It's just over four years since we bought Erin Mae, and four years since we last got her safety certificate done. Since her licence is also up for renewal at the end of February it was important to get the new BSS certificate in time to qualify for the discount for paying your licence fee on time. Wouldn't it be nice if the road fund for the car worked in the same way!
So we arranged for the examiner to visit on Tuesday, and drove up to Great Haywood on Monday. We travelled via Evesham marina battery centre where we'd dropped off Erin Mae's batteries for testing in November, ending a long saga of "Have they failed?" / "Will Numax acknowledge that they've failed within the warranty period?" / "Will Numax or the centre pick up the tab for replacing them under warranty?" In the end it was Yes, Yes and Yes and we came away with four new batteries. Who knows why they hadn't lasted the 3 years that were promised. Numax claimed we must have been abusing them terribly, but we most certainly hadn't. It seems that if you have a faulty one in a pack, it can lead to all the others failing – I suppose by an internal electrical leak discharging them unduly.
So I fitted them on Monday afternoon, replacing the two loaned to us by that nice man Keith at the Anglo-Welsh yard round the corner. It was an unexpectedly painful process, revealing a disturbing lack of current fitness in the ol' body. Partly having to kneel down on the boards to do the work, partly having to shift these very heavy blocks of lead around. I was also surprised by how hard it was to get the clamps down onto the terminal studs. Anyway, in they went, in time for the examination the following day.
The next 12 hours saw us eating far too much. We needed to eat out, so we visited the Ash Tree in Rugeley who, we found, do a 2-for-1 on main meals. Since we hadn't properly celebrated on Saturday our Valentinian attachment to each other we plumped for port-and-stilton sirloin steaks. We weren't in any hurry to leave so after a while they were followed by a rather delicious thing called mocha-misu. For once, the mouth-watering description in the desserts menu was reasonably well matched by what arrived on our plates. It had absolutely nothing to do with the rather unsettled night we then both experienced in the motel. But we'd already decided that the following morning we would visit the restaurant attached to the local Premier Inn for a full English. If you're going to pay for breakfast, it might as well be a good one. And you can eat as much as you like. Which means rather more than you need, or should.
Ah well, it did set us up for the day and we didn't need anything else until we eventually arrived home on the south coast late afternoon. Meanwhile we met Dave Freeman at Erin Mae for the examination, which she passed splendidly.
Battery renewal? Tick. BSS certificate renewal? Tick. CRT licence renewal? Can now be paid – ouch! Bodily renewal – think we have to get back on that cross-trainer!
