On the bike

Yes, on the bike. Mostly because I cannot afford petrol. Anyway, cycling with your children is supposed to be a positive experience, isn't it?

We were aiming for the local music festival, but never made it on account of getting lost. (Memo to self: always carry a map, even if it is of the Andes.)

But look on the bright side! I had an opportunity to muse on cycling vs driving. I can add my thoughts to the western world's weighty consideration on these matters.

1. Flies go up my nose.
When I am cycling, obviously, not when I am sitting in the car. For that to happen I would have to push them up my nose myself, and I don't remember having a habit for that. When I am cycling, flies also go in my mouth, and get trapped in my hair. This may be a summer lane effect. I am not sure it has a resolution. I can only seek to minimise the undesirable impact of being a death hole for flies by shutting up talking to Tiger while cycling.

2. My bottom hurts.
Being discreet about this, I will only say that I observe no matter how foamed-up and comfy my saddle promises to be, it still doesn't work over potholes and road bumps.

3. I feel vulnerable.
Yes, thrillingly vulnerable, not in a no-knickers way, but in the way of meteorology. I mean, look at this cloud. It's coming my way.

4.  I observe interesting things and not the back of a Volvo.
This pisses Tiger off no end. I am constantly off the bike wanting to take photographs or saying ohh look at this! while pointing to a daisy or a pigeon or a stream or a tree. It turns a simple trip into a two-hour journey. I can hear mutterings that on the next cycle ride I might be left at home.

5. I can say hello and thank you to delightful gentlemen as they make way for me on my bike.
This is an absolute bonus and I recommend cycling if only for this. It is unlikely to help me form any more lasting relationships however as you whizz past them quite quickly.

6. Dogs have a new and special terror.
Is that terrier bicycle happy? We are not going to find out until we try and get past it.

7. All roads are terrifying.

8. I become more moral. When we cross the road bridge I am practically levitating with my own sanctity.

The super-moral side is saying Look at me! I am on a bicycle! While you car drivers are eating up the planet and destroying our climate with your bad, bad ways. (The other side of the brain is whispering Lucky bastards. I bet you have a secret stash of biscuits stashed in your glove compartment.)

9. I become acutely aware of my own shortcomings.
Like, there's no one to help me if this goes bellyup. Can I call out the RAC or AA? If the gears break down or I have a puncture, I'm facing a very long walk home with a very cross companion.

10. I become hopelessly lost.
Two minutes off my familiar road route and I haven't a clue where I'm going! Did we pass this litter bin already? I shall take a picture of it, so I can navigate my own way home when Tiger leaves me behind because I am annoyingly off the bike again, complaining about the foam saddle, and covered in flies.

Actually, getting hopelessly lost is exactly my same experience as in the car. I may have to strap the non-working satnav to the handle bars, put on a cheery face, and just say, let's go that way.

Car bound

Tear home from Liverpool (not exceeding the speed limit, obviously).

I totally deny that the return journey - without stopping off to see Antony Gormley's Another Place as planned - has anything to do with my sudden, dawning fear, the Grit Mobile has no tax and what about the MOT?

Then let this cursed blog be useful for something, like a memo to my future self: 

Grit, when you wake up and shout Oh my god I am illegal! (about this same time next year 2014), your MOT was done 13th April.

You should have got it sorted, you twerp. Now you have a lot of panicky phone calls to make, don't you?

As for Antony Gormley, well, I have come to terms with loss, over the years. It is what makes me; it is a part of my being. I have thus devised cunning ways of lying to myself, bringing loss to promise, turning opportunity from emptiness. Like, my fortune cookie which reads thus: When you leave, you should always create something incomplete. Then you can aspire to return, when there may be time and space to shape something you never could before.

Maybe see you later,  Another Place.

SCHCHGLMSHKSCH

I am innocently driving the trusty GritMobile to pick up Tiger from the other side of town, when a horrible SCHCHGLMSHKSCH rises from under the bonnet as I lay my foot on the brake pedal.

I do the sensible thing and turn up the volume on Sue so I don't have to hear the horrible SCHCHGLMSHKSCH.

But it is quite insistent.

Hmm. I must think about this. I do not want to put the car in a garage for a day. This morning I calculated exactly how much time I have to organise everything for a smooth departure.

I must keep to the times to pick up Tiger from her windsurfing course at the lake and drop off Shark and Squirrel at their play dates.

