It was a good day today. Work went reasonably well, with the Co-Op coming in with their banking just before the time when it would have meant chasing my tail to close, although I did still end up chasing my tail anyway. But this isn’t about that, it’s about the afternoon. I got home around 2.30 p.m. (not bad for a Saturday) and Freya was ready to hop into the car and go back in to Brodick for the church fair. We got there around three and it really was pretty mince to be honest. It’s good for me to be seen at such things though, being, as I am, the subpostmaster and Freya enjoyed it and I enjoyed spending time with Freya. There were some silly games and they were reasonably fun, but the bric-a-brac or white elephant or whatever you call it, puhleese! Truly dreadful stuff for sale; to call it tat would be doing a disservice to the word tat. There was, however, facepainting, always a favourite of wee Freya, so we queued for all of about five minutes and then she got a snake painted on each cheek.
I told her she could do anything she wanted to do as it was daddy-daughter time and we were out to have some fun. She decided that she wanted to go to the swings in Corrie, the same ones that we visited a year or so ago when over on a recce mission and doubling as a visit with grandma and granddad. So I banged on Shostakovich’s 10th symphony (annoyingly playing in only one speaker cos my car stereo has decided that that’s how it’s gonna be) and off we went to Corrie. We spent only 10 minutes or so given that we had to go shopping after that and it was getting pretty late. Freya was happy with that though, but did say that she would have preferred it if Hamish and Mummy could have come too. Bless.
Between the church fair and the trip to Corrie, I popped in to the bike shop to ask about components and repairs then dashed home to throw both of Lorraine’s bikes in the back. We got a great bike seat for Hamish and fitted it to the good bike last week. Freya’s bike attaches to the back of the good bike so Lorraine has been taking Freya to nursery school that way, with her on her own bike being towed and Hamish on his wee seat on the crossbar. But, being the grumpy little sod that he can be, he decided the other day to resist the bike seat as he wanted to stay at the park and, in the process of his tantrum, he kicked the good bike over and it landed on the dérailleur . I had the bike man look at it today and it’s worse than we thought: the rear dropout is bent so that the hanging bit of the dérailleur catches on the spokes. The frame is aluminium (6061 tubing, whatever that may be) and the bike man was of the opinion that bending it back would snap it. So the good bike is now out of commission and I’m going to have to seek out a frame repair man to see if it can be fixed. As Mick Hucknall of Simply Red so aptly put it in the eighties, money’s too tight to mention and buying a new bike frame isn’t something that we can manage right now, so hopefully it will be fixable. It’s just one of those things, right? I’m sure we’ll laugh about it later, right? It’s just not very funny right now .
Anyway, despite that, it was a good afternoon and we both really enjoyed being together. Being a dad really can be the best thing.
