I have had some kind messages, enquiring about things.

Thank you for worrying, but everything (well most things anyway) are fine. The sick one in my family is the car.

As you are probably aware, I am entering into a long drawn-out phase of moving from Switzerland back to the UK. This process is planned to take a year or so. I have found a flat in Tunbridge Wells and have agreed to rent that for at least a year. As I (we) had no credit history in the UK, then we had to pay an entire year up front!

This flat of course would need some furniture. And an Internet set-up. And a telephone. And have the gas and electricity meters read and so on and so forth.

So I had to go to the UK (a Brentry rather than a Brexit) and look for suitable places. That took a good few weeks earlier in the year. Eventually, I found one I sort of liked and then entered into the contractual side of things, which, clearly, can never be handled swiftly.

The rental actually started on May 15th, but my travel plans did not allow me to get there before the 22nd. So that was when we got the keys. Not bad, I guess, that two of the three sets they gave us actually worked. Of course, they did not provide keys for either the gas meter nor for the electricity meter shed. More complications for when it was required to work out the state of the readings at the beginning of our tenancy. And there is a burglar/intruder alarm in the property, but no-one knows the codes to get it to function, so it has had to be switched off at the main ‘fuse’ board.

However, the good news was that the bed and mattress that I had ordered on-line, paid for on-line and arranged for delivery, actually turned up on time. So we had at least something to sleep upon from the 23rd. Please note, this (several hundreds and more of pounds) had all been arranged and done from my sofa back in Switzerland, using my English Bank account debit card.

I wanted to get a telephone line in (we get free calls for 300 minutes a month from Switz to UK landlines!) so I arranged for an engineer to call on the 23rd as well to get THAT set up. However, they wanted to be sure that I could pay so they wanted my debit card details. They wanted to run a token £2.00 charge across it. Shock! Horror! The address associated with the card is not in the UK! Sorry, we can’t arrange anything until you have a UK address! Please provide a UK telephone number we can call you on. ***F F S***

Just then, whilst driving round the dreaded M25, a warning light came on in my car and so I took it to the local Volvo handler. On the day before a bank holiday weekend. The garage could not fix it before the next Thursday – that is exactly one week’s delay. It was the intercooler and thus also the particle cleaner system. So I had to throw away the ticket we had for crossing the channel (£90.00 wasted) on that Sunday, and find a last-minute plane ticket for Di to get back to Switz as she had to work on the Monday. (Normal book-in-advance flight ticket price approx. £60.00 to £80.00 – last minute? £290.00)

So I was stuck in the UK for an extra week, without computerability. But I did manage to go round the stores, find and select the furniture we would need for our living room there in the UK. I had to arrange a delivery date for it, so – based on the information I had at that time – arranged for it all to be delivered on the 29th June, by which time I would have returned to Switzerland, loaded the car with other stuff to be moved and would have returned to the UK with that further load of moving boxes. I got the car back in exchange for over 1,000 bank notes, sorry, pounds aren’t notes any more are they? Over 1,000 coins.

Then my travel plans had to change to come back, so I asked if we could have the delivery of the furniture 2 days earlier, on the 27th. This was also the day I had arranged for the pest controller to call (silverfish) and the internet/landline engineer. The furniture company were happy to change the delivery date to the 27th.

So I drove back to Switz, did some business there and started to get back into the swing of Palarand once more. I wrote two chapters of JoB and decided I would send them to Penny to approve as I was driving all the way back to the UK so she could tell me her opinions when I got there and the Internet was set up in my flat.

I then got eMails, SMS messages and telephone calls all confirming that my furniture would be delivered on the 13th.

NO!!!!!!!!

There will be no-one there until the 26th. So I had to deal with all this. At least a dozen eMails, six international telephone calls and so on.

Then the ‘engineer’ wanted to change his date to another day when no-one would be there. