Not being stopped on the motorway

Well, the day started with more exciting camper van musings.

We occupied our morning coffee thinking about design ideas. After a little while, and some busy sketching and frowning, we had decided to move the kitchen to the other side of the van.

All of this does not sound very important, but it needs to be sorted out now, because we are going to be putting the floor down soon, and with it must go the wiring and the pipework. We do not want to lay the floor and immediately change our minds about a waste outlet and have to take it up again.

Eventually we started looking at the computer.

Goodness, the mighty Internet is selling some wonderful things.

An hour later we had purchased a beautiful gold kitchen sink, which sprays water across it as well as down into it out of the tap, and which has all manner of exciting accessories, like a water purifier and a squirty bit which you fill with washing up liquid and thus avoid anybody knowing whether you have purchased the upmarket brand-name or just the supermarket’s own cheapskate rubbish. It is all very well having a camper van which looks like the Orient Express, but you would not want a Budget Bargain Economy Size Bottle of washing up liquid perched beside your Royal Crown Derby Old Imari plates and cut glass decanter.

We had got to stop there because of needing to do other things, Mark had a car to fix and I had to go to the Post Office and take the dogs out, but we have almost purchased some other magnificent treasures, and indeed we will be purchasing them tomorrow morning.

There is a wonderful black and gold sink for the bathroom. It is etched into a magnificent stunning pattern, and to go with it there is a gold tap shaped like a swan. I was absolutely breathless with excitement at seeing the latter, and although Mark laughed a bit, he was very brave, and agreed that it would be lovely, especially after I had hunted through a collection of other taps, shaped like dolphins and lions and all sorts of other wonderful wildlife. By the end of that lot he seemed to feel that a swan was getting off lightly and agreed that it would be exactly what we needed.

I showed Oliver later, but he just said witheringly that he thought we were designing the Orient Express, not Trump Tower.

I was pleased to think that perhaps Donald Trump and I share our eclectic good taste.

After that Mark went to work, and I did the dog things and then set about cleaning the house, which has had some heavy grubbying this week, I can promise you.

I had not finished when the phone rang some hours later.

It was Mark, explaining that the children were having a difficulty.

Lucy and Jack were on their way to us, in both of their cars because of having some issues that needed repairing in both of them, and they had misfortunately broken down on the motorway.

They were stuck.

Obviously we had got to go and rescue them.

This turned into an Adventure.

We both went down in Mark’s car because we expected that we would have to tow Lucy’s car back. This was not our top favourite thing to do, because you are not really supposed to tow clapped out cars for hundreds of miles up the motorway, so we thought he might try to fix it first.

He did fix it, sort of.

We jammed a gallon container on top of the water tank to catch the water that was bubbling out of it. Then he sawed a hole in the container with a hacksaw and taped it all down with a lot of gaffer tape. He had to take the bonnet off then because the water container stuck up about a foot above where the bonnet might be expected to be.

We put the bonnet in the back of my car.

We set off then, with me following Lucy’s car and Jack following me.

We had to stop several times to put more water in.

Lucy said that there was a special traffic offence called Being A Twat On The Motorway, which policemen might nick you for if they couldn’t think of anything else that fitted, and that we might get caught for that if we weren’t careful, but we didn’t, so that was all right.

We started off in convoy, but after a while Jack’s gearbox packed up, and he could only drive in third gear, so he chugged past Lucy and Mark and their frequent hydration stops and just went straight back to the shed, making the most of his car whilst it was still going because it very nearly wasn’t. I got lost once, but in the end it all worked out all right and we all made it back to the shed.

Nobody was arrested and we made it home.

It was almost midnight by the time we got back to our house.

Mark said that we had gone past some traffic policemen who had turned round and looked the other way.

Lucy said that the police do that sometimes.

It doesn’t matter. We have made it back.

Mark and Jack are going to go and fix the cars tomorrow.

I am going to buy a bathroom sink whilst they do it.