cartastrophe

What a day.

This morning I had to take my car in for a service.

For many people this is normal and entirely unscary. For me it is rather like running the gauntlet. I am terrified of the whole process.  I can just about manage my own car, as long as I don’t think about it too deeply. I am at a loss when it comes to hopping into another vehicle and driving smoothly away.

That is on top of the fact that I have no idea what the man/woman at the garage is saying to me.  They look at me kindly and say things like:

‘Your left side throttle axle sprong looks like it needs regrouting. Do you use fng or pxgww?’

I hear: ‘RAHRAHRAHRAHRAHRAHRAH’

I weep.

I was late dropping the two smallest of the tribe to school due to displacement activity.

When I got to the garage it all went rather smoothly up to a point.  While they were talking about the flange resistors etc I just played nice, lift music in my head and nodded.  I reckoned as long as I agreed to pay whatever they asked they would not care.

This turned out to be a reasonably accurate assumption.

I was just congratulating myself on getting out of it relatively unscathed when the moment of total trauma came.

The chap handed me the keys to my courtesy car and said: ‘You’ll love the car. You’ve got a VW Sharan.’  He smiled at me expectantly. I looked at him in that blank way.  He realised I had no idea what a VW Sharan was. He might has well have said: ‘I am going to let you ride a camelopard down the high street.’

He elaborated.  He said: ‘It’s a 7 seater people carrier.’

I said: ‘Fucking hell.’ I said it quite loudly and then went even whiter than the sheet I already resemble.

He said: ‘No. It’s great. Really.’

I said: ‘For you perhaps.  I drive a teeny, weeny car, and I hate driving anything, let alone a brand new, seven seater people carrier.’

He would not swap it for me. They did not have anything else.

At this point I would have been happy with a unicycle.

I considered either a) staying in the VW garage until it was finished or b) running for the hills.  I considered these options seriously.

Then I decided that I am not a big girl’s blouse. I decided that I could do this.  I let the man take me out to the car park to where the Sharan was waiting for me.

It was wedged super tight between a large, orange TNT van and a small other car.  There was no way in God’s green earth I was getting it out of that parking spot.  It was massive.

The chap with the key looked at the car. He looked back at me.  I was, by now, a light shade of green.

He wisely said: ‘I will get the car out of the parking space for you.’

By this time I was feeling very sweary.  I said: ‘Too fucking right matey.’

It was either swear or cry.  I hate crying in front of people who work in VW garages, so swearing was all I had left.

It took him five goes to get out of the space.  He then parked it in the road, which didn’t help me much, as I was hoping for a quiet space to have a practice.

I noted that the car had a set of golf  clubs in the back.  A glimmer of hope appeared.  I pointed it out to the chap and suggested that he might actually have given me the wrong car after all.

He cheerfully said: ‘No. It’s the manager’s car. We’ve run out of regular courtesy cars, so you’ve got his.’

No pressure.

I swore some more.

He handed me the keys and ushered me into the driver’s seat.  I asked him if you had to put the clutch down before the ignition would work (I was caught out by this with the last courtesy car).  He said: ‘Oh yes.’

Then, as an afterthought he casually announced: ‘And it’s got an electric handbrake as well.’

I looked at him.  I had no idea. None at all.

He pointed to a small paddle shaped switch in the well between the two front seats and announced that this was my hand brake.  He said: “It works just like a regular handbrake except that you press it like a button to put it on, and lift it like a flap to turn it off.’

So. Not like a regular handbrake at all then in fact?

No.

I was now sweating.  I had run out of swear words and the urge to vomit was rising in me like a tidal wave.

It took me a year and a half of intensive lessons, hypnotherapy and beta blockers to learn to use a regular handbrake. Thirty seconds while the car was idling in the middle of the road was not going to cut it with electric handbrakes.

Nevertheless I shut the door and set off.

I was meeting a friend in town for coffee.  The car park I needed to be in was only a five minute drive away.

During that drive, which took twenty minutes, I stalled the car five times, three times at major traffic lights. I got sworn at three times and beeped at twice.  The last hundred yards of road before I got to the car park was executed with my legs wobbling so much I could barely press the pedals down.

I was, by this time, weeping.

By now, driving has become a fairly automatic experience, which is all to the good.  The problem comes when something changes and I am required to learn something new to replace the now automatic processes I have learned.  My brain just does not want to comply and my body is trying to complete the processes it knows how to do.  The conflict between the new learning and the old, learned response causes meltdown.

Every time I needed to put the hand brake on, my hand automatically reached down to pull the handle that wasn’t there.  I then had to look down to locate the ridiculously low and small button/flap.  By then my foot had forgotten that it needed to be on the brake.  By then the lights would have changed, but I would not be able to remember whether I had to press the button down, or hold the flap up. Plus my brake foot was also completely confused.

Eventually, after being beeped and sworn at, I would find the right combination of new actions and then move forward too quickly, promptly stalling the car and requiring me to then remember that in order to get the keys to turn in the ignition, my foot had to be on the clutch.

Fuck.

It seemed to take hours to get to the car park.  When I got there I was an absolute mess.

I sat in the car parking bay and cried and cried for forty five minutes.

I felt like such an idiot.

People do this every day. It is not rocket science. I am not that stupid a woman, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Nevertheless I felt totally defeated by this process. All my fears of driving that I had successfully buried came flooding back and I felt totally helpless.

Eventually I pulled myself together, went and bought some Bridgewater (therapy), went and had coffee with my friend, and bought a new pen (Derek is eating my other ones).  The garage rang me at twelve to tell me my car was ready. It took me another hour to pluck up the courage to go back to the car park and get in the Sharan.

I then lost the car, but only after paying for the parking ticket.  Finding it, I felt rather like Annika Rice on Treasure Hunt.  Some car park tickets expire if you do not leave the car park within a set time of paying. I had no idea if this was the case here.

Usually the car registration is on the key fob, but because this was the manager’s own car, it wasn’t.  I searched two floors of the car park before I found it by spying the golf clubs in the back.

It was much easier getting back thanks to Leicester’s peculiar one way system and the fact that I gave up on the handbrake altogether and just rode the brake instead.

By the time I fell with gratitude into my own, small, dented car, but which had a proper handbrake, I was £300 down, had just enough petrol left to get me to the nearest pumps (another £50. I thank you), and had a crashing headache.

I had had no lunch (felt too churned up to eat), and had half an hour left before having to pick up the children from school.

I then had to drop them off at my mum’s and leave immediately to get to Andrea’s.  We were off to Stratford with her mum and her mum’s best friend to celebrate her mum’s birthday.

Luckily everyone agreed I didn’t have to drive.  This was when the day really started to pick up.

We had a very nice meal at the new RST restaurant on the third floor of the main theatre, and watched a very funny performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream, which cheered me up no end.  It was perfectly silly, and exactly what I needed.

I got home an hour ago, after having left the house at half seven this morning.  My brain was still turning, turning, turning, so I have emptied it a bit in the hope that I will fall into bed in a coma and not dream of driving all night long.

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