Monday, November 7, 2011

Good News, really, I suppose...

After our recent visit to England, we came back to the quiet country roads of Brittany with a sense of relief.
But tonight the phone has not stopped ringing.
The front left wheel has flown off the car that the children have been using... while it was overtaking another car!
Nobody was hurt, but everyone had a nasty fright.
By the time the car came to a halt, there was no sign of the wheel.
It is only a couple of months since the tyres were replaced, so it seems that the garage didn't tighten the wheel up properly. I expect we will be having a little chat with the garage in the morning.
It brought me out in a cold sweat thinking about what a close escape they had.


Mysweet has got a bit of a thing about Japan. We have both toured there in the distant past, and, yes, it was an extraordinary place, so I do understand up to a point.
But, whenever there is nothing much on the other channels, he exacts revenge for my Poirot reruns, and tunes to the english language Japanese tv channel, NHK world.
We watch people placing individual stones in water gardens, or sometimes we get tips on how to add mica to tastefully decorate our paper walls. We are taught useful japanese phrases like "Has room service ironed my handkerchieves?".
It is sumo wrestling news at the moment.
Sometimes I wonder whether we weren't better off with just four channels...

5 comments:

Elisabeth said...

That was a close shave. I tremble whenever my young ones get behind the wheel. I'm in the throes of teaching my youngest to drive and the thought of her out alone in the beginning at least is daunting.

At least no one was hurt in this accident. As for the clash over TV viewing, I'm pleased to say we solved the problem: we don't have one, a TV that is.

Zhoen said...

I've had that happen, and it was the mechanic's fault then. Did find the tire, though.

Dig up some Kurasawa, should help both of you.

julia said...

How terrifying, glad to hear they're all ok. Yes, a few well-chosen words with the garage!

My TV is taking a rest. It sucks up too much of my time, time that should be spent doing useful things. It is, in my opinion, the new opium of the masses

Rosie said...

E The big boot can stamp down from the sky at any time.
Z I will have a go at Kurasawa
M The role of tele has changed in our house, even before my illness.
Everyone has a laptop on their knees in the evening so that the tv is simply wallpaper, a comforting Englsih voice droning in the background after a day of French.
It would be nice if we could turn it off now and then...

Lucy said...

It's not impossible the wheel was tampered with in the meanwhile though; our friends had a whole set of wheels stolen off their very ordinary Peugeot just a few doors down from their house in the car park in Henon of all places. Had the people responsible been interrupted, presumably loose wheel nuts might have been the result... Still, it won't hurt to give the garage a bollocking anyway. So glad everyone was OK.

Sometimes I feel quite nostalgic for the simple, family-unifying pleasures of old-fashioned telly, rather than everyone plugged into their personalised digital entertainment. You know, the days when we all got together to watch the Forsyte Saga or Poldark and gossiped about it at school or wherever the next day... I can't say there's much that we can find to distract us on it these days, I wish. If you don't want endless hideous flogging of Strictly until it's lying a bloodied and unappetising pulp on the floor, or similar, then you're pretty much stuffed.

Actually, though, we quite like 'Death in Paradise'. Have you tried it? Then there was lovely daft Downton which took one right back to the cosy days of Sunday night TV. And there are still good things on BBC4. No, I quite like a bit of telly really. But we're kind of self-limiting anyway as there's not that much we both want to watch, and most of the trashy stuff really doesn't tempt us; not because we're terribly high-minded or anything, just seem to have a limited concentration span for it, and don't recognise any of the celebrities in it.

The Japanese channel sounds really rather fun, placing single stones in zen gardens sounds right up my street.