nendless

After yesterday afternoon in a house with little mobile reception both our phones gave up at some point overnight with the result that no alarms went off in the morning and we didn't wake up until it was nearly time for the car to be taken in for a service to help make sure that it doesn't try anything clever when asked to drive three hundred miles next week. It's usually fine but is of the age where it might start failing MOT assessments or requiring money to be spent repairing bits of it, though hopefully not breaking down anywhere inconvenient in the middle of a longish journey during the winter just for the sake of it, breakdown cover notwithstanding. We'd jumped up and out without eating anything so (after dropping the car off) went to the same place we went to for breakfast a couple of weekends ago seeing as the first-choice target-place we'd attempted to try a couple of weekends ago still had a queue for a table. Conveniently our table in the place we ended up in was next to a plug so that our phones could be charged to allow the garage to be able to tell Nicky all the extra bits they'd found to be faulty or dangerous. It took an hour of wandering around attempting to extract present ideas before they called to say that the need to re-align the wheels had arisen (which, if it makes wheels occasionally squeak when adjusting the steering slightly on a not-quite straight road, has been out for a couple of years) and that the shock absorbers at the front were knackered, quite believable seeing as part of the small and not-worth-driving journey the car makes each day is over some fairly uneven cobbles. The shock-absorbers needed to be fished out from elsewhere and ended up not being done until Monday but the other outstanding bits required another coffee and a muffin to be eaten to allow them to be completed, though we then just walked back anyway so that they could fix the other bits when they'd got them in and taken £90 off the price in order to price-match a competitor.

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As well as being of the age when people of the same age as us are generally waving babies about (with some starting their second round) we're also at the age where our parents are getting more likely to start disappearing, unfortunately starting last night with the father of one of Nicky's school-people group whom we'd met through in Glasgow in the afternoon yesterday. Shockingly sudden for the family and friends but quick for the person involved. I'd only really met and spoken to him at any length on his daughter's husband's stag do five or so years ago, though it can be easily deduced that if he was speaking to the relatively sober me in detached observation of the antics of the surrounding embarrassingly-hammered people instead of getting embarrassingly hammered with his incipient son-in-law that he must have been a pleasant gentleman. His latest grandchild was demonstrating yesterday that it is just about capable of rolling onto its front and back again so it's quite unlikely to remember its maternal grandfather but at least its maternal grandfather got to see it.