It has been a day of so many adventures that I hardly know where to start.
The day itself started inconspicuously enough. It was our last morning of waking up at home together. We were not especially sharp after occupying the preceding night with gin and tonics and chatting to our neighbour, and so we hung about in bed contemplating camper van windows and drinking coffee, probably until later than we should have done.
When we did emerge it was to faff about with the cars. The idea was that we would set off in two cars, one of which was my old taxi, which we had finally resolved to scrap because of needing the space in the shed. Also it was not worth the time necessary to fix it, since we don’t need it for anything, so we were going to drop the dogs with Elspeth, take the car to the scrapyard, and then head to Manchester.
Misfortunately, we had just left Elspeth’s when the old car, which was being driven by Mark, began to misbehave.
It kept stalling, and then refusing to restart.
Mark spent a frustrating fifteen minutes trying to fix it, to no avail, and we flapped about deciding what we should do.
I had purchased some short-term insurance for it, but we had dawdled about for so long that it only had a couple of hours left, and time was fast running out.
After some agonised consultation we belted back to Elspeth’s to borrow a tow rope.
We hitched it to the back of my car. Neither car seemed to have a towing eye, which problem Mark resolved by hacking out the old wheelchair seatbelts and creating a loop with them, and we set off.
This fast turned into the sort of story that upsetting films are made of.
First the seatbelt loops came undone, both times at horrifyingly dangerous, middle-of-the-dual-carriageway points, and once with a police car passing in the other direction.
After that the tow rope snapped. I have had to order a new one on Amazon with which we will have to appease Elspeth tomorrow.
All of the time, as Mark was crawling underneath the car in terrible peril from lots of other cars and trucks thundering towards us, the insurance was fast running out, but in the end we managed it. We have towed a lot of cars between us, and once it all held together we trundled along quite nicely.
It took ages to get to the scrap yard, but we made it with twenty minutes to spare.
I was feeling a bit sick with the excitement by then.
I was not at all sorry to reach the lovely, lovely Midland, where the very nice guest relations lady had kindly upgraded us to a suite, and left a friendly little note on the table.
After the awful, oily, lethally terrifying journey, it was like collapsing into bliss.
It was four o’clock by then, so we had cocktails in the bar, since there wasn’t any sun to show us the yardarm, and went off out for dinner.
We went to a Turkish restaurant that we like on Deansgate, and gazed happily at pictures of the glorious Topkapi Palace, resolving that once we have got a camper van again, one day we will go back there and eat fish fresh from the Golden Horn, flavoured with exotic spices from the bazaar.
The waiter messed up the order and brought us the wrong food. We were hungry and a bit intoxicated by then, and so we didn’t mind in the least, which was perfectly all right because it was all divine anyway, but the waiter was so pleased that we weren’t upset that he brought us the most splendid pudding and wouldn’t hear of being paid for it.
After that we went to the theatre, where somehow they had messed up our tickets as well. We sat down, and somebody else came along and told us we were in their seats.
The play was just starting. We rushed off to see the usherette, and she checked our tickets carefully, but we were right, and somehow the seats had been sold twice, so she upgraded us to a box. This was the most fantastic thing ever. We were right in the middle, at the front, with the most amazing view, and we thought that we ought to make an effort to do it again, even when we have got to pay for it ourselves.
Of course after that it was an ace night. We were stuffed full of dinner and gazing at the play from the vantage point of kings. The play was irritatingly modern, it was To Kill A Mockingbird, but they had made up an awful lot of rubbish to fit with modern ideas, Calpurnia kept shouting at Atticus for being rude and racist, and Atticus was inexplicably Jewish, but we had a good time anyway, and pulled it apart to our own satisfaction afterwards, in our glorious hotel suite over a glass of Prosecco.
It has felt like a very lot of adventures just for one day.
I will not be sorry to turn out the light
…which I am going to do right now.
