And the moral of the story is...

Never leave the house without your handbag! I popped out to fetch Dave from work this evening, a twenty minute round trip that I do one way or another on most days. I literally just scooped up baby and grabbed the car keys on my way out - as I normally do. Sometimes I do the run still in my slippers, not tonight - thank gawd!

20 minutes later and I'm sat in the supermarket car park just up the road from the Uni with a very poorly car :( A giant pop was heard while negotiating a dastardly speed bump, followed by grinding noises from beneath the beast and bits of car related debris scattered in the road - arghghghgh!

But without my handbag I didn't have my breakdown details on me, I didn't know the postcode of my location to tell the breakdown people where I was (lots of spelling of welsh road names required), and I didn't have identity on me to prove who I was when the recovery man eventually turned up - no boy scout award for me this evening, 'be prepared' ?? erm what!?

Thankfully Dave had his mobile on him so I was able to 'straight through' 118 118 and get the number for the AA to request a rescue. Simple enough you would think? Oh, no. My car insurance that I bought from the AA in December came with free breakdown cover - but the muppets couldn't find any of my details on their system (breakdown and insurance are two different sections who clearly don't communicate with one another). They wanted to charge me £120 just to come and take a look. What? No way hosay. By this time R was wailing, he was hungry and tired and wondered why his Mummy was getting all cross in the middle of a strange car park instead of taking him home to bed. A quick breast feed to shut the munchkin up and then onto plan B - ring the RAC. I knew there was a good reason I 'forgot' to cancel my old breakdown cover from my previous car! So finally we had someone willing to consider coming out and rescue us, just the usual hour and half wait to sit through - by this time we'd called in Dave's Dad to come and rescue the little man and get him home to bed.

So two and a half hours later I'm half frozen, starving and I apparently have a shattered coil on one of my front wheels which means the car had to be towed to the village garage to await what no doubt will be a hideously expensive repair.

Sigh. It has been quite an evening.

Toodle pip
J
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