Chez Kay
Andrew Kay don’t do sport, he don’t do sums and he don’t do motors
Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention. Well except for wishing that I, 1: had paid attention in maths lessons, 2: had gotten a thirst for fitness and 3: knew something useful about cars.
How much easier life would be if I had developed my mathematical skills. I can do a bit – some basic things like adding up in my head and working out surface areas and proportions. I can even do percentages if I am pushed but they give me a headache.
Sports and fitness give me a tummy ache. I cannot watch competitive sport without prompting the onset of a gastric disorder. I get too involved and too excited and the result is belly ache. Exercise makes me simply ache, all over. My lovely personal trainer, Simon, did his level best to get me in shape, and his efforts were starting to pay off when I was struck down with flu, the real thing and not woman flu – the pathetic expression of mistrusting the idea that men can actually feel poorly. After that I had broken the pattern and never got back into it. Stupid me.
“How much easier life would be if I had developed my mathematical skills”
The car thing has always baffled me. I do understand the basic workings of the internal combustion engine, I do know how to change a wheel, fill the oil and the water and, in macho society, I can pepper my conversation with tappets, pinking, gaskets and the like if need be. Although I could not tell you what any of them mean.
As a consequence, the last few weeks have seen me drifting down the hill outside my home to start the car when the battery has failed. The cold weather may have played a major part in the failure, it may have been that the battery was simply knackered, but whichever, I was at a loss. And why open the bonnet and ruin a perfectly good manicure, poking around in some pantomime mechanical search.
Last Sunday I took the car off to pick up a friend from hospital and afterwards, I parked and took the dog for a walk along the beach. On my return the car simply would not start. I was furious but there was no hill so my silly attempt to bump start it alone failed and I ended up parked at a rakish but annoying angle across several spaces.
It was quiet at first but by 1pm the pub car park was full and I was simply a nuisance. I had called Green Flag, but in the 45 minutes it took for them to get to me, an excellent result I thought, I had to face the withering looks of people who needed to park. Not many of them were very nice about it.
There was nothing I could do. I smiled, I explained, but even so, people looked at me like I was a pork chipolata at a Bar Mitzvah. Once started, I sped away and gave the battery a big boost before organising a new one. All I can say is, I did it my way.
