Every holiday I swear to keep a holiday diary, and I have a shelf of unfinished ones – the first pages all whimsical prose getting progressively shorter and shorter until they peter out halfway through the trip. Or sooner. Occasionally I’d do them as blogs, with photos! But they still never get finished, closer, but no cigar.
Still.
Look!
An Epilogue!
I mentioned at the start that we had history with this car but I excluded most of April and May which I spent cursing the thing as I (and mainly my long suffering mechanic) chased down various oil leaks, water leaks and then spent a while re-attaching various bits of trim and bodywork. Honestly I didn’t think it woud make Dover, let alone manage nearly 5000 miles.
I’m not one for superstition (ask the Americans from day XI) but since we sent off the car has sat flat out for hours along French motorways, it’s chased supercars up and down Alpine passes with a foot buried firmly in the carpet, it’s sat in Roman traffic for hours at 35 degrees (and hotter still near Bologna) and has brought a smile to the faces of countless folk who’ve been overtaken by it. During all of this abuse the only issue we had was a flat tyre (and even that happened conveniently at a Swiss supermarket), which was simply re-inflated and then kept it’s pressure for the next 3000 miles.
It felt like someone was looking after us.
There’s a hair bobble round the gear stick, once brightly coloured but long since faded in the sun, that belonged to Kathy, the car’s previous owner, that’s now been joined by a “Rust 2 Rome Survivor” wrist band. Carl, her widower and one of my oldest friends, asked that we keep it there in memorium, so to speak, and it’s maybe that that brought us luck.
(Or all the time and money I spent on it before we left. Maybe a combination of the two.)
Kathy was only 32 when she died of cancer, almost as old as this car is today, and it was the people at Pendleside Hospice made her last days as peaceful as they could. If you’re feeling generous you can donate below. All donations will be fund matched up to 1k. (If I fill in a form at work and it’s approved. Although I’m not good with forms.)
https://www.justgiving.com/page/peter-shuttleworth-3
Thanks for reading this far,
pete
A pedant writes.
“What! This holiday story was written so that I would give money to some random hospice?”
“Look, I actually finished writing a blog. Got to the end. Do you know how hard this was for me? Sure some people swim far for charity but they like swimming! Some bloke I vaguely know called Andrew (who once taught me and Millie to drive quite quickly and meant I wasn’t scared in the Alps) is walking almost constantly this year for charity. But I bet he’s lost loads of weight, and he probably likes walking.”
I started something.
AND THEN FINISHED IT.
So why not Pendleside Hospice a fiver? Their link is buried halfway up this post.
(Or don’t. I’m planning to live forever. I won’t need a hospice.)