The final journey

It’s a long time since either of us wrote anything on this blog. Time just flies when you’re really busy, and we have indeed been really busy. So, sorry, this is a really long (but exciting!) update . . . . .

The Derby house is now on the market, and looking better than it ever did when we were living there. The final touches of paint were applied about 30 minutes before the estate agent arrived to take the photos, and the remaining boxes of ‘stuff going to France’ had been crammed into the trailer about 10 minutes before. It all felt very much like one of those ridiculous garden/house make-over programmes, where the pressure is really on in the last half hour before the final deadline, and the last-minute rush is filmed at double speed.

The next day, after a few final arrangements and one last Sainsbury’s shopping trip (to stock up on those hard-to-come-by essentials such as Marmite, baked beans and Echinacea tea) we made our tearful departure from Derby within an hour of our planned set-off time (which was quite unusual for us!) After a momentary panic 200 yards along the road when we thought the land rover had broken down – it had just randomly slipped into neutral – we were on our way.

The sense of relief that we were making our final heavily-laden, 17 hour journey along the delightful motorways of England and France was huge, and only marred by my sense of loss (and no small measure of guilt) at leaving my children to fend for themselves in the big bad world. We had made this relentless, two-day journey four times in the last month, and each time I had my metaphorical fingers crossed so that nothing would go wrong. (I am a terrible passenger, visualizing horrendous car crash scenarios at every bend in the road).

So, in some ways, it was not much of a surprise to me when a couple in a motor caravan overtaking us on the M25 (my favourite of all roads – not) gestured frantically for us to pull over. Thinking maybe we were losing some of our possessions out of the back of the horse-trailer, Simon got out to inspect the load, and returned to the car with the news that we were “really in the shit”. It seems that somewhere along the journey, we had lost a wheel off the trailer, and were actually damned lucky that the whole thing hadn’t collapsed sideways causing a massive accident. God only knows where the sheared-off wheel went, (I listened to the news for days afterwards expecting to hear of un unfortunate fatal accident caused by a loose wheel in the carriageway of the M25).

Now, canny Simon, being the good boy-scout that he is, had ‘been prepared’ and arranged breakdown recovery insurance before the trip. So we crawled along the hard shoulder (“Three wheels on my wagon, and I’m still rolling along”) to the next exit, and parked up outside a salubrious row of shops on a main road in Enfield. Unfortunately, the rescue service were a bit at a loss when it came to dealing with the broken down trailer, and with it being Saturday evening when all possible repair centres were closed, it was agreed that they would do a two-part recovery for us. Eventually a lorry arrived to take the trailer down to our overnight destination at Simon’s parents’ house in Dover, with the agreement that on Monday the rescue service would then take it to whoever we could find nearby who could fix the thing.

So Sunday morning arrived. The day of our intended departure from this Fair Island. After cancelling the 10.00am ferry (which was made difficult by the fact that the ferry company apparently forgotten that the clocks had gone forward overnight, and so weren’t contactable by phone at 9.00am as advertised), and cancelling the hotel of our planned overnight stop at Orleans, we decided to take the dog for a long walk in the woods, and consider our situation.

The llamas were due to be arriving at our house in France on Wednesday. It would take us two days to get to our house from the point of getting the ferry. The arrival of the llamas could not be delayed by very long, owing to the impending birth of Fatma’s cria (due anytime after the early part of April). We had no idea if the trailer was repairable, and if so, how long it would take – or how much it would cost. We couldn’t do anything about it until Monday because all the remotely possible repair places wouldn’t be open until then. The whole remainder of Sunday yawned before us like a chasm of inaction.

Still…we were safe, Simon’s parents were clearly overjoyed at the prospect of our extended stay with them, and the woods were beautiful. Full of wood anemones, early bluebells (East Kent is much sunnier than I’d realised) and tall, gnarled trees, undoubtedly housing lucky fairies who could help us with our dilemma. With the immortal words of my erstwhile boss ringing in my ears, I found myself irrevocably drawn to the notion of a SWOT analysis of the situation. Well, actually only the S and O parts of it. The Weaknesses were bloody obvious, the Threats something only paranoid people would think about. But, Opportunity! Now there is one of my favourite words.

Of course, being believers in the benevolence of the Universe, and having many times experienced the unexpected turning of apparent clouds into pots of gold (to mix a few weather-related metaphors), we started to look for the possible good reasons why This Might Have Happened. And the obvious answer - apart from the fact that it was a good thing to spend more time with Simon’s parents – was that it was a final opportunity to buy a really good trailer in England (they are ridiculously more expensive in France) so that we would be properly equipped for running our llama-breeding business in the future. We had already discovered that our current, old trailer couldn’t be registered in France, and therefore could not be legally used for transporting llamas to prospective purchasers, but had thought we’d worry about that later, depending on how things with the llamas progressed.

