Number 5, The Lift

Number 5

Today is Friday, I am still not working while the truck is being repaired at Harwoods MAN Centre near Southampton.  I have to go and collect it sometime today.  I am a little apprehensive about one aspect of this, being driven there by my boss’s mother.  I am guessing she is in her late seventies, and her driving is cause for concern if not alarm.  She brought me home on Wednesday when I dropped the truck off.  It was bucketing down with rain and much of the journey is on the M27.  We passed the scene of a grizzly accident, ambulance crews trying to help the occupants of a car which had dissected itself upside down across the crash barrier.  It was one of those crashes which did not look survivable, but from which miraculous escapes are sometimes made.  I pray that they did.

Meanwhile, trying not to look at the carnage,  I am at the mercy of someone who talks nineteen to the dozen with her hands, both of them.  And while they are away from the wheel gesticulating the car is drifting about across the lines between the lanes, and from the corner of my right eye I am checking to see if my driver is aware of this, or of other traffic beside or behind her, or indeed if she is using the mirrors at all.  It seems not.  We change lanes frequently, and with no hesitation.  She just does it.  Without craning my head round to check I am not sure if she is cutting anyone up or not as she weaves about, and she is, of course talking about the empire, or the Royal family, or trying to work out if the load on a truck ahead of us is really two bus shelters one on top of the other or something else entirely.  She asks me, in a way which confers absolute expertise on all things to me. She is certainly not paying attention to anything important.

As we negotiate a roundabout just prior to joining the motorway she hears the siren of an ambulance coming from behind somewhere.  Her reaction is to stop instantly.  She just stops right where she is, without any regard for the truck and other cars right behind her on the roundabout, and had I not had my seat belt on I would be out of my chair.  I don’t think she knew they were there, and certainly didn’t check in her mirrors.  The ambulance takes a different route and we continue.  That was Wednesday.

I wonder how my journey with her later today will be.  I might offer to drive!



Number 5,

The Lift.

Mrs. White is seventy nine,

Her eyesight’s good and her hearing’s fine;
She drives her car from here to there
But if you go with her, you’d better beware!
It’s pouring with rain as she fiddles with switches,

We dodge round the puddles and just miss the ditches;
A gigantic lorry hoots loudly at us,

And she jams on the brakes right in front of a bus!
‘What’s that over there?’ she exclaims with a shout,

And getting excited waves her hands all about!

‘Nothing important, just a man up a ladder’,
While people behind us get madder and madder!
She turns her lights on, then she turns them back off,

As she grabs for a hanky to smother a cough,

We swerve as a rabbit pops out from the grass,

And pull out in front of a car trying to pass!
The lights have turned red, but is she awake?

She’s still doing fifty; it’s high time to brake!
We stop just in time, with our tail in the air,

But when they go green she is quite unaware!

She’s back in her handbag looking for lipstick,
Somebody hoots and calls her a dipstick.

Away we go with the handbrake on tight,
Indicate left but then we turn right!
She chatters away about nothing at all,
And narrowly misses scraping a wall.
One lane or t’other, she goes where she likes,
While various bicyclists leap off their bikes!

We finally get to where we were going;
The public are safe from our to-ing and fro-ing,
The engine is off, I’m alive in one piece;

Mrs. White’s being interviewed by the Police!

To book Steph'nonsense for a rhyming evening:
bowleyfarm@gmail.com or 01428 741212

Agent / publisher wanted.