Wrecked and restored...

"Barbara, there's a man outside, drilling holes in your car!" I knew it was a joke when one of my team mates came into the house last night to tell me this, but I nonetheless headed outside, eager to see what was happening.

The story began about ten days ago, when my cough was still particularly bad. Doctors had taken x-rays and told me that it seemed I'd had pleurisy over the previous weeks. As I got into my car and began to reverse down the hill, I took a sudden violent coughing fit and it must have caused my foot to slip off the brake. I didn't realise I'd gone back further than usual and was positioned dangerously close to a low wall, until I turned my wheel and began to head up the next slope. There was a sickening wrenching sound, and when I got out of the car I discovered that the back bumper and mudguard had been scratched and torn from their position. Stephe came out of the house and managed to help me do a temporary repair job, so that the bumper was lifted up a few inches and wouldn't fall off any further. But it wasn't possible to lift the broken part completely back into its original position. (See photo on the right.)

The "man drilling holes in my car" was another team mate, Andrew. When I went outdoors, I discovered that he had completely dismantled the lamp section of the car and was drilling new holes where the brackets supporting the mudguard and bumper had been severed. This allowed him to lift the bumper back into place again, leaving almost no gap at all. (See photo on the left.) And he disguised the scratches with the old trick of filling them with a wax crayon (or candle) and rubbing it with your finger to darken the colour. My car looks like new again, and I'm feeling very thankful to have such helpful and handy team mates. (I knew both Stephe and Andrew when I lived in Paisley in the 1990s, and it's an interesting turn of events that finds us all now team mates here at the leadership retreat centre in Spain.)