overheated at the start of a tour with Jeremy Warmsley, fortunately on their way from Oxford to Derby which sort of brought them in the direction of the village. Having paid a fortune to have something similar attended to by a garage in Fort William he wasn't too keen to have to pay again when the village garage confirmed that it was an expensive head gasket problem. So, desperate to make Derby before the audience started throwing tomatoes or beer cans at the warm-up act doing a fourth unrequested encore, a very rapid dash to pick up a hire car in Northampton was needed. Achieved that with seconds to spare and licence intact and they went on their way.Being the brilliant journey planners that they were, Bristol followed Derby then Manchester and Harrogate then Plymouth and Norwich before Aberdeen and probably several more figures of eight on the GB Atlas before returning the car 3000 miles later.
Tour done, Russell now needed some transport. There had been a Nissan estate sitting in the paddock for best part of the year which the Chairman's son, Pete was going to get round to getting back on the road one day. He agreed to letting Russell have it and we had some fun getting it started and out of the mud, including a great drive along a track I didn't even realise existed across the field to get it used to moving and stopping again. Dropped it off at the village garage and it actually cost less to get through an MOT than my own car!
Russell had some extraordinarily generous breakdown insurance that would get him transported home in the event of the camper van breakdown. So, after transferring most of the stuff from van to car he set off for Fort William in the van. I think he made it a few miles up the A5 and from there got a piggy back on various breakdown trucks for the other 600 miles. Long, long bus ride back to the village and all that was needed was some tax for the car. Now, that should have been pretty straightforward - you can do that on-line these days and he was doing it on behalf of Pete so no complicated owner changes. All he needed was a registration document reference number. Pete said he'd dig the papers out and let him have that at the weekend.
Russell stayed with me and we waited breathlessly for the magic number. He'd arranged a quite complicated series of visits to people before setting off to chase some girl in Holland and timing was quite important. Pete's normally reliable but on this occasion had had a pretty intense Friday night drinking session and, according to his partner, had stayed the night somewhere else and set off for a shooting event early morning. Things like DVLA reference numbers, understandably, had slipped his mind. Now, normally a quick call would have enabled his dad to rummage around his house for the missing item and pass it to us. No phone signal wherever he was. There was no way to contact Pete. We'd have to wait until he got back home that evening. As it happened, Matti had a birthday party going on in MK so Russell made a star guest appearance which made the 8-year-old's day and probably made the delay worthwhile after all.
Got back to the village and, at last, the magic number, clutched by an embarrassed Pete, arrived. Russell dived on to the DVLA web site and bashed away at keys and all was looking good. Although he hadn't actually got the disc, he had paid for it and thought it wouldn't be too disastrous to set off on his travels and I'd post the disc on when it arrived.
That would have been fine. I not waved fond farewell, did the manly hug thing and then found he'd left a razor and a much beloved skateboard behind. Posting a skateboard would have cost as much as the petrol to wherever might have been a suitable meeting point so another hello goodbye session followed yesterday when the tax disc arrived and finally the lad is off, legal, well-fed and watered. Next stop Holland and, hopefully some teaching work there and a bit of luck with the girl.
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