I was lightly chastised by a good blog friend of mine for my blogular laxity of recent times.
So here’s a post. A missive, if you will.
I always find these things hard to get kicked off. You know, just speaking into the void. Once I’m rolling it’s fine. In fact, it’s hard to shut me up.
It’s just the getting started that I find hard.
I’m a little like a Mk. I Ford Fiesta in that respect. They had very teeny tiny batteries under the bonnet, you see. In fact, under the bonnet it was mostly fresh air. Tiddly engine, tiny battery, plenty of space for wildlife to nest.
Many years ago, just after the Dawn of Time but slightly before Time had finished its first coffee of the morning, my mum had a Mk. I Ford Fiesta.
It was red. Most cars were red in those days. There was some kind of government subsidy, I think. Something to do with the European Paint Lake.
We didn’t have the EU in those distant times. EU was the noise you made when your dinner plate turned up with a pile of soggy spinach on it and you knew there was no way on this earth that you were going to get even a sniff of pudding until you had necked the whole gelatinous mass.
No, we had the EEC. The European Economic Community. The EEC always had excesses of consumables: Butter Mountain. Wine Lake. Cheese Escarpment. Milk Pond. Toasted Crumpet Tower. Cheap Spanish Beer Waterfall. The EU doesn’t seem to have any of these. Where did they all go?
Hm. Where was I? EEC…Red Paint Lake…red cars…Ford Fiesta. Hokay, I’m back again.
Well, as was my wont as a 17 year old with places to go and a village-based girlfriend to visit I often borrowed the Fiesta.
My girlfriend hadn’t yet learned to drive. This is an important point to remember as the story unfolds.
I used to drive the 7 or so country miles to her village and pick her up. We’d go driving, maybe buy a burger and sit by the Embankment in Bedford and watch the swans or now and then visit the cinema. You know, boyfriend/girlfriend things. It was very lovely.
One November night we were driving back to her parents house to drop her off and we decided to pull over just before we got there. You know, to say goodbye properly. It wasn’t a layby. It was just the entrance to a field, rutted by tractor tires and muddy with winter rain. No matter – we didn’t have to get out of the car.
So, goodbyes said, I went to start the car.
It wouldn’t start.
Normally in these situations you just keep turning the key until it works.
In the Mk. I Ford Fiesta this wasn’t an option. You got three lives and then it was game over. Three twists of the key.
On the third twist the engine coughed and I thought I’d got it going, but it wheezed and lapsed into silence.
Further turns of the key produced nothing more than the clicking of solenoids.
Oh dear.
Remember that my girlfriend wasn’t a driver. Got that?
We talked it through and the only way out of the mess seemed to be for me to give the car a push and bump-start it while my girlfriend sat behind the wheel and did the appropriate things with pedals and gears.
She was reluctant but gamely offered to do her best. I told her what to do when – at least, I thought I did; I may have been a little hurried with the instructions. I put her fixed expression as she gripped the steering wheel tightly down to the cold night air and the lateness of the hour.
It took a while for me to get the car moving. It wasn’t a heavy beast, the Fiesta, but it was tricky getting it moving on the muddy, rutted ground. By the time the thing was shifting, I was breathing hard.
We only had one shot. The road was flat for a few yards then ran uphill.
“Ready?” I shouted. I didn’t listen for the reply. I just pushed like buggery.
Once I got the thing moving it trundled along at a fair clip. I pushed until I felt ready to collapse, then shouted
“Now!”
“Now what?” came the answer.
“Let the clutch out!” I cried.
She did. The engine coughed into life.
“Rev it,” I yelled.
She did. But she didn’t dip the clutch. The little car lurched away down the dark country road, headlights off, scared non-driving girlfriend in the driver’s seat. Exhausted boyfriend staggering in the road behind.
“Dip the clutch!” I shouted.
I couldn’t make out her reply. She was too far away.
I’m told that in times of extreme trauma, time seems to slow. Time didn’t slow for me. Neither did the car.
I ran. I ran like a madman, like a youtube downhill car handbrake failure victim. I got level and threw myself in through the driver’s side window.
My girlfriend was yelling incoherently.
“Which one is the clutch?”
It took me a second to work out left from right and her a second more to follow my garbled instruction. But she did it. And she kept the car going, bless her heart.
What we would have done if we hadn’t left the driver’s window open I don’t know.
Reader, that girlfriend is now my wife.
