Its rare for Tracey and I to have a breakdown in communication but today provided one of those occasions. The arrival in the yard of one of the local militia squeaking that the white, not quite, rotten algae white van was impeding his progress around the hill to round up the woolly pie fillings grazing their hearts out prompted us to take action and move it from its resting place under the trees and place it in a rather more accessible parking space to await the scrap man.
The militia man was an extraordinarily bad quad rider as the gap between the mucky panels of the van and the fence was big enough for any of Eddie Stobart's trucks to handbrake turn into, but for the sake of inter community spirits we would move the stricken van before the locals turned up with pitchforks, clubs and burning torches to deal with it themselves.
Having tried to push it all on my lonesome I conceded defeat and reversed Rene up to the dead Toyota. Tow bar to tow bar I attached what I considered a suitable tow rope between the two, they looked like competitors in a mechanical tug of war. Tracey came to inspect my handy work and opted to drive Rene which meant I was lumbered with being towed backwards in a van full of spiders. The tow rope I had chosen for the task was a horse leading rope, which at best is five foot long, with the knots to link the two vehicles it was shortened somewhat but I was sure we could manage.
What I hadn't counted on was Tracey not having towed before, but as my parting words before sealing myself into the white container full of arachnids was "No faster than four miles an hour" I thought I had made myself quite clear. The distance to be covered was some three hundred metres of dirt track, mainly downhill, a slight right hand curve if travelling forward and a huge ditch on one side and a large stone wall the other. The scene was set for a smooth transition from one end of the smallholding to the other.
The slack was taken up, the van jolted, metal groaned and the Toyota started to move backwards as planned. My world suddenly transformed, much like Han Solo's when he hit "The Button" in the Millennium Falcon and jumped to hyperspace except mine didn't dissolve into a blur of stars as I travelled forward at light speed, no mine jostled and blurred into a rush of green and brown autumn leaves as the sides of the lane rushed by.
I'm not proud, I screamed in panic, we were travelling considerably faster than four miles an hour, this felt like forty and as I fought the G forces and struggled to turn and yell out of the window whilst simultaneously standing on the brakes, pulling the handbrake, putting the van in a forward gear and most importantly of all steering the unguided missile I was sitting in. All the while Rene with its four wheel drive pulled resolutely and my universe continued to accelerate away from me backwards.
Finally the combined effect of brakes and gears dug the wheels of the van deep enough to persuade Rene to stop. I fell out onto the safety of the dirt track, my world suddenly moving the way I wanted it to. Tracey was crying in the four by four Renault. Tears of laughter were falling down her face. Between bouts of hysterical laughing she managed to explain that she had never towed before so when she looked in the mirror and saw how close the back of the Toyota was to the back of Rene she had tried to accelerate out of danger but it didn't work, the Toyota followed her. When I asked if she heard me screaming this prompted fresh roars of laughter as she agreed she had heard me but mistakenly took my cries of terror as shouts of encouragement. Having realised that she was driving the automobile equivalent of conjoined twins and no matter how fast she tried to get away the Toyota would follow she slowed down and friction eventually prompted a safe stop.
My ruffled feathers were soothed with a cup of coffee but my day has been punctuated with bouts of unexplained laughing from Tracey. Its almost as if she remembers something funny!
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