Fail 7: Bottom gear...
Well if this quarantine has taught us one thing, it's that most of Lee's journeys up until this point have been absolutely un-essential. I mean, there's nothing like a global pandemic to highlight that you don't actually NEED to travel to Glasgow and back to pick up an eighties Porsche to add to your oversized fleet of utterly shite second hand cars.
Actually, the eighties Porsche has been slowly decomposing in our garage for quite a while now. It was one of the first extraneous vehicles Lee tried to casually pass off as a useful purchase, despite me having had absolutely NO SAY in whether or indeed why we might need a fourth family car. Lee's always loved cars, but I personally don't feel like that in itself is justification enough for owning any more than one per person in a household. However, there's been just no stopping him.
He changes his cars more frequently than most people change their jeans, and I cannot stress hard enough that this is actually 100% true. It's ridiculous. His car-buying habit has reached the point now where I don't even bother to have opinions about whatever car is currently 'his' as I know for a fact that within a month, it will have been replaced by something else.
Once, quite early on in our relationship, we attempted to count how many cars we'd both owned. My total was about 5. His was thirteen - THAT YEAR.
If you're thinking this all sounds a bit flash, allow me to disabuse you of this notion. Most of the 'bargains' that appear parked outside my house are anything but. Take the eighties Porsche, for example.
Owning a Porsche sounds quite good in principle. In practice, getting into this particular one is like sitting in the actual past. Before we bought it, it was obviously stored on the surface of Mercury, as the once-red bodywork has been sun-bleached to a peculiar faded shade I think is known in the trade as 'sadness'. Once inside, a similar thing has happened to the windscreen. It's now yellow. The glass is so scuffed, murky and blurred that as a driver, it's like looking out into the kind of bad slow motion dream sequence you might have got on a programme like Dallas, if Dallas were filmed underwater and you were high on glue. You know that filter on Instagram that makes you look twenty years younger? Like that, except considerably more dangerous when you're about to crash because you can't see where you're going through the soft-focus windscreen.
The Porsche also has those comedy headlights that once upon a time seemed like the height of technology, in that they raise out of the bonnet like frogs eyes when you turn them on. Amusing the first time, perhaps. Amusing when you consider your husband has actually parted with cash for the thirty seconds of fun they entail? Less so.
While Lee owns a lot of shite cars, the thing I find particularly annoying about this one is that after buying it, driving it precisely twice, it's actually just been chilling in the garage for the last five years. The only saving grace I can see is that somehow, by some kind of witchcraft, or as I'm beginning to suspect, just outright LYING about how much everything costs, he never seems to spend very much money to acquire these unnecessary cars.
A few years ago after my own car failed spectacularly, he someone managed to procure me a BMW X5 for a while as a stopgap. The total cost? £150. Now. I can tell you don't believe me, but the reason a car costs £150 is usually because there is something so catastrophically wrong with it that anyone in their right mind would run a mile. In this case, what that wrongness turned out to be was a series of electrical faults which rendered the car completely unlockable. Great! Lee's reasoning was that if I managed to drive it at least ten times before it was stolen, this would still work out as a fair cost-per-use, and a chance he was willing to take.
Other weird glitches included occasionally coming outside of a morning to find the empty, parked car with the radio going full blast, which I think our neighbours probably really enjoyed. Best of all, though, was the time that I'd arrived home late and had to park it some way down the street. Without thinking, I'd pressed the lock button on the key, and miraculously, for the first time ever the car actually locked itself. Great! I thought. I wondered if the 'unlock' function was also working, to which the answer was, predictably - Fuck No! It had been a long day, I was tired, so I just left it there forgetting all about it the instant I was through my front door.
Arriving at the car the next day presented me with quite a large problem. It was locked (first time ever). I had the key. But the key didn't work. And I definitely could not get in. What should I do? I wondered. I was already late, and getting later as I stood for ages, puzzled on the pavement staring at the locked car trying to figure out the best course of action. As I stood there wondering, and definitely looking like I was probably about to try and steal this car, suddenly and apropos of absolutely nothing, the radio roared into life and all four windows spontaneously and very slowly wound themselves down. Glancing furtively up and down the street in case I was actually in some kind of Jeremy Beadle prank situation, I saw my chance, reached inside the car, unlocked it from the inside, and drove off before the urge to find and run over Lee grew too large.
This remains the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me in my life. So with hindsight I suppose it was £150 well spent.
What’s been good this week
Hi to all the new reader of this newsletter. I'm a week later than I should be because, as I suspect might be the case for all of us, I've found it pretty hard to think cheerful jolly thoughts these last few weeks. But now the initial panic has subsided, we're falling into the new routine pretty well, which is to say I’ve furloughed my ‘no drinking in the week’ until further notice and revised my expectations of home schooling to accept a single hour with no shouting as an unmitigated success. Here’s some good things which have been making me smile this week:
New comedy Breeders on Sky is exactly the kind of foul-mouthed funny I like. It made me laugh out loud, and is a brilliantly drawn picture of life with small children. It’s written by comedy kings Simon Blackwell and Chris Addison. The trailer is here (although I don’t really think this does it justice), and Martin Freeman deserves some kind of award for how perfectly he portrays that you can love your kids to death whilst also wishing it imminently upon them at times.
I particularly enjoyed this mashup someone made of TV hardman Ant Middleton’s instagram video where he announced basically that COVID-19 didn’t apply to him. He’s since taken it down…
Look, I know it’s not strictly ‘funny’ but reading good books is key to keeping your mental health intact. I’ve just finished the brilliant My Wild and Sleepless Nights by Clover Stroud, who writes perfectly about the pain, mess, exhilaration and struggles of motherhood, it’s well worth a read. I’ve also been saving it up for a while, but have just started Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light - the final in the Wolf Hall trilogy (best books ever). Finally, a shout out to my brilliant friend David Farrier, who has also just launched his amazing book Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, to incredible reviews. His writing is so beautiful, and really challenges you to think more deeply about the big things that matter. Buy it here.
Finally, when it comes to surviving in isolation, my dad knows a thing or two. He spent two years living in the Antarctic on Halley Base in the seventies with a small group of others completely cut off from the rest of the world, way before all the modern ways of communicating we take for granted. Here’s what he has to say on how to keep sane in these weird times:
Yes we were isolated. No prospect of physical communication with the outside world, no phone, no TV, no internet, no fresh food, no computers, we were allowed 50 words a month Telex message home. Many of the things we take for granted hadn’t been invented then.
However, we were busy. Helped each other. Socialised, had a really great time and achieved a lot. Tips - forget about the things you can’t do. Find and develop the things you can do. Help your colleagues, be friendly and sociable.
Keep busy.
Who am I anyway?
I'm Lindsay. Bit of a dickhead, freelance writer for money, author of And Other Idiots and other internet shite for kicks. This newsletter will be a short story of some idiotic exploits from quite close to home, to hopefully make you smile every two weeks. Exactly how much shit can one man buy on Ebay? I intend to find out.
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