So out of the ashes of Plan A, arose Plan B. We would unload all our worldly possessions into The Parents’ garage, arrange the purchase of a new (second-hand) trailer immediately, collect it on Monday when the banks would be open to let us get our hands on some cash, load it up with all our stuff, and leave on a rebooked ferry crossing on Tuesday morning. Then, delaying the arrival of the llamas by only one day, we could get to our house Wednesday evening, unload the trailer and unpack our stuff, and finish off the final touches to the fencing and field preparation on Thursday morning before the llamas arrived after lunchtime.

A good plan. We just needed to find a suitable trailer to buy, and find a way of dealing with the old one.

Sunday afternoon passed in a haze of frantic activity. We unloaded the trailer and somehow squeezed its contents into the available garage space – being sure to leave enough room for the dog, who was also having to spend the daytime in the garage because his bounceability posed a serious hazard to the health and safety of Simon’s aged parents. After endless internet searching, and many unsuccessful phone calls re trailers for sale within a 100 mile range (“Sorry, I think it’s sold, but can I take your number in case it doesn’t work out…”), we decided our only option for Plan B to work within the prescribed timescale, was to bid on Ebay for an Ifor Williams trailer in Milton Keynes. We watched it all afternoon - the auction was due to end at 7.15pm - feeling optimistic as by 6.00pm there had still been no bids. It had a high starting price, but was only 18 months old and in as-new condition.

As the bidding deadline approached, we all sat glued to the computer, and after deciding on the highest price we would be willing to pay (oh! the self-discipline! the maturity!), Simon placed our one-and-only automatic bid 3 minutes from the end. Two other bidders came in at that point, and one tried within the available time to beat our bid, but in the final second, our highest bid just held and we GOT IT! When the palm-sweating and heart-pumping had subsided, we reviewed with some trepidation the tasks ahead of us the following morning.

Monday morning. After a wistful contemplation of the possibility of getting poor old trailer ‘number One’ fixed and then stored for collection from England at a later date, Simon hot-footed it to the bank to pick up the necessary dosh, and then headed back up the M2, M25 and M1 to pick up the shiny trailer ‘number Two’, leaving me to ring round possible trailer repairers or find a way to scrap the beast. Another short woodland walk with the dog giving me the opportunity to heed the fairies’ advice, I returned convinced that the trailer being possibly fixed and stored in England would be a veritable albatross around the neck of our new life in France. Besides, it had only cost 300 quid on Ebay, and had done one return trip to France already. Nodding a farewell to pointless sentimentality, I got back to the house and straight on to the phone to a scrap-yard in Aylesham. “Yes”, they could take the trailer; “No”, they wouldn’t give me anything for it, and “No”, they couldn’t collect it, so we’d have to get it there ourselves.

Time for another cunning plan. The vehicle-rescue service still owed us the second part of the recovery, to a repairer of our choice. Why not say we wanted it recovered to the address of the scrap yard? It was a bit of a tense moment as I tried to convince the recovery call-centre operator that Carlos Scrap was indeed a Repair Centre (them not having an identifiable address in the post-code directory didn’t help matters), prompting another call to Carlos himself, to enlist his participation in the deception (“if anyone asks, can you say you have agreed to fix it with parts you have in your yard?”).

It was an even tenser moment when the lorry arrived to pick it up, but for very different reasons. The driver was not exactly skilled in the art of loading three-wheeled trailers onto lorries. There were some very hairy moments as the trailer hung precariously off one corner of the ramp while he tried manually to bounce it into place, and I had to point out that maybe he should be fixing it to the tow-ball on the moveable thingy at the front to secure it. His exact words were “ Hmmm, maybe it would’ve been better if I’d thought about that first. You can tell I don’t do this for a living, can’t you?” Still, eventually it was relatively secure, and he drove off happily to find the elusive Carlos repair centre, with all the paperwork duly completed and signed.

At 5.00pm Simon returned from his Milton Keynes jaunt towing the neatest, loveliest little trailer in the world. With proper, water-tight doors, and locks and keys and everything. What a good buy! How lucky were we?!

The Trailer is dead. Long live the Trailer.

A quick dinner, then back out to load up before it got too dark and damp (how do those boxes manage to get heavier every time you move them?). Phone calls to rebook the ferry and rearrange llama delivery for Thursday, and that was it. Plan B sorted.

Tuesday morning. Reload frozen gooseberries from Parents’ freezer into coolbox. Reload luggage and dog into car. More tearful farewells, and off we go again.

After the hectic events of the last few days, the fact that we were actually leaving England for good hadn’t really hit us. We watched the white cliffs of Dover fade away into the hazy sunlight. “Somehow, it seems as if this should feel more significant,” said Simon. “Yeah…” I replied. “D’ya fancy a coffee?” “Yeah…and a croissant, maybe.”

And so we left England behind us forever.