A bit of a night mare
So what else has been taking over all my time? Well it has been a bit of a night mare.
Well remember that I only really get one day on a weekend to work on the house, well these all came along in quick succession:
My mate Si’s 40th birthday party.
My mate Robbo’s wedding.
The Great North Run, that I’ve taken part in for the last 17 years.
My mate Peter turning out of the blue and staying for the weekend
Lotsa bad luck…. well not really bad luck, just bad timing, I love Pete, I love going to birthdays and weddings and I adore the Great North Run.
So what’s this bad luck excuse I’m talking about, well it started a few weeks back and then it started in earnest with a night out that cost me lots and lots of time and money.
It was late, around about 9:30 and I decided that I needed to get myself to the shops. These shops are close and as the journey was at most ten minutes then it wouldn’t be a problem to get there. Anyway on my way just before Cockfield I noticed a police car scouting around for something. He flashed his blues as I passed and I thought something must be amiss. So anyway on my way back after the shops I cut my speed and dawdled along at around 20mph when suddenly a large black horse leapt out straight in front of the car. I braked and slowly ran into it, there was a crunch, my bonnet creased into a nasty angle and the car came to a stop.
I got out easily, the door was intact and the airbags hadn’t deployed, the front of the car was a mess and I turned and there was no sign of the horse. Within moments the police were there and they said that although they’d not seen what happened they thought that there was no blame on me for the accident. Basically it was evident that I’d hit the horse going pretty slowly and that the damage and the lack of airbags suggested that I was going pretty slow in what was a national speed limit area of 60mph. If I’d been doing 60 I reckon it could have been pretty nasty and perhaps I wouldn’t be expressing these circumstances with hindsight as anything approaching bad luck.
Anyway the police told me that some kids had let a herd of horses loose from their field and that they’d been hunting for them. They also asked me if I could identify the horse if I saw it again…. J I didn’t expect that I’d have to do a line-up. Minutes later the herd of horses trotted past ushered by the farmers who’d set out to get them, they shouted across to ask if I was ok and that was it. The farmers left and after a brief chat the police left.
I was alone at 10:30 on some pitch black moorland, werewolves and all, all by my lonesome with my knackered old car.
I phoned the RAC and asked to be recovered, they countered that I should speak to my insurance for that, I re-countered that I had my car insurance with the RAC – touché! They counter-countered that although I had my insurance with the RAC that it wasn’t the RAC who would handle it but the under-writers of the insurance… so all my planning to cover my but with insurance and recovery by the same company was a bit of a waste of my time.
Anyway they gave me a number, tricky taking it down with a dodgy pen on the back of a fag packet in the pitch black. I gave them a ring and they threatened to charge me for “an out of hours” pickup. Not good when I had RAC recovery and they’d refused to recover me! Anyway two hours later and a large tow truck trailer affair arrives, I’d prepared earlier knowing that my trusty steed was probably to be written-off and stripped it of all my bits and bobs. So there I was beside the road with a baby seat on my head and all my bits in some big bags. The driver was great, he slightly threatened that he wasn’t allowed to give me a lift home but he saw my predicament and took me home.
Anyway I spend the next day on the phone trying to get a courtesy car, it seems that my insurance company didn’t issue courtesy cars in the event of a car being written-off and despite the fact a vehicle assessor couldn’t assess my car for two more days then they’d err on the side of caution and not give me one. Anyway the RAC stepped in then and pointed out that I’d ticked the box marked “guaranteed courtesy car” and only after a few hours mucking around I had a courtesy car. So it’s good to know that the RAC were good for something at least.
Anyway now the problem of replacing the car.
My car has 154,000 miles on the clock, those 154,000 miles though have been done under the watch of me or my big Sister. We have molly coddled that car and we know it’s every problem, of which there are few and none. The reliability factor of the car is a necessity to me, so to replace that in a new car would be potentially expensive, unfortunately 154,000 miles on the odometer of a car, no matter what provenance of reliability – doesn’t transfer into equally good expensive figures.
I got £2,600 for the shattered remains of my trusty X-Trail 2.2 DCi Sport, less the £350 excess.
This was going to be expensive.
- This was going to be money that I didn’t have and would be the last money that I would have to develop the house.
- So why do I need a good car, why not just buy a banger:
- I drive my 4 year old daughter in my car, often for hours a day, often in miserable and dangerous weather. I need something that’ll get me home.
