Things are looking up

Gosh, nearly 2 months since my last entry. I’m still getting a lot of problems with the sciatica. It seemed at last to be getting better a few days ago, but the night before last it woke me in the night and I had to take pain killers to get back to sleep. It has been quite bad since. Sitting at the computer makes it worse, sometimes just sitting at all. At times I have had to lie down in the afternoon to get some relief and often go to bed about 10.30 for the same reason. I find this upsetting because it is limiting my writing time. I’ve done very little on my book this year. I could do with a laptop that I could use in bed but no money for that right now.

It’s been one thing after another lately. Three weeks ago the dishwasher finally gave up the ghost. I still have one son at home who cooks separately and the other one often comes back for lunch so there is quite a lot of washing up and with my poor health I really need one. Then, a few days later, the car packed up. It was in the garage a week but they couldn’t work out what was wrong with it. We had no money to replace either. Then last week our luck turned. Our neighbour said her son had a dishwasher that he didn’t use and let us have it for £20,and a friend of my husbands offered to take payments on a car he was selling. So we got the replacement dishwasher at the end of last week and the new car today. I haven’t been in it yet but it looks really smart. It’s dark green, which reminds me of a funny story about the first car I drove.

After my father died my mother and I didn’t have a car for three years. She didn’t drive and I was only 15. Then when I was 18 she decided to buy one and we could both learn to drive in it. She arranged to go to a local garage to see what they had, but I had already arranged to go somewhere else, so she went with a friend to choose one. She asked me what kind of car I would like but my teenage mind was elsewhere and I said "Oh anything – as long as it isn’t green." I had heard green was unlucky although I wasn’t really serious. When I got home there was a beautiful 6 year old Sunbeam Rapier (this was in 1966) and it was green!

I persuaded my boyfriend to give me driving lessons. The second time we went out I turned a sharp bend and didn’t straighten the wheel. Believe it or not I didn’t realise you had to!  We hit a wall and wrote off the front wing. After it was repaired my boyfriend asked if he could borrow the car one weekend and my mother agreed. Next weekend he asked if he could have it again. It turned out he was mixing with the wrong sort of people and he and two friends, who all worked at a local holiday camp were ‘selling’ the car, taking a deposit and disappearing until the luckless holiday makers had gone home. It may sound as though Mum and I were a bit naive but my boyfriend was the sort of guy who inspired confidence. I suppose that’s why they call them confidence tricksters!

Fortuately a taxi driver friend of mums saw the car outside the camp with a for sale sign on it and realised it might be ours because of the new front wing. He told Mum and after my boyfriend brought it back, well he didn’t remain a boyfriend for long!

I joked with mum that the car was unlucky because it was green and I had warned her. She said she had believed that green was lucky for the Irish and she had Irish blood but only a great grandfather so maybe that wasn’t enough. The next day I went to town and saw one of those shamrock key rings which gave me an idea. I bought it for the car and named the car Shamrock. We never had any problems with it again, at least not for 6 years when we finally had to get another because it needed a lot of repairs.

I’m thinking of calling the new car Shamrock 2 .  We don’t want any more problems! Funny thing is it’s St Patrick’s day on Saturday so maybe that’s an omen.