It's a good day for greasing one's nipples.....

The old Mike Harding joke....

My Mother-in-law has never had an accident.... She's seen thousands!

"It'll never happen to me"

I hope I'll be able to summon a self driving pod at the touch of a button in an app when I need to go to the bookies pub cardigan shop in my late 80s.

Is that like a cardigan but already full of water when you try to get into it?

I think what you really heard was "I think you should get into catering" when Mrs H was advising you on the next steps out of furluff. ("catering" being a euphemism for burger flipping).

X1 serviced and MOT'd this morning. Should have been ready by 13:00 but I got a phone call early on to say it would be delayed a bit as they "hadn't realised it was a full service rather than an oil-change" or some such. Given it was bought there, they've serviced it since, and it's "phoned home" about this service at least three times, including when I fired it up this morning, you'd think they'd know better, wouldn't you?

That's on top of me getting an email from Leonie last week saying she'd noticed that my MOT had been extended to 28/7 (it hadn't) and would I like to postpone the MOT for a bit. Given the conversation we had about the fact that the first day they could offer for service was today, coincidentally the first day I could have it MOT'd and keep the anniversary, and we'd thus agreed to add the MOT on, I was rather confused (but not as much as her!).

I think I've said before that I suspect they should have reset the service date on sale, but it's remained at factory date (built about 7 weeks before purchase), so maybe the disjoint between MOT and Service dates threw her.

Anyway, I had an enjoyable few hours tramping round Chesterfield in the (almost) dry and eventually picked it up only 20 minutes later than originally agreed. The CV-19 precautions (for the car, not the booking in) seemed to consist of leaving the plastic seat cover on, and also the cling-filmy steering wheel wrap (which is quite odd, because I had to remove both and dump them in the rear footwell before driving off).

The traipse round Chesterfield (which I know fairly well) was rather off-piste, with a lot of "back-alleys" and minor roads through back-street industrial areas. I was absolutely amazed by the number and variety of independent automotive repairers of all kinds. You kinda know there's a lot of this hidden away, but the shear number was surprising. It was today's exercise sorted, anyway.