On the carpet

The Sopwith Camel is grounded, in the barracks on a charge; Insufficient Subordination.

When words fall out of my mouth they usually tumble down like snowflakes on a summer’s day, quietly melting away in a harmless mist. Sometimes, though, the weather confounds me and these words land crystalline upon the ground and rearrange themselves to spell the kiss of death for my unfortunate and long-suffering self.

It has been a hard week for me, with decorators in to smarten up the office, and no alternate place for me to work. I’ve skulked in corridors and been reproved for blocking the fire exit. I’ve parked myself on the edge of desks and tables, only to find the other occupants of the room needed to spread out their papers there or need to dismantle the printer. On the Friday morning, having managed to cheat the system and get my timesheets submitted early, I was told there was a phone call for me. I picked up my phone and showed them the cord that would normally be plugged into the wall socket, if I were in a room that had a wall socket. They grudgingly allowed me to sit on the edge of their desk and take a phone call from my little petal.

“My car’s blown up. It will cost at least £500 to get it fixed. It’s the head-gasket. The car’s wrecked. It’s not even worth that. I can’t live without it”

There was an unspoken reproof in her words. As readers of “Toad Patrol” will know, I was out the previous Friday night in a rally. In her car, to be precise. I bit back my immediate thought of “It was alright when I gave it back to you”, and said “I’ll be as quick as I can” instead. Which, when I was 270 miles away, was not going to be the blink of an eye.

It is no fun living in the countryside without a car. There is a bus-service that passes close to us; one of Wiltshire’s quaintly named Wiggly-Buses, that runs along a nominal route and will divert off it for a short way to set you down where you want to go, but it only runs one day a week. Poor petal would be stuck at home unable to get to the supermarkets for food, or her daughters’ for grand-parenting. More importantly, she would be unable to get to the post-office to hand her parcels over for delivery to customers, so she would be destitute. Her prison sentence would be far worse than mine, because at least I got let out twice a day for commuting, and each weekend for bad behaviour.

I left work and drove solidly for five hours, probably getting caught by one of those ominous speed cameras near Silverstone that gets your face in grinning glory as you revel in the thrill of driving ten miles over the speed limit. I arrived home with less than an hour to ring around and see who could save our dead Daewoo.

My first thought was, drop another engine in it. The local scrapyard had one, because we’d already had the exhaust manifold from it for the last MoT, so I got a price of £150 for buying the remainder of the engine compartment. Then I rang up a garage who I knew did engine transplants and got a firm quote of £200 to do the swap if I got the engine delivered to them together with the car. Then, I rang the garage we normally take the car to for servicing to see if they would like to revise their quote for changing a head-gasket to a more competitive figure. They said that until they had seen the car, they couldn’t quote any firm figures, because the extent of the damage was unknown.

“But didn’t you look at the car when you gave her the estimate?”

No, it seems that they simply listened to what she had been told by the breakdown man who had collected the car. So I stopped the frantic phoning, and asked her for the story.

She had been crawling through Bath in stop-start traffic, and had just started moving at a reasonable speed again, when there was a noise that she thought sounded like running over a plastic bottle in the road, and steam exploded everywhere. The breakdown man, when he arrived, had said to her “I don’t even need to open the bonnet to tell you what it is, the head-gasket’s blown” He had hoisted the car up on a spectacle carrier and driven them back home.

I went outside, opened the bonnet, looked down at the first hose that I could see, and saw that the plastic thermostat housing had exploded. One final phone call to the scrapyard confirmed that I could have the thermostat housing next morning, if someone else hadn’t beaten me to it.

So I went back inside, jubilant, having negotiated the cost of repairs downwards, first from £500 to £350, and then, if we were lucky, to all of £10, and a couple of hours of my precious time. I was cock-a-hoop, and probably a little dazed in the head from the long drive, because I then said “Right, we’re going out to celebrate, get dressed up, it’s you I want tonight, not your mother”.

Thinking back, that last wisecrack was unfortunate, but apparently it was also unforgivable. Having spent the week sleeping on my own, I’m now forced to spend the weekend also in solitary confinement. And, to make it doubly unjust, I was correct; putting on an unbroken thermostat housing has restored the Daewoo, but she now states that she knew all along it wasn’t anything as catastrophic as a head-gasket.

The cats have come to show me sympathy, curling up beside me on the sofa, kneading my stomach, and purring contentedly right beside my ear. I don’t think I’m going to get much sleep tonight, but not in the way I originally planned.