Friday 5 September 2025: A shiny new car

The poet’s new company car was arriving yesterday, and it was due to land at around 8am. They were collecting his old car too, a different company, but we didn’t know what time they were coming. All we knew was that it would be some time on the same day.

An 8am start meant the poet could have a bit of a lie in, so he set his alarm for 7:30am. At exactly 7:10am his phone rang. It was the collection company saying they were due to collect his old car some time during the day. The poet said yes, great.

Then the chap said: “I’m outside now, when you’re ready…and I think your new car’s here too.”

The poet said: “Oh, right. I’d best get up then.”

And so he was rudely awakened and he got up to go and deal with both parties.

At 7:30am, his alarm went off. I’d gone back to sleep because there wasn’t a lot I could do until he was sorted, and there isn’t a great deal of room outside the house for parking either, let alone a flat-bed truck and a spare car for the collection company driver. But now I was up and awake too, just as the poet was coming in, a big grin on his face.

I had a dirty cup of tea, he had a clean black coffee, and he had a look through the new car manual. He went outside to have a bit of a play and to connect his phone. Then he came in and told me to get dressed. We were going for a ride.

It was a very quick ride, but we went in a circular drive through a few of our closest villages while he got used to driving it. And then he managed to very successfully reverse it onto our very tight drive. Two jobs done in one go, now we both had the rest of the day to get on with our work.

Then his work contacted him and asked him to take his laptop in so they could update it to Windows 11, and the bloke who was going to do it wasn’t going to be there all day. It disrupted the rest of the day a little bit, but at least it gave the poet another chance to have a play with his new toy.

I wrote up yesterday’s blog post and posted it, choosing 2 of my own pictures I’d grabbed from a video on my phone. The quality wasn’t very good, but I think they did the job. I was about to get on with the new Novella #10 for the great novella challenge, when I noticed there was an OpenReach van outside…

These are the people who can’t get here until 12 September to fix our connectivity…

I donned a pair of shoes and ventured out for an unassuming stroll to see what I could glean, but the driver was on what sounded like a walkie-talkie discussing the traffic control they’d need. (Why do people use their phones like they’re walkie-talkies these days? I could hear both sides of what should have been a private conversation!) 

I walked around the houses along a circular route and bumped into one of our neighbours walking one of her dogs during her lunch break. Their house hasn’t been affected by this current outage, but, when I filled her in, she did offer me the use of her internet if I needed it, which was very kind of her. 

Back at my desk I started today’s blog post, and then it was time for my midday breakfast. The poet had called me on the way to work, to test his hands free was working, and I had to call him back as well. And by the time I was ready to go back to work, he was on his way back home to carry on with his work too. Before I got cracking, I did some admin and updated my 36-project spreadsheet with the latest daily wordcounts.

I did some outline work on the short story I brainstormed the day before and I updated my short story master Scrivener file with a load of ‘story starters’. These are draft titles or very short explanations of stories I may want to write in the future. I can use the titles for assignments or for submissions to 12 stories in 12 months. They’re just placeholders, really, in the binder, so I don’t lose sight of them.

Another OpenReach engineer turned up in the afternoon and joined the same one who had been there in the morning. So we went out to have a chat with them. They don’t need full traffic control for the repair and they expect to have it all rectified within 2 – 3 days. We won’t hold our breath but it was nice to talk to some real people on the ground for a change.

The rest of the day was spent on the great novella challenge. 

We’re going to a local annual fishing contest over the weekend, as spectators rather than participants. It’s one we went to last year. I think the poet is scratching an itch as he hasn’t been fishing in well over a year and he’s planning on doing something about that in the months ahead.

Whatever you’re up to, have a great weekend!