Sodium dusk

What I did in today's 27 hours will make funny reading when I'm less tired. It involved 5 people, luggage and a huge speaker in a borrowed car whose alarm kept going off. When my neighbours came out to complain as I finally managed to get the car back to our street and they were subjected to it yet again, they saw my frazzlement and just burst out laughing in sympathy. I have lovely neighbours.

And I now have four house guests from Grenoble for the 25th anniversary twinning celebrations. And I had four hours sleep last night.

Now I'm going to bed.

Edit:
Around 11 last night I cycled to my son's place to borrow his (very) small car so that today I could collect from the coach drop-off the family of four I am hosting for the twining celebrations. Son told me that the car immobiliser was not working brilliantly.

Today I dashed home at the end of an exceptionally busy and demanding day to get some food ready. Once done, I got to the car, unlocked it and... the alarm went off. But the key to stop it would not work. I closed the door. The alarm continued. I opened the door and the alarm stopped and started again. Repeat over 6-7 minutes with rising embarrassment and frustration. Finally the alarm went quiet. Phew. I got in, started the ignition but, instead of the engine, it was the alarm that started. Again. I phoned the twinning contact and left a message to say that if I didn't turn up she should put my guests in a cab, then I raced round to our friendly local mechanic to ask whether he had a replacement battery for the immobiliser key. He rummaged through boxes and finally found one with a little charge left. I found a screwdriver, extracted the old battery and replaced it. This time I managed to switch off the alarm at the second attempt, start the car, and phone to cancel my cab request.

All this with added heavy traffic meant that I was 25 minutes late collecting my guests. They were fine about it but when I went to open the boot I found I had no boot key. I decided to drop their luggage into the boot over the back seat but discovered that it was already full of a boot-sized speaker. And the cans and tools that usually live in the boot were, I belatedly realised, all over the back seat. So I crammed two adults and two teenagers (one on his mum's lap) into the tiny car on top of the spanners and oil cans, dropped their luggage on top of them and set off back home. Our 20-minute journey took 50 minutes through Oxford's rush hour traffic jams and we got hotter and hotter.

Once home, I just had time to show them where the food was before I rushed out again (on a bike this time, mercifully) to the rehearsal for Friday's concert. But not before, as the alarm went off yet again, a posse of neighbours came out to evict the noisy interloper from the street. Thankfully, once they saw it was me and saw the state I was in they just laughed sympathetically.

Tomorrow I must see if I can find a fully-charged car alarm battery.