The man at the garage told me there was no need for me to arrange my MOT on a day when the poet could come with me and bring me home as by the time we got home, it would be time to come out again. We live not 10 minutes drive away and he said I could sit and wait.
Instead of following me in his car, the poet came with me in my car with a view to us going to have a chat with our mates who had a shop just down the road from the garage.
We arrived at the garage 15 minutes early. “It’ll be about an hour,” said the same bloke who’d told me it would only take as long as it took us to drive home and come back again (not 20 minutes all together). So we toyed with going back for the poet’s car, but we decided to have a mooch around in the village instead. It’s rare we get a whole hour together to do nothing. So we went for a mooch.
We popped into a bargain basement shop to get his two bottles of beer he takes to band practice with him on a Thursday night… We came out with:
- 2 new 7-day pill cases (one each)
- 1 large packet of mini Fry’s Turkish Delights (chocolate)
- 1 large packet of aniseed buttons (sweets/candy)
- 1 large bag of mini packets of Parma Violets (sweets/candy)
- a new nail brush for the kitchen sink
- a new hard skin rasp for the bathroom
- a tin that looks like a retro radio with shortbread biscuits (cookies) in (pictured)
- 1 pot of vitamin C supplements
- 1 pot of vitamin D supplements
- 2 Black Forest individual trifles
- and NO BOTTLES OF BEER
Yup, the one thing we went in for was the only thing we didn’t get. Ah well. Next we went into the butcher shop to see our friends. I left the poet in there talking to his band’s drummer’s two lads while I popped into a sewing shop two doors away. It was filled with rolls and rolls of fabrics, piles of fat quarters, and new miniature fat quarter things the lady in the shop called ‘charm packs’. They’re not fat eighths, they’re five-inch squares.
The poet caught up with me in there and we wandered back to the garage, where we sat and waited a further 20 minutes for my car to be ready. It passed, with no advisories, and we booked it in for its first ever service in just under two weeks’ time. They’re going to look at the air conditioner unit as well as change everything on it. Apart from, perhaps, the tyres.
My car has only done 13,000 miles in six years, so the mechanic wasn’t expecting it to fail or anything. As we were leaving, we found out the mechanic and the poet had friends in common and they ended up chatting for another 30 minutes.
On our way home, we stopped off at Asda to get the poet his beers. And by the time we got home it was dinner time. I made us a sandwich each (ham and pickle), and we had the trifles.
Before we went out, the only thing I really had time to do was catch up on some reading. I’m reading How to Write Short Stories and Get Them Published by Ashley Lister, bookmarking all of the exercises I want to have a go at as I go. I’m not a massive fan of writing exercises for exercise sake. But I’ve bookmarked those I think will lead to at least one short story getting finished, if not more.
After dinner I did some proofreading, finishing the chapter I’d left it in the middle of the night before. I created and downloaded the graphics for the July wrap-up, hello August and August wrap-up blog posts. Then I settled in for a revision session of the online short story writing lecture.
By this time the poet was getting ready to go to band practice, and I had a good couple of hours to catch up on the morning I’d lost. I fed the garden birds and settled down to some proofreading, clearing 39 pages. I didn’t do any writing, but I’d done a lot the day before so didn’t beat myself up.
I have a busy day today, as usual. We might be doing the shopping, as we have friends coming over to attend a music festival with us tomorrow.
Have a great weekend!
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Sometimes, you just need to putter. Sounds like it was a lot of fun. Have a great weekend.
Thank you! We did, mostly.