Spin Dryer

It is almost midnight and I have only just started writing this.

It is very nearly tomorrow.

Of course I am on the taxi rank, and I seem to have had a very busy evening, which for a Sunday night in February is impressive.

Regrettably I haven’t been busy earning money all night, although of course that has been happening in between times. In fact I have been busy buying a spin dryer on eBay.

We have been wanting a spin dryer for ages. This is related to the horrible dirty overall difficulty which resulted in the new washing machine that Mark has not yet got around to plumbing in to his workshop.

This is the thing that you have got to do when you are a person who mends cars. When you have finished, you take off your revolting oil-shiny blackened overalls and then dump them overnight in a large tub of cleaning stuff, which is called Jeyser. This gets the oil out so that the next day you can wash them and they will become a clean colour and smell much better, and your wife will not make you get undressed in the garden before you are allowed in the house.

The problem with this is that a tub full of Jeyser will cost about fifty quid, so the thing to do is to use it again and again until it is so unpleasantly oily you could use it for running your central heating.

In order to accomplish this the thing to do is to be able to spin the Jeyser out of the overalls and back into the tub. This is why we need a spinner.

We have bought one on eBay this evening for £17.50.

The difficulty with buying spin dryers is that nobody wants to post them, because they are too big to fit handily into an envelope or into a post box. The second difficulty is that nobody in the Lake District seemed to be selling one on eBay, possibly because half of the Lake District still thinks they are state of the art technology and much better than that old mangle: and in which case would be very unlikely to be selling things on eBay anyway.

The spin dryer that we have bought is not in the Lake District. It is not even close. It is in Peterborough, which is on the other side of the world.

By a happy chance of fate I have got an aunt in Peterborough.

Of course there is a protocol for doing these things in families. I did not phone my aunt, who would have been so astonished to hear from me that an awful lot of explaining and subsequent pointless asking about cousins etc would have had to be done. In any case this would have been an irrelevant courtesy since I know perfectly well from Facebook how my cousins are getting on, and also it is hard work explaining to a surprised elderly person over the telephone that somebody is getting in your taxi and you are about to hang up abruptly half way through a sentence.

I phoned the Windermere Diaries Appreciation Society and asked if they would telephone my aunt and ask her to collect the dryer.

My father agreed that they would do this, and I emailed the seller to ask for his address.

He emailed it back.

I called the Windermere Diaries Appreciation Society to tell them the collection address.

They thought this would be all right.

I emailed the seller to explain that my aunt would be collecting it and would he please help her load it in to her car.

He emailed back to say that if we liked he would drop it in at her house tomorrow at four forty five.

I emailed back to say how kind I thought that was and telephoned the Windermere Diaries Appreciation Society to see if my aunt would be in.

Unsurprisingly they had not got the first idea about my aunt’s social arrangements for Monday afternoons, and what was more my father had got to get up from his armchair to go and hunt for her address and postcode, which made him grumble.

After some discussion they thought they would disturb my aunt even though it was the middle of the night by now, and ask if she might be in tomorrow afternoon.

I emailed the chap with the dryer and gave him my aunt’s address.

Mark went to sit in his own car to find out what YouTube had got to say about applying a new cam belt to a Renault Megane, because he said that my life was giving him a headache and perhaps we could just buy a new dryer.

My father telephoned to say that my aunt was going to get her hair cut tomorrow afternoon but thought that she would be back for quarter to five, and if I needed any more help in organising my life would I kindly ask somebody else.

I am pleased to announce that I have now thoroughly bought a spin dryer, and am entirely free to turn my attention to writing my diary.