Undead
20 09 2004I’m starting to wonder about my car. It’s clearly getting old now. In the past 4 months, the exhaust fell out, the same weekend a tyre burst, and then the brakes needed replacing just mere days before the battery died.
That last one happened today. I went to the house in London to deposit some of my belongings, that I might soon move there. I was planning to leave after dinner, so in order to get dinner, we went up to Tescos. After leaving the supermarket, the car failed utterly to respond, and remained that way. I called the RAC, since I am a member by way of Dad, and they sent a guy out to tell me what I’d already guessed: The battery is fucked and it’ll need replacing. He told me to drive home and avoid turning the engine off, and since I wasn’t equipped for an extended stay in London, I set off more or less immediately for Warwick.
Further problems arose in the form of petrol, because it became clear that despite my extra-slow driving, petrol-saving measures weren’t going to stretch out what was in the tank enough to actually get home. Getting more petrol meant turning the engine off, and turning the engine off meant that I’d quite likely end up being stuck wherever I did it. I managed to get to Banbury, which was far closer than my original estimate of Oxford, and close enough that I could get someone to pick me up without it seeming like an incredibly ludicrous prospect. Even so, I faced a 40 minute wait in a car with a radio I was locked out of by bizarre security measures, and not enough light to read anything by.
A jump start got the engine going again, which got it home, and hopefully will get it going again tomorrow so we can find a replacement for it.
One good bit of news today, my Shaun of the Dead DVD arrived. I watched all the extras and they’re all great, though I’m most interested by the video diary of Joe (of Adam and Joe fame) being a zombie extra, and Lauren Laverne doing a makeup test as probably the most attractive zombie ever. I’m looking forward to the commentaries. In fact, if the car doesn’t get fixed soon, I expect I’ll have quite some time to be watching them…
I had a similar problem with my car battery the other day however, it was due to the lights being left on. I was at my house alone and was about to set off to pick Row up from the airport when I noticed the car wouldn’t start. I phoned my dad to see if there was anyway I could just plug the car into the mains to get it going, but there didn’t seem to be, so he said go and get the neighbour. The neighbour I chose happened to be a complete drunk. You could smell the alcohol on his breath. Shit, thought I. Fortunately he wasn’t an aggressive drunk, just quite slow and wasn’t sure what was going on. I decided to ask for his help and he gave it to me. I decided it would be easier for me to move my car to him, than get him to try and reverse his car into a position that would be reachable by jump leads. It started off quite tricky, pushing the car up the slight gradient of the drive, but once it got to the peak it got surprisingly easy. In fact, a bit too easy, as it started to work its way down the other side without any help, picking up speed. Realising what was happening in perused the car and managed to jump into the driver’s side to find the steering lock was on. Luckily, my quick thinking prevailed and I yanked up the handbrake before any damage was done. The easy part over, the drunk then had to figure out how to open his bonnet. 20minutes later, I was back on the road.