No Lyin', a Glitch with a Wardrobe.........

Poor old C.S. Lewis.

He must be spinning in his grave........ and at an unseemly high RPM to boot.

Okay.

I'd better start at the beginning.

Saturday began really well: Jackie and I partook of a leisurely breakfast before I trotted up to Emmaus to do a bit of fettling while Jackie packed for her trip to Egypt. (An interesting yoga/scuba-diving combo awaits her - the comedy potential here is obvious, and I await her texts and emails with a keen interest..... :-)

When I arrived at Emmaus, it became immediately apparent that it was one of their famous 50% Off Everything Sale days.

A quick call to Engineer Mark ensued. ( He and Sheena have recently moved aboard their recently purchased wide-beam 'Norweigan Blue'...... - no, really -..... and I knew they were looking for furniture. )

Mark had no transport as Sheena had their car that day, so I scooted round to his mooring quick-smart in The Hairdresser's Car, picked him up and returned to Emmaus.

Wardrobe purchase was on the agenda!

It didn't take Mark long to find one he quite liked, measure it up, and enter the data into his phone with a photograph of it.

We mooched about a bit more, then did a couple of hours in the scrap shed restoring old tools.

(I'm not sure Mark was aware this was going to happen when I picked him up, but he donned the PPE and wielded the angle grinder with no complaints, so top bloke for being a sport...)

After we'd given a fair few old spanners, pliers, wrenches and saws a new lease of life, I suggested we pop back to The Ex-Parrot to see if the wardrobe he liked was going to fit.

We did so, measured (twice), drank tea, then returned to Emmaus via the supermarket where good sandwiches were bought and consumed.

So none of what follows occurred because we didn't measure properly, were dehydrated or hypoglycaemic......

Back at Emmaus, a mere £15 flashed briefly in the sunlight, and Mark was the proud owner of a new (to him) wardrobe.

Bargain!

"Proper Job" we thought. "Lets get it in the back of the Suzuki and spirit it away to Ex-Parrot Land"

Ah...............

Easier said than done, though we did manage to do it.

Just......

By moving the front seats forward to the very limit of travel.........

However, I cannot recommend the 'Forward Control' position if you are driving a Suzuki Vitara.

At six feet tall, bending my knees up under my chin like that is no fun, especially as I no longer possess the elasticity of youth.

Thank goodness the old heap's an automatic, that's all I can say.......

And the sooner that young James off Severner Willow learns to drive, the better!

But I digress.

We got back to where Mark moors his boat, and after a decent interval (which I spent walking about  the field trying to get rid of the cramp and pins and needles), unloaded the wardrobe with a view to installing it in the boat.

( For the second time that day)..............    Ah............

Yes, technically, the wardrobe was narrow enough to fit through the front doors of "Norweigan Blue".

But the devil is, as ever with these things, in the detail........

The small detail.......

Which we'd overlooked.........

Mark's boat has a cratch cover.

Nothing wrong with that. Jolly useful bit of extra foredeck-storage-space.

Except the steel cratch boards weren't bolted down in a furniture-remover-friendly de-mountable sort of way.

They were welded.

Would the wardrobe fit under the cratch frame and go through the door?

Well, of course, we tried.....

Then we took the base off the wardrobe and tried again.

Then we took the doors off the boat and had another go.

Tea was then drunk and heads were scratched.

I started having nasty flashbacks to an irritating novelty song by Bernard Cribbins.

Mark was about to take his screwdriver to the wardrobe and dismantle it completely (thus risking rendering it down to a pile of wardrobe-coloured matchwood), when I called a halt.

Mark's boat has two large side windows. They have been glazed with Perspex which has cracked and needs replacing. Why not load up the wardrobe, take it round to my shed in (more or less) one piece, then return with it on re-glazing day?

Thus, with the problem, if not exactly solved, then at least, on the continuum, we squeezed the wardrobe and ourselves back into the long-suffering Suzuki and made for the parish.

Ah well, at least no-one fell in............

:-)