There and back again

Today was taken up by The Car. For a few weeks now every time we turned on the ignition there was a warning beep and a sign saying "oil change due" - and I jumped guiltily every time. So today we took it over the water for a service in its home garage because we've not had it for a year yet and this is part of the deal, that we get a "free" service. Otherwise, as I said to the nice girls at the desk when we arrived, I'd be down the road to the nearest garage in Dunoon ...

"Home" for the car was Arnold Clark - or one of the Arnold Clarks - in Linwood. For the uninitiated, this is a place in the nearer wilderness to the west of Glasgow, south of the river, a land of car sales rooms and retail parks full of the kind of shops I don't usually frequent and Starbucks. We had to go to Arnold Clark Skoda, a relatively small place with a decent enough line in free coffee and inexpensive hot food. From outside, you look out on a sea of yellow flags, all bearing the name "Arnold Clark", flags that seem to grow in every second lot in this massive area. Finding it always gives us the vapours, as the internet signal is intermittently not there and the sat-nav app didn't work when we needed it to. 

The service was to take a couple of hours, so we schlepped over to a TKMaxx just because it was there and emerged an hour later with a pair of men's pjs (comfy waist: remember?) and a bottle of lemon-infused olive oil, which I needed and which is impossible to find chez nous. We had more coffee and some wraps back at the showroom, chatted to the attendant girls, and left, hobbling from the flat, hard chairs. We drove out into a vast traffic jam, and it wasn't until I got Waze on screen and was able to persuade Himself to trust me that we were able to escape and make our tedious and roundabout way to the M8 and home.

My collage shows the ferry on which all our journeys begin, crossing the Firth away from the black clouds over the hills; the road back to the M8 outside Paisley with an impressive array of daffodils all along its verge, and two views at Toward, where we fled in desperation after we had arrived home and had some tea. It's after a day like this that I realise my time for living in cities is long gone - which adds its own dimension to yesterday's mixed feelings.

But there are far too many cars ...