Just when we got used to the clock...

So, then the salesman informs us there's been a mix up and the car alarm won't be installed into our 2010 Nissan Note until next week.

"I suppose we'll just have to mind it until then," I say. So off we go, pushing occasional buttons and trying to get the windshield wipers to stop working.

At SuperValu, Herself goes in to buy some groceries while I mind the car from the passenger seat. I'm checking both side mirrors and the reflection in the passenger side window. It's a busy car park. A car drives right at me before swerving at the last minute into a space. I lower the window and start howling:

"Ahhh-rooo...! Ahhh-rooo! Ahhh-rooo...! Ahhh-rooo!"

Yer man from the car looks at me kind of funny.

"Sorry!" I say cheerfully. "Sensitive car alarm!"

The man walks off towards the shop, shaking his head. Herself appears at the shop door.

"Is everything alright?" she asks.

"Oh yes," I say. "Everything's fine. You carry on."

She goes back inside. I go: "Cheep! Cheep!" and return to my vigil.

A few seconds later, I'm off again:

"Ahhh-rooo...! Ahhh-rooo...! Ahhh-rooo...! Ahhh-rooo...!"

"What now?" Herself says. "I've lost my place in the queue!"

"Bit of a breeze came up. Rocked the car a little."

She goes back inside and I go: "Cheep! Cheep!"

Shortly, it's "Ahhh-rooo...! Ahhh-rooo...! Ahhh-rooo...! Ahhh-rooo...!" again.

Herself appears with a half-packed grocery bag.

"Well?"

"Woman looking at me funny."

"Okay."

"Cheep! Cheep!"

And then:

"Ahhh-rooo...! Ahhh-rooo...! Ahhh-rooo...! Ahhh-rooo..."

"Yes?"

"I'm lonely.... Cheep! Cheep!"

It turns out to be cold and frosty after dark and we decide we'll risk the car on just the immobiliser for the night.

I couldn't find my thermos flask anyway.

Long Hard Day doin' nothing

My two eyes feel like someone is in the back of my head squeezing them by hand to produce something vinegary.

Herself and I sailed off into the lofty heights of a private hospital today to pick up some test results (and almost sailed off into some even higher heights when I suddenly directed her into a change of course in front of an oncoming van... Apologies to the driver who needed a change of underwear before ever having set foot in work!) and as the appointment was for the ungodly hour of 8.00am, we have been out of bed for too many hours already today.

The test results were fine, and weren't for me. The pain behind my eyes is just from the tension of (ironically) a day of not being at work.

Gas company arrived to put in the big yellow fuse. Their jackhammers and JCB with rockbreaker and the ever-popular mole going Thump! Thump! Thump! for hours has set my teeth on edge.

So I'm grumpy.

But you knew that already.

I mean I am noticeably more grumpy than usual.

But I have just found a €5 voucher for Woodies, so that is good. And I managed to load the dishwasher (the labour of it all...!) and get it started. And brought in washing. And mixed a little sand and cement and filled some holes in the side of the house. So maybe all is not as bad as it seems.

Plumbers promise to connect the heating system to the big yellow fuse next week.

Doubtless, I shall improve my humour as the ambient room temperature rises.

Pass me the Gazebo, missus

A little bit of sunshine has ensued and it hasn't rained much to speak of on the east coast for the past week or so. The Home section of Dunnes Stores is playing a blinder selling garden furniture, barbeques and gazebos. I could see burly husbands marching boxes of them out to parked cars in The Square yesterday. The wives were following up with shopping trolleys laden with bedding plants.

Our B&Q gazebo was unpacked from winter hibernation this morning. My father, who had called to show me his shiny new seven-year-old car, watched as I poked lightweight metal tubes together and made the magic of the summertime appear amidst bags of recycling drinks tins and plastic bottles which is our back garden.

The black cat put in an astonished appearance only briefly. Although he is becoming less wary of visitors if they are in the back garden (more room for him to escape if they should turn on him) he is still unhappy to see old men. The old man next door has had reason enough to chase our cats out of his shed in the past which I think is the source of Black Cat's phobia.

A note left on the counter this morning reads:

"If you have time, could you clean the litter trays?"

