came to pieces in my hand

This afternoon as I was driving my small and elderly car at a sedate thirty miles per hour I pressed the button to open the window.  It wound down with a strange and ominous grinding noise it had never made before, and I found that something in the door had broken and it refused to come up again.

A car with a window you can't shut is not at all user friendly.  I don't know how people who drive convertibles manage.  I was supposed to be meeting a friend, but did not like the thought of leaving the car in the town car park with the driver's window fully open, even though it is an old and shabby car and probably nobody would want to steal it, and I could still lock it and would have the key.  Objectively speaking the thought of anybody climbing in through the open window and hot wiring it in order to nick it was ludicrous, and if they wanted it that badly they could just break the window anyway.  It's not as though there was anything worth stealing in it, only three road atlases (one national, one Essex and one Suffolk), some grubby reusable shopping bags, a free Evening Standard collapsible umbrella, a squashed box of tissues, partly used, and two dirty towels to cover the back seat when carrying compost.

I couldn't help thinking of the episode of One Foot in the Grave in which Victor Meldrew empties the contents of an entire dustbin into the open topped sports car of somebody who has annoyed him, only of course it was not actually their sports car but another one of the same model.  Deeply engraved into my subconscious must be the fear that if you leave your car window open somebody will chuck rubbish in through it.  A more rational fear is the fear of rain.  Also, as I discovered driving home behind two buses, a car with no driver's side window is jolly noisy.

It is now parked by the house, driver's side to the wall, with a couple of large compost bags shut into the door so as to hang down over the void, tree stakes propped against them to try and stop them blowing around.  The towels are shoved up against the inside of the door to catch any drips. If I need to go anywhere between now and whenever I can get it booked into the garage I daresay I can borrow the SA's car.  It is a nuisance, though.  I've only just spent a morning driving to a garage, and going to the Skoda garage in Clacton there will not even be the consolation prize of a new frying pan and some oven gloves from John Lewis at Home.  Coming on top of the honey fiasco I am starting to think that the week is not going my way.