Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Over the last few days, I’ve once more become aware of the ‘good/shit’ dynamic that dom­in­ates my life. It has yet again been played-out with much gusto as clearly, noth­ing pos­it­ive can occur without some­thing hor­rendous bound­ing ’round the corner to remind me that life will forever have my arse clenched between its molars.

Within hours of us dis­cov­er­ing that K had been suc­cess­ful in her quest for employ­ment and us leav­ing the house in search of a cel­eb­rat­ory XL Double Whop­per (good), the car decided to die. Joy.

After cough­ing and splut­ter­ing as we per­suaded it gently down an ‘A’ road at a sym­path­etic 35mph (though it must be said that other drivers were per­haps not so sym­path­etic) and cajoled it to at least get us as far as the front door, we deemed it unfit for fur­ther travel (shit).

For­tu­nately, we have really great cover and within 2 and a half hours of pick­ing up the tele­phone the next morn­ing, we’d had a visit from a ‘man in an orange van’ to dia­gnose the prob­lem, someone to remove the car and take it to our Dealer’s ser­vice place and the deliv­ery of a hire-car as part of the deal, as our Dealer was out of cour­tesy cars (shit about the lack of cour­tesy cars, but over­all, very good).

In my haste that morn­ing to be up and vaguely present­able before the break­down man vis­ited, I hur­riedly exchanged the “legs” of my pink, striped pyja­mas for a velour ‘Chav’ track­suit (no, I do not wear such things in pub­lic, I actu­ally use them as sleep­wear – I just thought that they looked less PJ-like and there­fore less gen­er­ally ridicu­lous than the pink, striped affair on this occa­sion). Once said man had been and gone, I took to the order of the day: sit­ting in Chavvy track­suit, drink­ing tea and mind­lessly surf­ing the inter­net under the guise of “working”.

We were told that the gar­age wouldn’t even be able to look at the car until Monday/Tuesday. By 5pm Sat­urday, they called to tell us that they’d replaced the Oojimaflip (or was it the Flan­doogle?) that had some­thing or other to do with the second cyl­in­der, which I think may or may not be engine-related, and now our poorly little car was feel­ing muchly bet­ter so could we come and get it. You know, NOW.

Cue us brav­ing rush-hour traffic and reach­ing the gar­age nano­seconds before clos­ing in order to get our car. We wait for a Rep from the rental place to turn up in order to do the change over (who never turns up), frantic­ally call the rental and de-hire the hire car and ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over the shiny, shiny new mod­els and men­tally pick which car we’d like next time. Then, leave in our little car that now seems even less shiny than usual after being sat next to all the new, shiny, shiny ones that were very shiny with the shinyness.

Now, for those of you not fol­low­ing closely the manic order of events, all of the above was done in pub­lic with me wear­ing Chav pseudo-pyjamas and a cam­isole I’d slept in the night before, fluor­es­cent bed socks, train­ers, no bra, not a speck of make-up and I think a hair­brush my have been still lolling drunk­enly from the back of my head with its bristles securely mangled in a mass of rat­ted tangles. Although, I can’t quite remem­ber as I was too busy try­ing to drown my forehead-smacking humi­li­ation with the deluded optim­istic man­tra “Just remem­ber, your path will prob­ably never cross with these people ever again”. (Shit, shit, shit!)

Monday had been des­ig­nated as the day we’d go up to the Coun­cil Offices to put our names on a the Hous­ing Register (good) which accord­ing to the woman at the desk, has a brief and breezy wait­ing list of at least, oh about 12 years. Although our wait will be even longer, as I chose that par­tic­u­lar day to real­ise that I’d lost my Birth Cer­ti­fic­ate and now have to go and get a replace­ment (shit, obviously).

Yes­ter­day saw K take to her induc­tion day like a house cat to scuba-diving (decidedly shit). Con­sequently, she’s opted to not take the job (the shit just keeps on com­ing). In case you haven’t noticed, we are now due a back-payment of ‘good’. Here’s hop­ing it arrives soon.