Tools. Sheds. Unnecessary bits of wood. Random scraps of anything. All the old T-shirts that your wife/girlfriend thought had been thrown away. That's just some of the things a man covets. Some men, and this may or may not include me, even have Haynes car manuals for cars they either no longer own, or sometimes never have.......which brings me on to my subject. My lovely little Fiat Cinquecento 1.1 Sporting threw a fit last week. It was expected as there was water loss from some unknown yet suspected problem. Rather than bore you with the details, suffice to say, my good friend Simon [or Rmad as others know him] borrowed my 'Cinq' to drive to the Haynes Motor Museum in Zummerzet to visit a car shown. On the return leg, the car showed it's appreciation by spitting it's water content out all over the M25. Nice.
The upshot - I ordered parts. Parts arrived. I got greasy, oily, dirty. My finger nails look like Steptoe's and my stance now resembles that of Richard III. It seems that whenever I do any kind of DIY, the danger, toil and expectation of a job well done turn me into a crookback. All I need now is some oil if the Americans have stolen enough this week and some water, which of course is a finite and cyclic resource too. Just think, the water that goes into my car may well have been bathed in or drunk and therefore passed, by good King Richard himself!
Fortunately for me, I'm always ready to take something apart, see what's wrong and then put it back together. It would be nice to be so well paid that I could just say things like 'You there, grease monkey. Fix this!' Throw the keys and a wodge of Lizzies at the offending working class person and wait for it to be done. But no. In this modern age, creative people like me are cheap.
The car might be fixed, nearly, but I'm going to take a good few days to recover, even with the aid of two bottles of Old Speckled Hen and some red wine. Swedish massage anyone?
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