The benefits of being old and sensible…

The thing is, when you are a grown up, you get sensible, and with sensible often comes boring.

Let  me explain….

This week I left the family home at 2.55pm, I started the car, set off down the country lanes that surround my home and carefully avoided the pools of water that currently flood our area.  Two miles down the road the car felt like it was having a seizure and I pulled up onto a marshy bank and, whilst taking care not to stain my Ugg boots, I had a look at the exterior.

I am not a car expert, not in the slightest, however even I have the brainpower to recognise a very flat tyre when I see one.

 

Credit

I did over react, I wailed down the phone at he who helped create them, I flapped needlessly, then sat with mascara running down my face whilst he called our breakdown cover and arranged for a man with a van to come and sort me out.  Then when the crisis was averted I called a friend to collect the kids and then sat back and enjoyed thirty minutes of me time in the car with the radio and my book.

It was all rather pleasant really, after the initial distress, and the man in the van was more than lovely, he didn’t mock my rather poor knowledge of cars when I asked if we could just fix it with a plaster and he had me back on the road in no time at all.

See, because we had breakdown cover, we were sensible and everything went rather boringly well.

Let’s turn back time.

Sixteen years ago I took four friends in a small Citroën from Brighton to Bristol.  We had a blinder of a weekend and all clambered back into my pokey little car late Sunday evening and hit the M4.

A strange noise started to arise from the car, being only twenty and beautifully naive, we ignored it.  In fact if my memory is correct, we actually turned the radio up to drown out the rattle.

Then wham, bam, the car started to shake like a seventies dancer and I was forced to acknowledge the problem and pulled it onto the hard shoulder.

Two of my companions were male and they shook out their shoulders, flexed their arms and proceeded to dive under the car on the hard shoulder.  They later emerged with half a fan belt and a bit of a confused expression on their face.

This was before YouTube and Google – we were on our own.

We attempted to fix said fan belt with an actual belt that was holding up my friends trousers at the time.  One of us had read this in a book and thought it would work.

It didn’t….

Three very cold hours later we gave up and called my Dad, who very sensibly gave me a full on northern rollicking for not having breakdown cover…

Then we paid £250 for a recovery vehicle to take us to the nearest garage.

It was a costly adventure, but definitely not boring.

God, I don’t miss being young and I love being boring!

In association with The AA – my roadside saviours!