Well, that didn’t seem to take long.
The holiday is over, and I am back on the taxi rank.
I am not, however, back without Mark. It has turned out that the weather is so completely rubbish in Aberdeen that helicopters are not going anywhere, and so he is staying at home for another week. If the weather improves then he will go north next Thursday instead.
It is nice to have him still at home, although not without its disadvantages.
I was expecting everybody to have buzzed off by now, and for January’s electricity bill to have diminished to almost nothing, reflecting my own careful use of resources. Fond as I am of Mark, his upkeep involves a very lot of laundry and showering and also catering.
I do not really mind this. Also his presence means that I can switch off the electric blanket when I get into bed instead of leaving it for another fifteen minutes until my toes have warmed up. Mark pretends, loyally, that he does not mind my cold feet, so I pretend to believe him.
However, I can tell you that we have occupied the holiday to its very fullest, with almost no useful results whatsoever.
We have been trying to get the van through its MOT.
It is not an ordinary MOT, like a car, or even the ordinary-with-benefits sort that a taxi has. It is a truck, and its MOT has got to be done by the mighty Ministry of Transport.
We thought that probably it would be all right, since it hasn’t actually been anywhere at all since its last test, apart from the long motorway journey up the road to our house. Mark gave it a cursory check over and said that it seemed okay, and so on Tuesday we climbed aboard and set off down the motorway, to the Ministry’s very own MOT station.
We made a holiday of it. We found a place for the dogs on top of the engine cover between our seats, which they seemed to like because it was warm, and after the MOT had to head off to Fleetwood where Mark had to have an offshore medical.
We had to wait ages for the MOT, because the testing station was running late, and the tester was not in a happy frame of mind.
He failed it.
He failed it because, he carefully explained to us, its exhaust emissions were too high. They were not too high for the law, in fact, he explained, they were well below the legal emissions limit of 3.0 at which it would normally pass, however our van has a plate on the engine explaining that it can run as low as 0.2, and so he was going to take that as the passing standard. Misfortunately, it was running at 1.8 and so it failed.
Some people, he added, just removed the plate. If it wasn’t there then it didn’t count.
We sighed, and took it away. We spent four hundred quid on new tyres, which had passed but which he had advised would be out of date in a month or two, and then we drove to Fleetwood in the horrible sleety weather for the medical.
The doctor was a lot more relaxed than the MOT inspector. He was supposed to check Mark’s teeth, which he did by flashing a torch into his open mouth and agreeing that they were definitely teeth. Mark explained that he didn’t have any notifiable diseases, wasn’t deaf, at least when people other than his wife are talking to him, and that he does not have vibration whitefinger.
The doctor nodded vaguely, stamped the paper and booted him out, because it was almost five o’clock and he wanted to go home.
Mark spent all of the next day crawling around on the frozen ground underneath the van whilst I tidied up after Christmas and tried not to set the chimney on fire as I disposed of the Christmas tree.
This morning we took the van back.
This time the plate in the engine had mysteriously fallen off. The MOT man said that it didn’t make any difference, because he remembered what it had said and so he was going to count it anyway.
It was still 1.8, and failed again. The MOT man added that some wicked rotter had passed it at its last MOT even though its emissions had been 1.8 then, somebody had been ignoring the plate on the engine and just thinking about the legal limit.
We brought it back to Windermere. We did everything we could think of. Mark took the air filter off, although it was clean, and we filled the oil with cleaning chemicals and the fuel tank with cleaning chemicals until everything smelled of chemicals, and we took it back again.
It still failed.
A truck mechanic who was hanging about waiting for his own MOT said that it smelled as though it was overfuelling. I do not know what overfuelling is, but Mark nodded sagely.
He is investigating that now.
I wondered about trying to fix it and then taking it to another MOT station, possibly one where a wicked rotter worked, but was not at all surprised to discover that this MOT station was the only one for hundreds of miles which has vacancies. Everybody else is booked up until March. Only this MOT inspector has got blanks on his job sheet.
I am trying to feel sanguine about it, although it has made for a mildly traumatic holiday.
It will be fine. I am sure that Mark will sort it out in the end.
After all, he has got another week.
