Bad things come in threes

It’s a well-known fact that this time of year is truly one of the most depressing. The changing of the clocks means that it gets dark earlier, and so travelling home from work in an evening is in darkness. Well having experienced 34 changes of the clocks going back, I have sort of got used to it. That is except when bad things happen to me.

On the Thursday before the clocks changed, I decided to defrost the fridge. Chipping away at one rather stubborn chuck of ice, all of a sudden a loud hisssssssssssss could be heard. I’d accidentally punctured one of the refrigerant pipes. Now, for the first 10 minutes, I didn’t mind. I was as high as a kite, and loving every minute of it. The realisation dawned that I needed a new fridge. One trip on Friday morning later, and a new fridge is now installed in chateau aitch.

Then things stepped up a gear. On Monday evening I went to reverse the car out of the drive. Putting my foot on the clutch led to a “pdoink” noise and the clutch pedal was resting firmly against the floor. Something serious had happened, and no amount of inspection showed my what was wrong. It turns out that the clutch cable had snapped, an easy job by any amateur mechanic’s standards, as long as you can get the car above a pit or on a ramp. I couldn’t, so I popped into a local garage to ask if they could do it. They said they’d be up. To cut a long story short, 4 days later, and I had got the car done, after repeatedly being let down by one mechanic after another. What would have cost me £10-£20 for the cable had now cost me £80. What with the fridge etc I was now clinically skint.

To cap it all, whilst I was carless (no, not the Klingon) I was using my little 50cc shopping trolley. On the way to the supermarket on Wednesday, and in bloody awful weather, some twunt had decided deliberately to place a log in a way guaranteed to make a cyclist come off and covered it with leaves. I was that man, hitting the log with the front wheel, going to put my foot down to stop falling over, and getting tangled up in the log. I ended up on the floor, scooter on top of me, and a pain in my knee. The knee is now stiff and all funny shades of black, blue, red and yellow.

Still, they say bad things come in threes…