One Step Forward in Going Nowhere

At long last, I had a theory test that did not get cancelled!

I passed it on Tuesday and was gratified to get a perfect score in the multiple choice portion. After three months of rescheduling, I would have had no excuse for anything less than 100%, but it felt like a delightfully petty victory against... The Man. Or something.

Tuesday was also the day my boyfriend officially became our support bubble as he'd been away in Bristol for a couple of weeks. The test was in Barnstaple, an hour's drive away, which posed a number of logistical difficulties.

• How to get there? My boyfriend gamely did the hour's drive down from Exeter first thing in the morning, but he left his car at the flat and I drove us to Barnstaple under the badge of my newly acquired L plates. (I'd love to know what the neighbours have made of those.)
  
• Would I be back in time to pick up my son from school? My son was having a leaver's fun week at school including a sleepover, Tuesday night. We marched him to school that morning with assorted changes of clothing, a bicycle, sleeping bag and two packed lunches... and thus dumped him for thirty hours.
  
• What would I do with my daughter while taking the test? Under pandemic rules, only candidates are allowed in the test centre. In fact, there was only one seat available in the waiting area, and I had to stand outside for ten minutes before I could go in. I don't know what would have happened if I'd taken the test six weeks ago and shown up with both kids and no responsible adult to watch them; instead my boyfriend was thrust into the intimidating role of babysitter for a nine year old girl. She had her school work with her, so they spent twenty minutes learning about Lord Shaftesbury and the child labour act in the car. After that, they found a cafe by the car park and got cake.
• Face masks required. This wasn't really a hurdle at all, as Mum has already made us two masks each, but I had to wear a mask the entire time I was inside the testing centre. I was only asked to remove it briefly to confirm my identity (and to prove I hadn't somehow concealed a phone or highway code inside it.) Most of the computer booths were taped off too, so I would sit two metres apart from other takers, and although I was assured that everything was wiped down between candidates, disposable wipes were left at each console if anybody wished to use them.

My test was at 11 and by 12, I had rejoined the others in a cafe where they had kindly saved me some cake. We now had an afternoon free of obligation ahead of us, and—no offence to that fair town—we had no desire to spend it in Barnstaple.

Instead, we spent the afternoon exploring Welcombe Mouth on the north end of Devon-Cornwall border. The road down to the car park is an adventure in itself: it gives up on being a road altogether for the last 20 yard stretch, instead becoming a series of rocky steps... but we made it, and considered it well worth the car's suspension!

Exploring rocks and sea

The northernmost bridge between Devon and Cornwall

Marsland Valley flowers

Ronald Duncan's Writing Hut

Scrambling around the waterfall at Welcombe Mouth

Sitting on the stepstones just upstream.

This bore out my decision to go with my boyfriend for our support bubble. Obviously, picking my boyfriend has some personal benefits for me, but I had debated choosing another family instead, so we could all have friends our own age to hang out with. However, with the driving issues, what we most needed was somebody in the car with us, so bubbling with one individual made more sense.

Then again, with my boyfriend in Exeter, I worried that it would be more practical to find somebody in the village. But what a waste of a support bubble to make it somebody who we barely knew! We wanted somebody we could adventure with, somebody we could hug! This day out at a beach was far more valuable than any errand.

Not that we didn't do errands! We returned via Bude, dumping some cardboard at the recycling centre and then doing a drive-by for a house that had just come on the market. With a Stamp Duty (land tax) holiday in effect, I'm now looking at houses in earnest. Of course, so is everybody else... After checking out the area, I contacted the agent to view the house and discovered it had already gone under offer.

That's probably going to be my focus for the next few weeks: watching the property market like a hawk. I've spent much of the weekend preparing a moving plan, making sure I know what needs doing and how much it will cost, so that I don't need to waste time when I find something I want to make an offer on.

That and getting ready to take my practical test. Practical tests won't reopen until next week, with priority given to those who had their tests cancelled at the start of lockdown. I need some more lessons too, and those will also start next week. It might be optimistic, but I'm hoping I can pass by the end of July... I really don't want to waste the entirety of the summer holiday without a car.

It does nothing for my brain either, knowing every day is going to be the same as the last. Tuesday was the last day I really felt alert. Since then, I've found myself lethargic... If I sit down to do anything, I get drowsy and if I do something standing up, I can't focus and end up staring into space. I need concrete goals to work towards: another driving test and a house would be stressful, but they'd also be definite steps forward.

The Bus: A Cautionary Tale

The end of last week was a bit traumatic. Mostly because we have a16 year old cat with a heart murmur who rarely leaves the garden and he disappeared. After 24 hours, we presumed him dead, we grieved, it was a whole process... and after 48 hours he turned up at the back door as if nothing had happened.

But the second most traumatic thing to happen last week featured a bus.

Just to review: I can't drive! So I was determined to catch a bus into Bude last week as a trial run. I know myself, and the longer I put something off, the more it becomes a Big Deal. If I didn't go the first week, I'd never get up the nerve to do it. The bus stop in Bude is a stone's throw from the beach which gave us the perfect excuse to go.

I'd downloaded the app, checked the timetable and I knew we could arrive in town at 12:15pm and catch a return bus at 2:30pm. That would drop us back in the village just in time to collect my son from school.

