I am not at work.
It has been a bit of a Day.
My taxi is not working.
Things started to go wrong at about eleven o’clock last night. I was miles away in Hawkshead when all of the red lights flashed up on the dashboard with an instruction to STOP, which I didn’t.
The car chugged helplessly. I coaxed it and eased it and finally managed to persuade it to get home.
I put some oil in it, which is usually the source of most of its troubles, but it wasn’t that.
Then I got my diagnostic machine out and cleared the fault codes, but it wasn’t them either.
Oliver came out and helped, and said that he thought it might be the spark plugs.
After a little while the diagnostic machine thought so as well.
It was dark, as it usually is in the middle of the night, so we abandoned the project until morning.
Oliver took us to the bottom of the fell in his car in the morning, and we stumped around the dog walk together, contemplating spark plugs.
When we got back we started to investigate in earnest.
The sight of the wiring sparked a vague memory*, and I recalled that some similar problem had happened before. Oliver wanted to know what the outcome had been, but beyond saying: Well, Daddy fixed it of course, I had no idea.
Mark rings me three times daily, the first time at lunchtime. Today, of course, turned out to be the first time in his offshore career when he did not, and by the time he eventually rang, we were deep under the bonnet and covered in oil, yanking desperately on recalcitrant bolts and trying to work out how the wires had been clipped on.
He explained what he thought we should do. The dismantling of the electrical bits and the removal of the coils proved to be challenging, not least because all of the importantly vital tools had been dumped in the shed at Burneside, about six miles away, and in the end we abandoned my taxi and went over to collect them.
We remembered on the way that Guffy had another appointment to see the vet, and so when we had collected the tools, I dived into the house to abduct her.
This turned out to be easier than anticipated, because she was asleep on the sofa.
She knew as soon as she saw the car where we were going, and gave a little wail of horror before becoming limp, in a tragically despairing sort of way, in anticipation.
The vet looked at her limp form with some concern. Guffy buried her face in my elbow and mewed, piteously. Then she collapsed limply, as though the spark of life had been extinguished
Honestly, I said, she’s a healthy cat apart from her poo problem. It’s just that she doesn’t like coming to the vet.
The vet furrowed his brow and poked her unresisting corpse-like form a bit. He said, without much optimism, that he had known some kittens get better occasionally, but without doing tests we would not know what the problem was. I pointed out that tests cost a couple of hundred quid, and the problem couldn’t actually be fixed even if they knew for sure what it was, so there didn’t seem much point.
The vet concurred, without enthusiasm, and gave her an injection and some more worming tablets.
Then it was back to the car.
The diagnostic machine said there was a wiring problem on Circuit One, so we looked on YouTube to see which was Circuit One, and took it apart.
We cleaned the wiring, we cleaned the spark plug, we made sure the connection was good, and replaced it.
When that didn’t work we took the coil out and exchanged it with the coil on Circuit Two, to see if the coil was faulty.
That didn’t work either.
We cleaned it all again and screwed it all back together to no avail.
Eventually we rang Jack, who was in Loughborough rescuing other people who had broken down, and who opined that the problem was that my engine was in back to front, and that in fact Circuit One was the one at the other end.
Armed with this information we started the whole process again at the other end, and eventually fixed it.
The lights went out and the car ran smoothly.
We rushed about getting ready for work then, and the phone rang with somebody wanting me to go out and do a taxi pick up.
I was halfway to Grasmere when it started coughing and spluttering again.
I deposited my customer and eased it back home, where Oliver and I tore the wiring out in great haste. This time it was one of the other spark plugs, which would not come out. It just turned and turned as we fought with it.
Mark was on the telephone, and told us to stand clear of the engine and turn the ignition on.
There was a small, but nevertheless businesslike explosion, and the top half of the spark plug fired out as excitingly as if we were pro-Palestine gender-indecisive immigrants with a clear view of Donald Trump.
Fortunately nobody’s windows were in the way.
The bottom half of the spark plug was still stuck in the hole.
Oliver was late for work by then, and had to rush off, leaving me to clear up, in an unemployed sort of way.
Mark called later, and under his detailed and patient instruction I managed to get the bottom of the spark plug out, but it still would not go.
I ordered some new spark plugs from Autoparts, and gave up.
I have spent the evening doing everything that I have not got round to all the rest of the day.
We will try again tomorrow.
*Pun intended. I thought it might be a good idea to point it out in case anybody thought I was just short of vocabulary.
