a partial fix

I rang the garage first thing, and got through to the young assistant on the service desk.  I explained what had happened to the window, and she said that the earliest they could book the car in was next Thursday.  Four working days (since Monday is a Bank Holiday) wasn't too bad, and in any case if that was the first day they could manage then that was what I would get.  In the meantime I'd been promised the use when needed of the SA's car, which is cleaner than mine.  The weather forecast was dry and not too windy, and looking at the compost bags hanging over the car window I hoped it would stay that way.

Five minutes after putting the phone down to the young person at the garage it rang again, and it was the experienced service manager, who said she gathered that my retraction mechanism had broken, and that I would not want to have the car sitting outside with no window for an entire week.  If I could bring it down this morning they could wedge the glass shut for me, then at least the car would be secure.  She was absolutely right, I did not really want the car sitting outside the house until next Thursday with a large hole in the side of it, only I had not seen any alternative.  I agreed enthusiastically, and then remembered after ringing off that today was the first day of the Clacton Airshow, and began to worry how bad the traffic to Clacton was going to be.

In a world where garages are commonly viewed as rip-off artists, alongside banks and estate agents, I really like my garage (mind you, I like my bank too).  It is a skilled job being a good garage service desk manager.  I have heard Lesley coax descriptions of ailing motors from their non-mechanically minded owners with the patience of a doctor or a detective so that she can form an educated guess about what is actually wrong with the car and hence how much workshop time to allocate to it.  Let us hope the young person is listening and learning.

The traffic turned out to be no worse than normal, if not downright quiet for a sunny day in August.  You would not have guessed there was an airshow.  Once at the garage it took rather a long time to wedge the window shut, and I was running out of levels of the day's Sudoku on my phone when the assistant appeared with my car key.  As I left the showroom the service manager told me not to open the window, and I drove up the road worrying that I would absent mindedly press the button or else lean on it by accident.  Just as it is impossible not to think of a word you have been told not to think of, so it felt as though it might be almost equally hard not to press a button you had been told not to press.  I stopped on the way home to buy hand cream at the garden centre that sells it, thinking that at least I would get some incremental benefit from the journey given I was running out of hand cream, and as soon as I got out of the car I realized I had forgotten my hat, which must have dropped off my lap when I stood up in the garage, so I had to go back for it.

That was half the morning gone by the time I got home, just to achieve a temporary partial fix on my car which had been working perfectly well until the previous day, and buy some hand cream. No wonder the meadow is disappearing under a fresh crop of brambles and even the path to the dustbins is half blocked with over-ebullient shrubs.  Where does the time go, indeed?

I had been meaning to write up the minutes of yesterday's music society committee meeting first thing in the morning, so had to come in early from the garden to do them.  For a meeting where we weren't going to discuss much except formally approve the accounts it went on for a long time and generated a lot of notes.