And I must budget carefully. I have thought about this as well. I want to fill the car with only enough fuel to last the week. Then, if an insane and blind young man wants to steal the GritMobile while it is tucked in its nest behind closed doors, he will have to fill it with fuel first.

How I have planned ahead!

But the car continues to make that horrible SCHCHGLMSHKSCH.

Less than one week in England! How can I find a garage with a bank holiday weekend looming and us on a flight to Hong Kong? I wonder if I can drive without using the brakes?

I try that.

It is not very successful. My road speed is ten miles an hour and in the rear view mirror I see that I may be the cause of an accident.

So I think about not driving anywhere.

While the car screams SCHCHGLMSHKSCH I calculate the cost of taxis back and forth to the lake, over to a community arts centre on the other side of town, detour to Bletchley Park to drop off the relays, do the chip shop run on Saturday night, then take the hamster to live in the borderlands of Northamptonshire.

Taxis sound expensive to me.

I consider the options.

When I pick up Tiger to drive her home, I observe how we nearly smash into the back of an Audi because now the trusty GritMobile can barely stop. So I say to Tiger - paralyzed with fear at the sound of SCHCHGLMSHKSCH and the approaching Audi brakelights - that I will drive into the local garage to hear what they say. But frankly, I don't expect much when they're closing at 6pm and it's 5.55.

The garage mechanic sees me at the desk and his face falls and he says, 'Oh I remember'. I say, I have had a valet since then. Now it is making a SCHCHGLMSHKSCH sound.

So he rolls the GritMobile on a lift and crawls about underneath to say pads and discs, really bad, really really bad, and he stares at me.

I think, what are my options now, given the fact that I have three kids to get on a plane, I planned the point to a full stop so precisely, with all the stuff where I said 'yes, we'll do that', and I only have a hire car place that I need a car to reach?

He must have seen my face, and maybe he softened since I brought the car in for the MOT. Maybe he thinks how much mould has been steamed cleaned away, and considers how I must love the GritMobile. He says, 'We can do it for you now. Bill's just finished, but he has to stay on for his missus.'

Immediately I say yes. I don't think for one second whether there's enough money left in the bank.

As I drive home with the lovely safe brakes that don't SCHCHGLMSHKSCH each time I lay my foot on the brake pedal, I consider how I have reached that point where I solve difficulties by throwing cash at them, and sort problems in minutes that otherwise would take me months, simply by doing, and not thinking or planning at all.

Maybe I should take that as advice, and try solving a few other life problems that way, too.

Thanks, Hyundai!

I gave my (ad-free) blog soul to Hyundai today. I had to do it. They waved a family pass for Woburn Safari Park at me. So I considered the alternative - watching my spirit shrink as its owner sank on hands and knees to defrost the freezer - and I agreed. It seemed a fair exchange.

I had to agree to something else too. Shadowing a keeper for the day? suggested Tiger. No Tiger, something even more exciting than shoveling lemur shit and cutting up dead deer.

Driving a Hyundai car. Not any old Hyundai car, like the beat up specimen that lives in our 'hood at 32 Arbuckle Street - the one with dents in the bonnet where the local gangmaster took a hammer to it. No, this is a proper upmarket Hyundai car. The new i40 tourer diesel thingy, available in your showroom from September, from where you can drive to Milan on a single tank of fuel, apparently.

As you can tell, I know nothing about cars.

I am not a car worshipper, am I? You don't get all that 'petrol-sipping, vigorous interior, crisp graphic dash, hydraulically-assisted steering' round here. No. You get the practical horror of rattling several thousand miles around England with three kids in the rear, locked in mortal combat over a rage-fuelled vendetta that started last Monday.

So I started this test-drive experience with kids in a proper spirit of terror. (You should see the Grit Mobile. It needs a valet like the clear-up after the Bosnian War, and it's got no corners.)

The moment I sat in it, I should have backed out. Because it is at that point I realise the godawful truth that in test driving this great Hyundai chunk of metal, it is someone else's chunk of metal and (the awful bit) I have to drive it around a safari park and bring it back with all its corners, lights and wing mirrors intact.

Then Gerald says, Not only that! You must make our metal go past the rhinoceros, and they have a history of taking a dislike to your face, so watch it.

Well, after the terror of sitting in the chunk of metal and making it go had sublimated into shouting at the children to shut up about the bloody windows, reason and thinking started to kick in.

