Never let me behind the wheels of a van
First off, sorry for disappearing from the digital world for oooh a month, but you’d be surprised how much time it takes to settle into a new fab home, complete with *two* washing-lines. And maybe a new houseguest, but I’ll tell you about that later!
Anyway, at the beginning of July it became time to move all my worldly goods up to North Wales. So I hired the biggest Transit van that I could get - which turned to be a bruised and battered white van which had to come all the way from Liverpool.
It being a hot summers day, I thought a big huge American-sized tumbler of Diet Coke would be just what I need before I started the four-hour journey down the motorways of Western England. So I drove into a nearby KFC drive-in. Neglecting the fact that it had a height-limit, and I had a huge Transit van.
Thus, the first warning I had about the sheer size of the thing was when I drove right into the handy mobile height-metre warning on the KFC drive-in. So I thought I’d better try to get out of the drive-in before I courted any more damage. But I didn’t want to run into the height-metre thing again - so I thought I’d just go a little forward and try to ramp my way out of the drive-in lane.
Another bad mistake, since I managed to scrape past a yellow post on the corner (leaving yellow markings all over the side of the van) mount the kerb and come down with a thud on the other side before I made it to the relative safety of a parking spot. Although it’s lucky I did that since the *roof* of the drive-in was just around the corner.
After that little incident, I drove to Cardiff and even managed to park outside my temporary flat without any further problems. Then I was invited to the pub - and as it was now dark and raining by now, I thought I’d drive the van down there. Spotted a parking space between two cars, thought I could get the van into there without a problem. Except not really.
Before I knew it, a man had come running out of the pub screaming “what the hell do you think you’re doing to my car?” - and on further examination, I was a wee bit too close to his BMW. Reversing the car revealed the awful truth - I’d made quite a few scratches on his precious car.
Once he had calmed down and realised I wasn’t just going to disappear quietly into the night, I popped into the pub where I saw my friend, grabbed a pen and exchanged insurance details. At one point I asked him who his insurer was, he muttered something about Glamorgan County Cricket Club, and I asked him why there. Both my friend and him looked at me as if I was mad or stupid. Which I may well be, but that’s another matter!
Anyway, details were exchanged, and the man left to carry on his drinking with his pals. Whereupon my friend told me with some glee that I had managed to scrape the car of not just anyone, but Robert Croft, captain of the Glamorgan County Cricket Club. Which makes it my second scrape, and my second scrape with a famous Welsh celebrity.
More moving disasters next time, once I gradually get my office set up!
Originally published at almost witty. You can comment here or there.