When you’re retired you don’t need to look for excitement. In my experience just sit back, relax and it will come to you. Last Saturday was Mrs Summerhouse’s open day at the barn. We did this before 4 years ago when we opened for two weekends, we provided wine and cheese, great success, from this point of view, people came, drank the wine and ate the cheese, oohed and aahed at the view and yes, hadn’t we done a lovely job on converting the barn, and wasn’t the wood-burning stove a delight, the only thing they didn’t do was buy any art. Bugger this for a game of soldiers we thought, not doing this again, and so it was. Each time the nice lady who organises it approached Mrs SH we made some feeble excuse as to why we could not be a part of the Nidd Art Trail, a grand concept aimed at putting the dale on the map art-wise, but just too much trouble for us. You have to bear in mind that we don’t, unlike most people on the trail, live at the barn so being there for two weekends was organisationally complex. Anyway this year we ran out of excuses and Mrs SH came under a bit of pressure from the nice lady about doing a service for the dale or some such baloney, and she caved in, at least to a certain extent. She agreed to open for one day, i.e. last Saturday. No wine or cheese and she sold 6 pictures, small ones but 6 nevertheless.
I have to admit I was not looking forward to hanging around and wrestling the dogs to the floor as they attempted to bite the head of a prospective buyer. They’re very nice dogs really but they do like to have a good old bark at anybody new but I thought this was likely to be the only challenge that the day presented – how wrong. At one point we had cars, I couldn’t count how many, lined up outside the barn. Unfortunately they were not lined up waiting to visit us and buy many pictures. They were stopped because there was a bloody great breakdown truck in the way completely blocking the quite narrow road outside our barn, stopping traffic in both directions. Now a more enterprising salesperson would have been running up and down the lines of stationary traffic, art work in hand, selling, you might say to a captive audience. Unfortunately this is not Mrs SH’s style and nobody else thought of it until it was too late.
Anyway much debate about what to do to help Clive. We tried to push it up the hill, this was worth the effort in that my son-in-law was subject to a face and shirt-full of mud as the wheel on his side spun enthusiastically but uselessly. This made everybody laugh, except him. Note for the future, a Volvo estate is a very heavy vehicle. So we tried putting wood, rocks and blankets under the wheels and had tried pushing it out, time for plan C I guess it was. We would pull the Volvo out by towing it with my Defender. Surely just the kind of task the Defender was made for. Well, yes and no. There were a couple of short-comings to this plan. This plan is only as good as the rope you use to attach one vehicle to the other. We didn’t actually have a rope, just some strap things for strapping items to the roof rack or maybe trailer. Never mind we press on, the other slight complication was that, given the weight of the Volvo, the steepness of the slope and the muddiness of the field, I would need to have the Defender in ‘proper’ 4 wheel drive. Being a bit of a city boy, I had never attempted to put the Defender into this manly sort of gear ratio. The Defender is a vehicle that is permanently in four-wheel drive but only the girly version – don’t worry ‘girls’ I shall be punished for my sexist attitude towards this whole task, a bit later. In girly four-wheel drive the Defender gets out of the field a treat but this was a whole different jamboree.
So we fabricated the strap thing into a makeshift multi-threaded rope substitute eventually found, by reading the service manual things, well it wasn’t our car, we didn’t know where it was, the Volvo’s anchorage point and attached our quasi rope. Only one problem now, I didn’t know how to put the Defender into manly four wheel drive. I had always promised myself that I would practice doing this in a non-crisis situation such as this, needless to say, I never did. The salesman at Ripon Motors had told me but that was three years ago and true to form, I hadn’t paid any attention then and probably wouldn’t have remembered if I had. So I had to read the book that comes with the Land Rover. How unmanly can a man get? By the time I had found the instructions (no real man reads the instructions for anything, certainly not four wheel drive on a Land Rover) and through complete trial and error wrestled the gear stick (there are two) into what I thought was the right position, everybody, Clive most of all had lost interest in plan C and moved onto plan D.
Plan D was to call Green Flag of which Clive was a member. I listened to him explain to the person at the other end of the phone his situation and I have to say, full marks for making the challenge sound like a solvable one but absolutely nil points for accuracy / honesty. I’ve just reversed off the road a bit and I’m stuck. Wrong Clive, very, very wrong, you’re a 100 yards in a field half way down a hill. Winching you out seems to me and son-in-law and his friend, not in any way achievable. Still although technically this is my problem, Clive being in my field, morally, it’s nothing to do with me, so lie away.
About an hour and a half later, a truck about the same size as the barn arrived in the very narrow track / road outside the barn (as above), blocking it as I’ve already said. And because this blog is already too long, I’ll cut to the chase and tell you the Green Flag man, who was actually just a local guy driving the local garage’s breakdown truck, pulled out the Volvo. As the guy said, we were all more likely, himself included, to be decapitated when the wire snapped than to pull out the Volvo. We had been happily leaning on the gate, offering advice in a manly fashion, like you do when you’ve failed miserably on the manhood front. With a lot of manly sounds we moved away although that didn’t help truck guy of course. He was brilliant, how he managed to extend the winch that far, manoeuvre the Volvo around ninety degrees on to the back of the truck (Clive had unfortunately burnt out his clutch trying to get out the field so the Volvo had to go on the truck), placate the members of the public who had been held up for about 45 minutes, I’ll never know. And I still think stationary traffic right outside the barn was a selling opportunity, still never mind, the Volvo was out of our field.
To end this blog, already too long, everybody left, we climbed into the Land Rover to drive to the pub and I couldn’t get it out of the manly four wheel drive and into normal four wheel drive, in fact it was worse that, the Defender seemed to be stuck in neutral so every time I let the clutch up to drive up the hill we rolled back down the hill, so now we were stuck. Not for the first time I mused, as you do, what a funny old business retirement is. So excitement in retirement, thrills aplenty and we’re still in the field. I’ll let you imagine how we got home to our normal retirement life whatever that may be.