Most importantly, I think someone should tell Hyundai about the handbrake problem and the fact there is no ignition key.

They may not know this. The designers obviously did what they wanted with the look and functionality of this car because they not only made the outside metal very physically curvaceous, they rejigged the inside, and did away with the handbrake.

Be warned. You must press the handbrake button! Do not sit there screaming surrounded by vindictive rhinoceroses while the chunk of metal has stalled, and is now gently rolling backwards. The poor sod of a driver in the vehicle behind is frantically banging his horn and making shock-filled faces at you in the rear view mirror.

But there are so many buttons to choose from!

It was close. They won't be inviting me to test drive their metal again. But I carried on! In the same spirit of fortitude as always!

I only forgot about the handbrake button a few times, and then forgot how to drive altogether because there's no ignition key to turn when it stalls (another button). Then there are buttons in the steering wheel (confusing) and buttons all over the dash (don't look at them). There are buttons for air con settings, buttons for seat positions (up, down, hot, cold). I half expect a button to make the ruddy thing sing the South Korean National Anthem as well.

Some of the gadgetry does help though. A little screen on the dash shows me how cak-handed is my reversing, and the headlights swivel round corners to show your parking space. Gerald made much of the strip lights on the front. He said - with one beady eye on me even before I'd switched the thing on - how daytime lights significantly cut down your daytime accident rate. Ahem.

I merely wonder what is the cost to repair this electronic gadgetry when it all breaks down. I mean, at one time we drove a Ford Galaxy people carrier, and when water hit the electrics, the whole thing went kaput. You would drive along, and the doors would spontaneously lock and unlock a dozen times, and the windows roll down. It even used to do it when no-one sat in it. We'd come out in a morning to find the car unlocked and the tax disc nicked. So, Hyundai, a sensible approach is to know the maintenance cost of your buttons.

On the actual test drive I brought the metal chunk to a shuddering halt maybe two dozen times, so there is definitely something funny going on there, apart from my limited driving skills. (Admittedly I never got into third gear, it was all so scary and button-driven.) Maybe the new i40 requires a confident foot, a widely experienced driver, and a man who likes buttons.

But you are desperate to hear how the children reacted, aren't you?

They hated the Hyundai i40 tourer, and I am being kind. They couldn't see out (rear seats sunk into metal). They couldn't see out (windows smoked). They couldn't see out (she is in my way, it is not fair, I always get the middle seat, there is no space, etc. etc.).

In a consoling voice, Gerald said the kids have ports in the rear to dock ipods and computer gadgets (more buttons).

Sadly, we do not have kids who tour in cars like that. We have kids who want to look out the ruddy windows.

With a note of pleading he adds how the kids can set their own air con temperature. (Oh, innocent child-free man! Imagine the endless fun on a six hour journey to Northumberland!) The main advantage I can see there, is that the boot is very large.

On the other hand, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger could not believe their luck that Hyundai would give them a free safari day pass merely in exchange for a test drive and a post on mama's dodgy blog. So Hyundai score very high on kid delight there. They also, unwittingly, gave us a great lesson on car design, manufacture and marketing.

Quickly then, in conclusion.

What the new Hyundai i40 tourer needs: A bloke (35-years plus), who says, 'I am successful and stable in my important career with my expensive car and impressively fragrant wife, and I have computerised children (only two of them) who do not want to look out of the windows. I play golf and like buttons.'

What the new Hyundai i40 tourer got: Grit (aged 50), who says, 'Good grief where is the sodding handbrake? Why is it all buttons? Shut up SHUT UP about the windows. This car would last five minutes on our street before someone keyed it. Your father will never pay the repair bill on these gadgets. We could keep the rock collection in the boot. Oh my god, I can't see the corners.'

What Hyundai wants: You, to test drive it, then buy it.

You should see my kitchen floor

I take the car to a valet service and park it to the side. This is obviously out of the ordinary. The man in charge of the cleaners - all tall men and very muscly - comes over to me, frowning, and dismissively nods his head towards the queue for the car wash. He orders, 'over there'.

He thinks I'm here for a normal 30-minute makeover. The one where I drive it through the foamy brushes, they give it a once-over with the shake and vac, then I pay fifteen pounds.

