I switched on my computer this morning and it was fine, uploading emails entirely normally and letting me scoot round the Times website while I ate my muesli. I have discovered what it was doing last night, which was uploading the new Microsoft Office. There were new and unasked for buttons on the toolbar, including Outlook, which I don't use, and some kind of search engine called Bing, which I'd never heard of. I opened Bing to see what it was, and couldn't find any way of closing it again, and had to call on the Systems Administrator for help, who couldn't initially close it either and kept harrumphing from the aggravation of the car still being at the garage and the government website being down so it was impossible to see if it had passed its second MoT or not. I really wish Microsoft wouldn't do that. Supposing I had badly needed to use my laptop last night, if I'd been up against a deadline to finish a report or something, I'd have been stuck.
Finally the government site worked, and a little tick appeared against the car's MoT status, and the garage rang to say it was ready to collect. It goes to a Jaguar dealership for servicing because of the electronics. There are so many of them it is basically a computer on wheels, and it is of an age where they have started to play up, so although it passed the MoT first time round in July except for the cracked windscreen, the Systems Administrator was not entirely confident that it would necessarily pass again. The Jaguar dealership is in a retail park to the east of Ipswich, and there are two ways of getting there from here. You could walk a mile to a railway station and get a train to Colchester where you could change trains for Ipswich, then get a bus from the centre of Ipswich. Or you could drive there in another car. The SA quite understandably preferred the latter option. The garage is in the same retail park as the Ipswich John Lewis at Home store, and so it was a reasonably productive journey because after collecting the car we were able to go and buy a couple of oven gloves and some frying pans.
Having a car stuck at the garage for over a fortnight while Autoglass fails to replace the windscreen on a weekly basis is not the worst of problems to have, in the grand scheme of things. It's not as if it was our only car. I have a friend who needs to sell her house, who is on permanent standby in case of viewers, having to keep the house unnaturally clean and tidy, all social plans subject to revision and cancellation in case a potential buyer should materialize, and afraid to book any kind of holiday. The Colchester housing market has gone soft and she is getting quite demoralised being tied to home all through the summer. Compared to that being on standby to go and collect the car is a minor inconvenience. Even so it is a nuisance. Arrangements to see people and go to places have kept getting bumped forward to try and keep my diary clear. I was hoping to revisit the Tate's Giacometti exhibition with one friend before they go into hospital for an operation that will leave them immobile for a bit, but I fear we've run out of time.
The garage somehow swung it so that the SA was not charged for the second MoT. It would have been deeply unfair to have to pay twice, when the only reason for the first failure was the windscreen and it would have been the work of two minutes to see that the windscreen had been changed and the paperwork showed it had been done by a qualified installer, and the car had been parked at the garage all the meantime. Still, technically it was outside the ten working day period to qualify for a retest, and the SA was more or less resigned to paying twice and then deciding whether the hassle of trying to reclaim the cost of the second test from the insurers and the windscreen firm was worth it.
The oven gloves were plain black ones from John Lewis' Essentials range. We already have some, and they give much better insulation than many branded ones at four times the price. In the end we split the difference on whether to go for upmarket frying pans or get cheap ones and just replace them as often as the non-stick coating scratched, buying a fairly expensive saute pan that fits our existing lids and has a metal handle so can go in the oven, and two budget frying pans, one of which was marked with a piece of kitchen string through the handle as soon as we got home so that it can be kept for pancakes and omelets. John Lewis at Home is really rather a terrifying temple to consumerism. I read in one of the Sunday papers that inflatable flamingos were A Thing, but I didn't entirely believe it until I saw they have them in Ipswich.
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