A hairy old time (From The Northern Echo)

A hairy old time

12:56pm Thursday 26th May 2011 in Mum At Large By Ruth Campbell

I COULD tell from my husband’s voice on the phone that it wasn’t good news. “Can you get the jump leads? I’m about two miles away.” He had been dropping our 15- year-old and his friends off at Pickering, to catch a coach which was taking them off on a Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme camping weekend.

But, once he stopped, he couldn’t get the car started again. The boys didn’t seem to care. They waved goodbye from the bus while he waited for the AA. It turned out the car needed a new alternator: “Once you stop, you won’t get it started again,”

warned the AA man.

There followed a nerve-wracking journey home, during which, I imagine countless drivers must have been shaking their fists and muttering under their breath at the ill-mannered motorist who was barging along country lanes without stopping, forcing others to pull into the passing spaces at every turn.

That was, until he got two miles from home. “You realise what this means?” he said as we examined the heap of immovable heavy metal in our drive once we got it back. “I’m away next week and I need the other car.” And the garage said it would be the end of the week before they could fix it.

So now I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, six miles from a supermarket, five miles from the boys’ secondary school and two miles from our youngest’s primary school without a car. For a whole week.

Even worse, it dawned on me that I was 15 miles from my hairdresser’s and I was booked in for Monday. I wouldn’t be able to get her for weeks now.

I had read a book about a woman living in war-torn Baghdad who, during periods of intense conflict, spent much of her time holed up in her tiny flat, apart from when she needed her roots touching up. Then she dodged bullets and stepped over dead bodies in her eagerness to get to the hairdresser’s.

Now I knew how she felt.

First thing on Monday morning I started cancelling appointments. I arranged to do an interview over the phone and told the boys they weren’t to do any after-school activities.

“And none of you had better miss the bus because there’s no way home,” I told them, handing the 17-year-old money to buy fresh milk from the shop next to his school.

In desperation, I called a taxi firm to find out how much they would charge to ferry me to the hairdresser’s and back. It would have added £50 to the cost of the hairdo. I thought of the woman in Baghdad and was almost tempted.

By the end of day one, I felt like climbing the walls. But I also sorted stacks of admin and paperwork, going back more than two years. It was a job I had kept putting off but, at last, I was on top of it. Maybe being stuck at home wasn’t all bad.

Charlie had come home from school without the milk, so I had to drink black coffee and no one could have cereal. But at least everyone was there at the same time for tea. I didn’t have to rush off in the middle of it to pick someone up and I knew I was at home all evening. I could relax.

And, when I looked in the cupboards, there were probably enough tins of beans and tuna and other long-lasting supplies to see us through a war. We weren’t going to starve.

By day two I had cleared out, cleaned and re-organised our office, which had been so full of clutter and junk, you couldn’t see the desk, or the floor. Now it was sparkling and immaculate.

I was starting to see the benefits of not having a car. Instead of picking the eight-year-old up from primary school, two miles away, every day, I had been walking to meet him from the bus at the drop-off point up the lane.

I don’t usually do this because I worry he is too young to be dropped on the roadside on his own. And if I had a flat tyre or the car broke down on the way from town, I wouldn’t be there. But now that I didn’t have a car to let me down, that didn’t matter.

And I was saving time, as well as petrol money. By the end of the week, I had sorted out clothes in the bedroom and washed down all the china on the dresser too.

On Friday, I actually walked into town. I have never done this before, but at about 11 miles there and back, I knew it would be good training for the Coast to Coast walk, which I’m doing in July.

A few people I knew stopped to offer me a lift and I had to work hard to convince them I really was enjoying it. I brought a rucksack to carry some shopping and, even though it poured with rain on the way back, it was still quite exhilarating.

By the time the garage rang to say the car was ready, I hadn’t missed it as much as I thought.

And I also discovered that, if you have dark hair like mine, mascara comes in handy for touching up your roots when you’re desperate.