I say, nervously, 'Can you have a look first?' I open the back door. He says nothing, but stares. Then he calls over two of the other muscle men. They stare too. One of them, looking like an action hero in his combat trousers, turns to me and shakes my hand. Then he says, in a quiet accent that sounds Eastern European, 'I've never seen anything like it in all my life'.

I feel both dismayed and a little pleased. Dismayed that I have been driving what looks like a battlefield from the Bosnian War. Pleased that I am a woman able to impress a man who bears a passing resemblance to Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Have wheels, will travel

We dug the Grit Mobile out of storage at the end of the back garden, drove it down the local garage and it passed its MOT.

You could have knocked me over with a molecule of air.

The tender loving care I have showered upon this vehicle in the last three years (nil) has obviously paid off. As has the love I bestowed upon it last August when I abandoned it down the bottom of the garden to fend for itself. It has done mighty well and I am proud. It simply dug in for the winter and shrouded itself in a mound of soil, dead leaves, bashed up coke cans and chip wrappers.

Truly, between the certificate of SORN and the neglected rusty brakes, I was not expecting it to pass. In fact, I was totally expecting a long list of failures, and a less honest garage than Honest Ted's could have made a killing from me. They simply could have clocked the expression of sad resignation on my face when I handed over the key at 9.00am, then handed me back a long list including replacement of cam-drive cylinder core-charger motor wheel-spike cable or some other essential item, which they claimed could be accessed only by trained mechanics wielding precision-controlled pneumatic spanners.

As it was, the man at the garage merely looked a little unwell, handed me back the key to road freedom, and wiped his hands down his overalls. Then he said 'That car's a health hazard'.

The working functionality of the car is not what he meant, Dig pointed out later. Apparently he is referring to the pile of last summer's cheese sandwiches rotting in the passenger footwell, the layer of mud, leaves, sticks, clumps of dried grass, the green chocolate raisins pebbledashed to the interior, the detritus, shavings and peelings of kid craft spilling out of every plastic hollow, and the collection of yellowing moulds and mildews which cover all seats and steering wheel with a comfortably soft furriness.

But that is no matter. Look out there upon the road network of England! The Grit Mobile is declared worthy of it!

Apart from that, the journey went quite well

I drive to Wales and pick up Squirrel from her home on a mountainside.

That sounds easier than it was. In reality I fall out of bed at 5.30am, throw coffee over my face, stagger into my trousers, pee down my own leg, throw more coffee over the floor, then exit the house backwards.

That sequence of events takes place after I have checked all my handover plans are working with Dig. He is arriving back from Hong Kong this very same morning. I insist he must be at home when Shark and Tiger wake up, because I'm not taking them with me to Wales.

So Dig, when your plane lands, spin the earth back on its axis by two hours. Then you can make time to wrestle with London Midland and arrive home for 9am. I will be on the M5. But imagine the lovely awakening your daughters will have! After not seeing you for a month the kids will think I have become suddenly hairy, gone bellywise, and grown more stubble. Mama! What a big surprise!

After more coffee and reassurance that London Midland has not exploded overnight, I set about driving to Wales. And I am a woman with a mission. You can leave me in charge of a vehicle that can kill me! Sure I can drive! I can do that! I just carry on drinking as much thick black coffee as my face can hold.

By the eighth mug I am a howler monkey on speed. I'm swinging from those tree tops quicker than you can count. Just one more slurp of the wizard black treacle should do the trick and keep me going until 2012.

So I pull off outside some house somewhere in the middle of nowhere at 8am. Stupidly, I think it is OK to park here. It's 8am on a Saturday morning and I plan to take ten minutes to pump that juicy fluid into my veins then make the ascent into Welsh. Only at 8.02 some hairy farmer bloke looms over my driver window, taps on the glass, and says he's seen me from his kitchen window, and can I move the car, because he wants to keep his garage access clear.

Move my car? By two foot? Look matey, I woke up at 5am, navigated a distant husband, arranged a military manoeuvre to salvage a Squirrel from a mountaintop, reversed Planet Earth, and drove two hours on the motorway while brain-fuelled on roast Colombia. Sure I can move my car! Just so you can see your poxy garage!

By rights there should be a hairy farmer bent double somewhere behind a hedge in Worcester with tyre tracks over his face.

But it was just another moment in a long and arduous journey I made to see my lovely Squirrel, fresh from her PGL adventure, and listen to her chatter all the way home about how to lunge at your enemy with a pointed stick.