Thursday was the last day of the heatwave and there was a chance of storms as the heat broke, so I almost reconsidered. I didn't really want to carry rain paraphernalia with us—I'd rather be as light as possible for this trial run and had already decided that I would only bring swimming stuff for my daughter. But cancelling because of a low risk of storms felt like making excuses, so we chanced it without our rain gear.

Catching the bus into Bude went beautifully! It arrived on time, and from the top deck, we enjoyed stunning views of the countryside—and over the hedge into the allotment of an elderly gentleman who was beating the heat by gardening in skimpy underwear. It was mesmerising.

Once in Bude, we crossed the river to the quay and recklessly had ice cream for lunch, before hitting the beach. This was busy, but not packed like the recent news pictures of Bournemouth and Dorset. We soon discovered that the sea pool had re-opened after some construction work, so my daughter spent about half an hour swimming there while I watched in raging jealousy.

We left at 1:30 so that she could dry off before the bus trip back and wandered around town for a bit, did some impromptu parkour and watched the trout in the river, but she was keen on getting back to the bus-stop early so that we wouldn't miss the bus.

Ten minutes ahead of our departure time, the incoming bus rolled up and dropped off the passengers for Bude. All of them stepped down with due care for the glass all over the step: the bus door had shattered en route.

The bus driver was making some phone calls, and the five of us who were waiting for the return trip came to the conclusion that he wasn't going to be allowed to take on passengers in that condition. Nor were we going to see some roadside assistance man turn up with a replacement door.

Eventually, we got the information that a replacement bus would be coming, although as it had just left Launceston, we didn't expect to see it for at least half an hour.

Crisis Number One: My son would need picking up from school in half an hour.

I sent a frantic text to my parents as a backup plan and then called the school, asking if they could let my son take himself home. After a bit of checking around, it was agreed that we were all fine with that.

Although I lock the front door, I usually don't bother with the back: it's pretty safe in our part of the world anyway, and the builders see everybody coming and going. As soon as my son got home, he went round the building, over the wall into our garden... and found that the back door was locked.

He doesn't have a phone, but luckily for him, around the same time, it suddenly hit me that for once I'd actually locked the back door before going out. More frantic text messages went out: to my landlord and to a neighbour who worked with the builders on site. About twenty minutes after my son got home, half a dozen people turned up to open the door for him. That night, the landlord ordered me a spare set of keys.

Meanwhile, back in Bude....

Crisis Number Two: The Mysterious Case of the Cloned Buses

As well as the replacement 2:30 bus, there was a 3:20 bus. It had the same number, but it was the 'school run' bus and took a different route through different villages. You can see where this is going...

The 3:20 arrived before the replacement bus. I did say the name of our village, as I gave the bus driver my ticket, but I was wearing my face-mask and perhaps that muffled my voice. Certainly, the bus driver later assured me that I never told him where I was going.

I didn't worry at first when we took a different route... I know the local roads well enough to know that there are plenty of other routes back to the main road before our village. But then we got to the "I can see my house from here!" mark. We were across the valley from our flat, we could see the building on the hill top and we were most definitely going past it.

When we finally got back onto the main road, I had my brief altercation with the bus driver, but my main goal was to get us off the bus before it drove any further away from our village. Instead of arguing the point, I let the bus driver feel the full weight of my displeasure by disembarking without a "Thank-you!"

He said we should catch the return bus when that came along, but we weren't at a bus stop and I had no idea where the nearest one was. I also didn't know exactly when the next bus would be, but I did know we had either just missed it or it was almost an hour away. I toyed with the idea of getting a taxi, but according to my phone, we were three miles from home. I decided we'd walk.

My daughter was horrified. She was hot and tired already from our day out and was utterly convinced that a three mile walk in this heat (in flip flops, no less!) was beyond human endurance. She didn't specifically protest, but she wept for the first mile. After we survived that without heatstroke—it was still warm but the sky had clouded over—she got over it and abruptly started playing "I spy."

My main concern was that we would be run over since we had to walk directly on a twisty road where cars weren't expecting pedestrians. Fortunately, all we got were funny looks, both from cars and from cows and sheep who weren't used to seeing passers by. (My daughter had quite the conversation with one sheep behind a hedge who couldn't figure out who the mystery bleater was.)

The threatening storms never broke either, although the clouds continued to gather. We went slowly due to the heat, so it took us longer than I expected, but we were able to call my son en route and let him know what had happened—my daughter particularly enjoyed that round of sibling one-up-man-ship. "You were locked out? Try walking three miles home!"

In just under an hour, we crested a hill to look down at our village; the bus passed us a few minutes later. We stopped at the corner shop for some drinks and then pushed on home, finding the energy to break into a run for the last 100 or so metres.


Anyway, it's not the first time I've been caught out by a bus and it won't be the last. In some ways I think it was quite a good lesson for my daughter on recovering from public transport mistakes. Of course, it was also a good way to put her off the bus altogether, and every mention of taking a second trip into town has been met with a certain Look.

Luckily, my son is more interested in giving it a try, so we'll do it again... with a little more due caution for the return journey.