Car fun

My fabulous Audi cabriolet has been playing up for a while now. It has an electrical problem that causes the battery to run down and I have noticed that it has been getting worse recently, lasting just two days after I have charged it up. Finally, this week it seems to have given up altogether - the battery won't charge any more and so I couldn't start the car.

This was a bit of an issue as I had guests here that needing dropping off at the airport and a wife due to arrive on the same flight. As luck would have it, my good friend Denis, who owns an appartment on the second floor of the building, had arrived from Ireland the day before. His car sits outside next to mine while he's not here and he generously suggested that I use his car to do the airport run. What a lovely man.

Only trouble was, my car was blocking the exit through the archway and had to be moved out of the way. So it was that my neighbour and paying guest were putting their backs into pushing a very heavy Audi with no power steering as I frantically hauled on the steering wheel trying to manouevre enough space to get the other car past.

There is even less room in the back of a Peugeot 306 coupe than there is in an Audi cabriolet, so one of my guests had to sit squashed up and a bit sideways in the back for the short drive up to the airport, poor thing. Having dropped them off, I shot round to the battery shop and got a replacement for the Audi and then went back to collect Debrah from the airport - who was somewhat surprised by the change in transportation.

The problems didn't stop there though. We still needed a number of things for the suites, and with new guests arriving the next day for both suites we could no longer get away with moving stuff from one to the other.

One requirement was another television - we duly bought quite a large screen version that was on offer and then realised that it wouldn't go in the car without the roof down. It was then that we discovered that there seemed to be a fault with the roof mechanism on Denis' car - it wouldn't work. We tried every which way to get the box in the car, but in the end we were forced to concede defeat and had to take the TV out of it's packing in the middle of the Leclerc car park and put the TV, the polystyrene and the cardboard box into the car separately. What a palaver!