overlap

I mentioned the car's electrical problems – somewhere there was a fault that kept draining the battery. After a couple of hundred miles last sunday, the battery was as flat as a steamrollered pancake come tuesday. Which is how the battery happened to be in the house being charged on wednesday night when the car was broken into. With a fully charged battery returned to the car on thursday and the run to London, it came as some surprise when I got back to the car on saturday morning to find a completely flat battery. And nobody in sight in all of western London. Half an hour later, I finally had a car come by and some very helpful chaps stop, so via the magic of jump leads, I hit the road. I was already planning to visit my friendly mechanic in order to get him to look at the electrics again – we replaced the alternator a while back and that didn’t fix the battery drain. By a process of elimination, we established that the radio was the cause of the drain and I went off to the match enjoying the mighty irony that had the muppets been successful in their attempt to steal the radio on wednesday night, I would not have had the battery problem that morning. Although I could easily have slept through the first hour, the final thirty minutes of the game was great fun with a very, very late winning goal. Collected the car with an understanding of how to work around the radio problem now it’s clear exactly what the problem is, and feeling satisfied with life and looking forward to getting home, I left. An hour later I was stopped in an isolated layby on a country road in deepest Wiltshire, with an immobile car. By the time I stopped, the headlights had dimmed considerably and I’d taken the pragmatic decision to press on slowly rather than be stopped with the imminent prospect of no lights at all in the middle of an unlit yet rather major 60mph road. This is where knowing the route helps immensely! Going through my stuff by feel to locate my headtorch, once under the bonnet it didn’t take long to work out what had happened; while playing with the electrics, someone that isn’t me had failed to re-make a connection. Where the alternator had previously been charging the battery, since leaving I’d just been running the battery down, with the inevitable consequences described. However, by that point the battery was so flat that even had I fixed the connection, the car still would not have started. A couple of phone calls told me that it was set for –5 that night, but the stars were lovely in a very clear sky and the hours it took for the aforementioned mechanic to come and find me, fix the connection properly and give me a jump start was productively spent listening to my pocket radio and giggling at my predicament. I trust your own seasonal travels will be less troubled, but do feel free to have a good chuckle at my expense – you really couldn’t make it up, but no harm done, and all’s well that ends.