… can go wrong” I hear you say.
And I say they can. And it doesn’t just relate to Terry not having a socket to fit the wheel nuts on the trailer either. Ohhh no!
Instead, I drove all the way out to Kessel-Lo this morning to the Fortis Bank retrieve my bank card, only to be told that they don’t open the safe until Wednesday morning. So that was a total waste of time, wasn’t it? But at least the baguettes and free coffee in the Bio-Planet are worth having.
And getting back into my parking place here wasn’t easy either. They are doing building work in there and one of the builders had parked his vehicle across my parking space. I had to wait a while until he moved it.
Other bad news was that I had to pay for my week’s stay here. That’s left a hole in my pocket and no mistake. But at least they have a photocopier there, so I could photocopy my accident report form. I’ll send that off tomorrow.
And so what else (as if that isn’t enough)?
The good news, I suppose is that having gone to bed comparatively early last night, I actually managed to sleep right the way through until about 10 minutes before the alarm went off. It’s been quite a while since I had a decent sleep anything like that.
I’d been on my travels toolast night and they were rather vivid too. I’d been given several tasks to do and one of those was to go off any pay a bill to the Tax Office. When I finally arrived there it was someone whom I knew at the cash desk. I’d paid over the cheque, and so she asked me about the £2:2:0 administration fee for the cheque. I explained that the Government certainly insisted on its pound of flesh, didn’t it? She told me not to worry – seeing that she knew me she would pay it in on my behalf. And as well as that, she gave me some notes that had been rejected by the Tax Office – some Lei notes. Lei is of course the currency of Romania but during the night it was Czech money and these notes were of different size (which I knew to be a possibility) but they had been endorsed “wrong size” which I knew was quite probably wrong.
My next port of call was tomorrow at 15:00. I’d been asked by some friends whom I had known when I lived in Chester in the early-70s to appear in court on behalf of someone detained overnight who owed a sum of money and my task was to pay it so that he could be released. But I had suddenly acquired an urgent appointment of my own for that time which meant that I couldn’t go on behalf of this other person. I reckoned that I could go off to the court and pay the money in advance but that was across the town (I was in Macclesfield, but not a Macclesfield that I would ever know) so I walked down through the main street which had been pedestrianised and where there were some important buildings being built – but then I remembered that I had an appointment of my own at 15:00 this afternoon and if I attended it, I would be too late to go to the Court and pay this money. But if I went to the court and paid in the money I would be hours late for my appointment. And so with all of this confusion, what would I do?
But waking up solved that problem for me. I went off for an early breakfast instead.
Around everything else that I’ve been doing today, I’ve been working on my website. And by the time that I knocked off for tea tonight I’d organised all of the photos and text in Upper Quebec and Labrador that relate to the trans-Labrador Highway. They are all in the correct place now. And that wasn’t easy either because I must have had a bad day or two out there last year because I forgot in many instances to record the mileages of the photos that I’d taken. Not only that, where I had recorded the mileages, I had to convert the trip readings on two vehicles – the Dodge from 2014 and Strider the Ranger from 2015 to correspond with the mileages on the road.
later on though, I managed to put two revised pages on line – this one and this one. I ought to me making more of an effort to bring some of my earlier entries up-to-date with things that I have subsequently learnt.
And I managed not to crash out this afternoon either. That’s a rare occurrence these days, isn’t it?
Tea tonight was a chick pea curry with vegetables, rice and boulghour. The crowning ingredient of the curry was the stock cube of course. That makes a world of difference.
Nad now I’m planning on another early night once I’ve washed the dishes. I’ll see where I end up tonight.
. And did you know that they had motor vehicles in Middle Earth? There’s a delightful little paragraph – “Legolas and Gimli were to ride again together in the company of Aragorn and Gandalf, who went in the van with the Dúnedain and the sons of Elrond.”. I wonder which van it was.