My work is cut out for me. At least I shall have a gazabo to relax in later today. I also have a new gas-fired barbeque, so if you hear sirens and see flashing blue lights this afternoon, you'll know what's happened.

No work til Monday.

Related Post: B&Q Gazebo instructions

Winning the Howth Head Rally

"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Nothing ventured..." was the reply.
I looked, dubiously, at the temperature gauge on the dash.
"Well, if you think it will make it..."

We were in Herself's bockity Nissan Micra Collette, an impulse-buy, "this-one-will-do" kind of thing which transaction must have gladdened the second-hand dealer's heart. Its engine wasn't properly attached, for one thing and it had a distressing tendency to emit loud "Boing!" noises when power was applied.

"Howth is a long way from home to break down," I tried.

She steered up the hill and started working the gears.

"Do you smell something?" I asked, sniffing the air.
"Hmmm?"
"Something burning?"
"It's your imagination. You worry too much."

Horns started to sound behind us. I looked around.

"Was it foggy when we started out?"

Plumes of white smoke obscured the rear view.

"I think we're on fire!"
"Nonsense! She's just burning a bit of oil."

A muffled crash and tinkling of broken glass sounded from back down the hill where an unsuspecting fellow motorist has lost his way in the smokescreen and careered off the road and into Dublin Bay. Screeching brakes sounded briefly and were cut off abruptly as we rounded another bend.

"We can probably be arrested for this, you know?"
"She'll make it."

And she did, crawling at 15 m.p.h. up the roadway to Howth Head on a hot summer day, we felt the car almost physically flop when it reached the car-park overlooking the view of the sea.

"At least it's downhill from here."

We walked across the Headland, listening to the silence of victory.

Tea and a Relaxing Drive with Carmel

In our work canteen they swapped over some months ago from a large, smouldering tea urn, which produced a brown, lava-like substance to what seemed at the time to be an elegant substitute -- individual stainless steel teapots and a nice, new hot water boiler. It was self-service all the way and if Mary wanted tea like cabbage-water and Willie wanted tea like tar, then so be it. Everyone was now responsible for their own.

Theory is fine, but practice proved different to expectations. No-one seems capable of finding the optimum filling level in the miniature teapots and several forests worth of napkins have been sacrificed moping up spillages. It's like trying to pour tea through six spouts at once. No matter which way you tilt the cup or half-fill the pot, this golden fountain spews forth onto the saucer, the tabletop, your work colleagues, the floor. It's just one more nerve-brittling part of a stressful day and we seem to have come to accept it as we have irate customers and irrational orders from on high. Why shouldn't every tray be wet and dripping when first picked up from the pile? Hasn't it always been that way?

It was therefore with a certain amount of astonishment that I found that things didn't work that way in our sub-office in Clondalkin, where the smaller staffing levels mean a full-time canteen staff is not warranted. The calm of the Clondalkin office canteen is perhaps due to the fact that they use teabags the old-fashioned way, straight into the cup and out again using a real spoon.

I found this out on a training visit there in 2005 when several staff were updating their computer skills. Carmel Smith, one of the teabreak mafia I like to join in with at head office, was there and though I didn't suspect it at the time, was going to play a great part in getting my memory cells working later in the day. I don't mean in the "Do you remember when?" kind of way. Rather it was more "My life is passing in front of my eyes."

Carmel has recently learned the art of driving a mechanically-propelled vehicle, in her case a small, pale blue Fiant Panda. It still had learner plates on it when I climbed into the cockpit as navigator on the way back to HQ after the training session ended.

"You'll have to show me where to drive," was Carmel's first remark. Now, while I understood that the one-way system in Clondalkin Village is a little intricate, the fact that I don't know how to drive seemed to have been overlooked by Carmel. The blind were going to lead the blind in one of the busiest traffic snarlups in South Dublin County.

I started to worry when I saw Carmel mouthing a prayer to St. Christopher before checking the mirror. If we needed intercession with the divine already, it didn't bode well. I double-checked my seatbelt.