- Where I live the weather is more weatherish than other parts of the country. Basically I’m 900 feet up in the Pennines in the North East of England. Weather is rather freaky here, one day I went to work sporting a foot of snow on the car when it was only quite nippy on the coast.
- I travel an hour to work – downhill, zoooom….. and an hour back each day. That’s around an eighth of my waking day, I don’t want to spend it in something terrible.
- The horse incident has brought home my mortality and susceptibility to all things larger than a badger tripping across the country roads of Northern Britain. If a largish horse at a meagre 20mph can wipe out a roughy toughy Nissan X-Trail then I need something tough. Trust me there’s no way you can swerve when something just suicidally steps in front of you, I always thought it was a matter of seeing something and swerving out of the way, it’s not, it’s just driving, driving, driving, HORSEBANG. It steps into the foot of air in front of your car that your car is inevitably going to be in.
More bad luck…
Don’t know if this one counts as good luck but I parked my courtesy car outside the college where I work (building work being done unluckily on the car park entrance). I moved it at lunchtime and five minutes after I moved it a car ploughed into all the parked cars wiping out our receptionist’s faithful old run-around and a brand new car that a student’s parent had turned up in.
A student ran into my courtesy car a day or so after this. Good for them though they owned up and came to see me and luckily I’d taken out the excess coverage with the hire firm so despite the bad luck it didn’t leave me out of pocket. Well so far it hasn’t
The car I decided to get, a nice silver Toyota Rav4 I’d found after some travelling around and having to take time off work, I phoned to ask further details about it and having settled that it was the one I wanted I phoned back five minutes later to find it had been sold two minutes ago.
My new wonderful Tiguan, that I really was silly to buy as I cannot afford it, turned out to be a good car but for some reason the tax disc got lost and what should have been a half hour transaction turned out to take nearly three hours.
On getting out of the garage I was pulled by the Rozzers within five minutes of driving. It turned out my temporary insurance hadn’t registered on their computers so they’d pulled me. Luckily I had the right paperwork in the car and I got off with the policeman snickering at all my bad luck.
Driving along in traffic along the A66 and there’s a big fat Wood Pigeon beside the road, I thought “I know how this ends” it leaps up and straight into the grill of my car. Gore all over my windscreen the automatic wipers engage and anyone passing would have observed me laughing hysterically as blood and guts smeared across my screen. I get to Tesco’s afterwards, check my car which seems ok despite the birdstrike, I shop for a £60 shop that I have a £15 off voucher off for anything over the £60, this is refused as it is only an internet offer and even my 58p off voucher is refused as it is out of date.
My Great North Run training is ruined by me doing for my ankle a couple of weeks before the run. Not sure how I did it apart from something going “twang” in my ankle while I was sat cross-legged in the Green Man Festival. Still I manage to do the run at a hop and a jog, while damaging my ankle even more.
Oh I forgot but the day of the Great North Run I had left early to get to the garage from where I was going to be buying the Tiguan. The journey is fraught due to the terrible GNR traffic, I’m knackered after running on my ankle in some pretty awful heat and I’m not happy that I have to leave before my traditional pint while watching the Red Arrows, but hey I need to get some paperwork for a two year service agreement signed. I get to the garage and they say “didn’t you know, you didn’t have to come after all, your application for servicing was refused”… I’m normally quite the quiet chap but I wasn’t too happy that afternoon.
I make motions to doing a simple 5k run, despite my nasty ankle and the day before I do it I drop a rather large weight on my big toe. I’m mucking in with the tech’s erecting 47 swivel office chairs when the pneumatic shock absorber that holds the chair up drops out of a box, landing on its end on my big toe. I express to the tech’s the pain and the necessity of a hospital visit and they basically get on with erecting chairs. The next day and much throbbing of toe later I decide I do need a trip to the hospital. The doctor declares it might be broken, I go to X-Ray and on returning he declares it unbroken, good luck wellllll I could have done with some time off J so anyway I say to the Doc’ “do you prescribe rest then?”… “Noooo” he exclaims, “You should get as much exercise as you can”.
I spend the next week hobbling around work on my painful ankle and throbbing toe.
The electrician discovers I have woodworm in my bedroom floorboards.
Believe me this is only the tip of the iceberg, it’s like I’ve been cursed.