Last summer was one of the most amazing moments of my life, I taught about human rights at the World Scout Jamboree in Sweden along with a group of the most amazing people who’ve ever existed. However, not everything was plain sailing.
We, my friend Miss H and I, stopped off at Cambridge on our way to Sweden. It was lunchtime and the moment we’d decided to attach the headlight converters to my car – Bertrand. My father had advised me that headlight converters are easy to put on, but a pain to remove.
Ten minutes after opening the packet, after carefully reading the instructions five times each, turning the diagram from side to side and upside down just in case that helped, we managed to lose one of them in the actual headlight. As much as we tried, we couldn’t get it back out. Have you ever tried attaching headlight converters in a multistory car park? You get some funny looks. Time was ticking. Bertrand pulled into Halfords in Cambridge where you can buy headlight converters, but they don’t provide a fitting service – we asked.
I bought some goats. This was actually a very important achievement as my mother (the scariest of scary ladies) had formed a long and arduous search for a small goat for the previous three weeks. This search was a result of needing to provide my boyfriend with a replacement goat. Whilst he was at university, his goat died but his parents hadn’t shared this information with him so when he went home there was just no goat.
Have you any idea how difficult it is to find a small goat?
In the ferry queue, we began noticing logos on pieces of camping equipment and flags. People stood waiting, wearing uniforms we recognised. Uniforms we also had. Ours however, despite once neatly ironed, were lying in a crumpled heap on the back seats (or at least the pile of luggage on the back seats). Somehow, I attached the headlight converters and I managed to manoeuvre Bertrand onto the ferry and park without crashing. Notice the use of the word I. Miss H was no longer allowed contact with the headlight converters and had to stay safely inside Bertrand where she couldn’t get into trouble.
Next time: Driving on the wrong side of the road and Danish parking metres.
(We named my car after Bertrand Russell and a greatn grandfather of mine called Albert. Does your car have a name?)
Kate - Words jumble together trying to describe the object in question: she is clever, but not the cleverest; she is pretty, but not the prettiest; she can write a sentence, or even a thousand sentences strung together –but neither entirely concise nor clear; she is a scientist, inquisitive, precise; she is an artist, open, distracted. She is me.
