Should've taken the bus - Act II
Jess swallowed hard and off we went again. Roundabout after roundabout, junction after junction, I slowly reached the dizzying speed of 15 km per hour - and then Jess uttered the words that not only radically changed the comfort of our journey, but my entire motoring existence.
After taking a deep breath (or fifteen), I started hammering at my insurer’s phone line. The conversation went surprisingly smoothly (which really should have raised my suspicions). The car was taken away within an hour, and we had to decide which direction to go - home, or still to the campsite. We chose the latter – “we won’t let a random numpty to spit in our faces”*, ahem, disrupt our trip. Forgive me, in moments of stress my national‑liberation instincts get awaken. The insurance company suggested I might get a replacement car the same day, but after dozens of minutes spent talking to three different Enterprise branches, we decided to order an XXL Uber, end the day with a pint at the pub, and worry about the new car tomorrow.
In the morning, after drinking a coffee with a soothing view of fields straight out of English pastoral poetry, I finally reached the correct Enterprise branch and booked a car pickup for 11 a.m. The company assured me its standard would be similar to my Mazda. Alright, alright I thought. I’ll probably get a Toyota Yaris or a Fiat, similar size, manageable. You may ask - why would I be stressed in this situation? Why indeed? Let me remind you that getting my driving licence took me about 10 years and 10 exams. When I finally started driving, I was dangerously close to printing business cards with my details, because I couldn’t keep up with handing them out to people whose cars I’d scratched. After nearly 10 years I don’t drive badly, but I’m certainly not going to become Louis Hamilton.
So imagine my shock when, upon arrival, a true beast appeared before my eyes - a brand‑new SUV, three times bigger than my Mazda, and an automatic with so much electronics inside that even Elon Musk would tap out.
“Oh dear / Oh for the love of butterflies / Oh f*** (delete as appropriate),” I thought.
Jess, fully aware of my “ability” to operate wheeled vehicles, probably thought the same, but we both kept the poker face of Ross from Friends. After signing 48 pages of paperwork and digging our way to the air‑conditioning settings in this miracle of French automotive engineering, we set off. And it begs to be said that we “sped off”, but sadly that would be far from reality. For the next ten minutes we moved in a hop‑and‑shuffle motion at roughly 2 km per hour. I’ll add that this was still on the car park - I wasn’t ready for the road yet. Every ten seconds Jess’s head nearly hit the windscreen, because I had never driven an automatic before and for the life of me - I could not grasp the absence of a clutch. It was as if my driving reflected some kind of automotive bipolarity - stop, go, stop, or no, actually go, or maybe stop?
After ten minutes I decided to take on my first challenge and drive to the shop across the street. Those five minutes were some of the longest of my life, interwoven with flashbacks from one of my ten driving exams. But we made it, we parked, and we didn’t scratch anything. Jess’s cervical spine also remained in one piece. Next stop: McDonald’s, seven minutes away. A calmer ride, but still at 10 km per hour.
Out of concern for my wellbeing (but let’s not kid ourselves - also for her own life), Jess suggested:
“Listen, we don’t have to go to Hebden Bridge. Maybe we should go back to the campsite and you can drive around the local roads?”
“Absolutely not. I have to get the hang of this today, otherwise I’ll be stressed all day.”
Jess swallowed hard and off we went again. Roundabout after roundabout, junction after junction, I slowly reached the dizzying speed of 15 km per hour - and then Jess uttered the words that not only radically changed the comfort of our journey, but my entire motoring existence.
“Umm… you know you can use just one foot?”
One foot? As in one for the accelerator, one for the brake? What - my left foot is supposed to remain lonely, purposeless, useless like a debate about who should play Tosia?** Despite my mental resistance to abandoning my left limb, I somehow forced myself - and shockingly, unbelievably, it worked. From then on we sailed along the local roads like Dar Młodzieży*** on the Baltic Sea. And on that one day a year when it’s not blowing a gale.
We spent a lovely afternoon at the Brontë sisters’ museum and an evening on deep conversations about life and death. I almost wanted to thumb my nose at the universe and shout into the air: “Ha! See, you muppet, you didn’t manage to ruin our weekend.” Little did I know what surprise awaited us the next morning - and that this aforementioned muppet would make my blood boil so many times that I’d mentally brush against the need for a transfusion…
*A reference to Rota - a Polish patriotic poem.
**An unnecessary Polish social media drama about an unimportant sequel to an unimportant movie.
***According to Wikipedia: the first Polish-built, ocean-going vessel to circumnaviagte the globe.
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