We took off at a sedate pace and were soon wending our way through the hurried crowds. Carmel was surprisingly calm, although she interspersed her concentration on things automotive by telling me she actually wasn't very calm. In fact, she said, she was very nervous. She was glad I was along. An extra pair of eyes to watch out for danger.

I remember rosary beads. There were several incomplete sets in the kitchen drawer back in the day. By coincidence, one even had quite a nice St Christopher medal on its broken chain.

Carmel's small blue Fiant Panda is about the size and temperament of a large bee and Carmel drove it that way, buzzing about the traffic, peering into wing mirrors and watching all around her. I was reminded of one of those World War I movies, maybe The Blue Max, where the hero with the stiff upper lip, leather flying helmet and goggles scours the sky for enemies.

We trundled back and forth between traffic lights and I advised on lane changes and signalling. I peered out the passenger window, watching for biplanes sweeping down out of the sun. We checked our position on the compass a few times, but the mission was going smoothly. At last, sweeping over the Belgard Road, we went hard over to the right and landed with a slight bump back at HQ. The engine was switched off and silence reigned. I unclenched. All in all it was a creditable performance. Carmel's training days were nearly over.

We heard that Carmel was taking the driving test a few weeks later. Funnily enough, there was a full complement in the safety of the staff canteen for the hour that she was absent, reversing around corners and doing three-point turns. A somewhat stunned Carmel returned with a pass and we all breathed sighs of relief.

The wee blue car is still on the go, despite a scrape or two. It had a luggage box added last week which whistles.

"It's like a fecking ceili band!" someone complained. Carmel, of course, just laughed.

More power to you Carmel!

Especially at the traffic lights.

Online Motor Tax beats the Tallaght to Hollyhead bus. But only just.

I was the bigger fool, because every year around Christmas I would get on the bloody 75 bus and rattle along the roads to Nutgrove to get the Motor Tax renewal disc.

"Why not drive?" I hear you say. Because on the one hand, the beloved was using the car (or more to the point, it was parked outside her workplace and would be used after she was finished working to get home again), and on the other hand I neglected to learn how to drive so I wouldn't be put upon to go on errands like this one...

No bother getting there. Not much trouble handing the paperwork over and paying for the disc. And no trouble bumbling about the shops of Nutgrove Shopping Centre, maybe even finishing off a bit of Christmas shopping while I was there. The problem invariably arose when I decided to go home. The 75 bus seemed only to go one way. No matter how long one waited, usually with an inappropriately large gift like a giant picture frame, or a candleabra, with the rain and sleet blowing up Nutgrove Avenue, the bloody thing never came back!

I decided that far from ending its journey at Dun Laoghaire, the double-decker must have trundled on along the crumbling pier and taken the plunge into the cold water to travel the murky seabed until it reached Hollyhead. Dublin Bus was obviously muscling in on the Irish Sea ferries business at my expense.

One year it occured to me to get six months worth of tax instead of twelve. This would make the disc expire in, say, June rather than December. Why didn't I think of it before!? No more shivering at bus-stops, or trudging along through puddles into Rathfarnham Village in a vain search for civilization, the while discovering the dubious pleasures of the inevitable hole in the sole of one's boot.

So I took the bus in the sweltering heat of June, baked inside the Motor Tax Office and fell, dripping, out of the Shopping Centre. I parched at the bus-stop waiting in vain for the returning 75, before finally hiking up to Templeogue under the scorching sun before limping onto a Tallaght bus and, whimpering pitifully, crawled in the front door to sit steaming beneath a cold shower jet.

Last year we took a different tack, making sure the Motor Tax ran out at the end of March. Now March is a fairly predictable if changeable month. One day can be warmish, the next a fair blizzard. But at least it's possible to predict the weather a bit. I even went so far as to change Motor Tax Offices and got a lift to Clondalkin instead of Nutgrove with my father. We spent an hour exploring the Mill Centre with its various shops (quite like Nutgrove, as it happens), before wrestling with the one-way traffic system and the other irate motorists in the village.

I was pleased when tonight the Renewal Notice was waiting for us on our arrival home from work. On it was information about the online renewal process, a PIN number, and a URL on which to log in. Perfect!

