The long drive from Nottingham to Glasgow got off to a bad start when we were forced to pull into a garage because of a loud grating sound of metal against metal coming from my rear driver’s side wheel. I don’t understand cars and unlike some men have no real interest in them, apart from wanting them to work when I am inside them. There was something wrong with a disc of some kind that needed replacement. “What CC is this car?” asked the mechanic who was covered in the grime and sweat of an honest morning’s work. “I don’t know,” I replied, which bamboozled him momentarily. I didn’t even know what number would make a competent guess. Seven? A million? It could be anything. The only number of CC I am aware of is 10CC. And I think that band was supposed to be to do with the volume of semen in an ejaculation (though this is either an urban myth or an error because there isn’t that much) rather than the whatever it was of a car. I didn’t say this out loud though, just tried to avoid the piercing stare of a proper man who understands manly things like cars, which was clearly saying, “You don’t know the CC of your own car? If you had any pride you would die of shame.”
As we walked round the back of the car the mechanic saw that it had 1.6 written on the backÂ… which apparently gave him his answer. Damn I was going to say that too.
Anyway, the work was going to take two hours and put us behind schedule for our tech at the Tron (and I was worried we might also risk missing out on dinner too. The lamb at the Tron holds the record for the highest ever sandwich rating, in the now obsolete sandwich rating system of old and I wanted to sample it again to ensure it deserved this accolade -
see here). But it meant I had a couple of hours to kill in Nottingham – what could I do? Might it be time to leave behind my humdrum life and make another pilgrimage to the World of Robin Hood?
No. I could not risk leaving behind my humdrum life. I might like the exciting world of Robin Hood more and decide never to leave. Especially when my life was so humdrum with my broken discs and lack of knowledge about ccs.
So I went to get a coffee and to write Warming Up.
Today is Good Friday – a day when Christians celebrate the selfless sacrifice of Tom and Barbara Good from the Good Life: they gave up all the world’s mod-cons in order to have a pig or something, which made Margot cross, which is why the symbol of the day is a cross, a delightful visual pun – and a Christian was out in the streets of Nottingham with a megaphone shouting out some rubbish about Jesus to some people who knew all about it already and weren’t interested in hearing about it again.
“The wages of sin are death,” I heard him saying. And I thought to myself, fair enough, but the wages of virtue are also death. And the wages of just living a life that is neither sinful nor virtuous are also death. The one thing we can be sure of, however we choose to live our lives, is death. That is our ultimate payment for our time on earth, however long or short we have worked at it. From the tiny baby to the gnarled old man, the reward for living is the same: death. It’s a fair and equal payment, the same for man and woman, black or white, saint or sinner. I think the man with the megaphone should have been duty bound to point this out, because by leaving out some important facts he was in danger of convincing people that they should not sin in the hope that they wouldn’t then die. But although he wasn’t lying, he wasn’t telling the whole story, which is that you die whatever you do and so you might as well have a bit of fun sinning while you’re at it.
And donÂ’t say, actually if you are virtuous you receive everlasting life in heaven, because a) you have to die first to get that, which to be frank makes a nonsense of the concept of living forever and b) if you live a life of sin you also get everlasting life, albeit kin a massive lake of burning sulphur, which might not be as good as Heaven, but still counts as living forever if you ignore the fact that you have to die to get it.
My car was mended earlier than had been anticipated and we got on our way to our date with dinner at the Tron (alas the menu had changed and there was no lamb to be had and whilst the posh pizza I got was very good and certainly within the top three pre show meals IÂ’ve ever been given, I couldnÂ’t help being disappointed).
And in Nottingham at least the wages of fixing peopleÂ’s broken discs are ÂŁ135.
