man behind the counter to record it so that they will have no excuse whatsoever.
I hope somebody turns up to their office to collect the post every now and again.
My father always did the administration. A new world of infuriatingly inept officialdom has just opened up for my mother, and it is not improved by its novelty value. I hope our newly installed beloved leaders can improve things, although I am not holding my breath. My experience of socialist governance, most especially in France, has been a level of official indifference and petty bureaucracy that is almost impossible to explain to a resident of a capitalist country. In those days in France you had to take a day off from work when you purchased a new car. This was because the paperwork had to be completed in person at the central office in the nearest city, and the queueing took all day. The only positive part of it was that employers expected you would have to take a day off, and although they did not like it, they weren’t allowed to sack anybody or dock their wages, so quite a few people took the following day off as well, as a recovery process.
We spent much of the rest of the day exploring the computer. My father’s computer is identical to mine, but he has inexplicably filled it with so many peculiar ways of doing things that I just can’t work it out, and we spent most of the rest of the day scowling at it and jabbing at buttons, hopefully, whilst Mark bashed away at the camper van in the drive.
In the end it was finished, and my mother cooked a large and satisfactory dinner which we ate before we chugged back up the motorway.
It was a horrible journey.
The heater in my car stopped working.
Mark is going to have to fix it tomorrow. By the time I got home I was so cold I could hardly speak
It looks as though it might be some time before he gets around to the poor camper van.