I logged on and answered "Yes" to the first few questions. Then it asked me the big one. "What is the name of your Insurance Broker?"

Oh bugger.

I went out with a lump of paper and a pen in the rain and noted the details from the Insurance Disc on the windscreen. The wind shrieked down the roadway and leaves sped by my head. Large drips fell down the back of my neck from our leaky gutter.

Why me?

I'm informed that the Motor Tax Disc will arrive in the post in about four working days time. That's slightly shorter than the return journey of the 75 bus in my experience. Let's just hope the whole thing is over for another year, eh?

You wait for ages for one Briggie and then a bunch of them come along at once

Don't get me wrong, I love those funky tunes of Stevie Wonder. My childhood 70s were liberally sprinkled with replays of 'Superstition' and 'You are the Sunshine of my Life' on our life-threatening wireless set, but man oh man his harmonica sets my teeth on edge!

I was sitting here this evening gazing blankly at the Blog when I heard 'Isn't She Lovely' as a background piece to some soap opera playing on the TV in the other room.

Yes she is lovely, Stevie, but please stop blowing on that thing for mercy's sake...

When Old Nick finally gets to poke me with the barbeque fork, I reckon he's gonna have our old shockin' and rockin' radio set tuned to eternal 12-inch versions of 'Isn't She Lovely'.

Okay. Rant over.

So anyway, I finished doing overtime a few Saturdays ago and had to walk around in the afternoon from work to the LUAS terminus (the LUAS is a tram) to meet up with Briggie, the love of my life, who had kindly offered to pick me up in the car when the morning's extra work figuring out end of year accounts was over.

"I'll probably just drive around," she'd said earlier, meaning that with the LUAS terminus nearby, and Tallaght Hospital, and the Civic Theatre, and the County Council building, that the car park attendants were buzzing about on Saturdays trying to ensure that customers for The Square (The Square is a local shopping mall) had spaces in which to park their cars. If you were planning a LUAS ride, or a visit to the Theatre, you were politely told to move along.

I took this to mean that she'd probably find a space on a double-yellow line, like usual. And I'd just have to open the car door and step inside, like usual.

Nope. This time she really was circling. Like a plane waiting to come into land.

I walked over from the LUAS terminus and there was the car shooting by in a steady stream of orbiting traffic, most people looking for a parking space in the busy car park. She hadn't seen me, because of the traffic and the need to concentrate on avoiding a fender bender. Brig was steadfastly looking at the car in front, and not at the waving, smiling, suddenly feeling foolish man in her life standing on the edge of things.

"Maybe she's going to park," I thought, clinging to the hope of a simple open door, step inside scenario. I was sadly mistaken. The car went clockwise around on the far side, pausing to allow another vehicle to move out.

I stopped to size up the options for an interception.

I could run madly straight ahead, hoping to catch her eye before she pulled out into the circle of traffic again, or I could switch to the right and head her off at the pedestrian crossing. She moved off again. I had to jink right.

I scuttled past startled pedestrians pushing shopping carts and dragging children in their wake and came to a skidding halt at the zebra crossing outside the North Entrance. A large 4 x 4 security patrol vehicle stopped. I looked at the driver, who seemed to be expecting something. He looked back, then waved me over the crossing into the centre.

"I don't want to cross!" I mouthed, waving at him to move on. He looked at me with a strange expression and jerked the jeep forwards. I wasn't sure if I caught a hand gesture out of the corner of my eye.

I trotted down the roadway, thinking as I did so that people were probably giving me strange looks for good reason. I wasn't exactly the typical jogger, in waxed jacket, woolly hat and combat boots. And the massive, swinging beer-belly and rapidly purpling face were atypical health-nut features too.

Then, at last, just as lines of dayglo wearing happy-people catchers from the security firm were starting to nonchalantly converge on the North Entrance, muttering "It's alright, sir. The nice men will be here from the hospital very shortly now," here came the car tootling towards me in the traffic. I caught the door handle in relief and hopped inside.

"Did you have a good morning?" she asked me.

"Not bad," I said. "Although it got a bit hectic there towards the end."

My Cherie Amor. I could listen to that now, if Stevie goes easy on the harmonica.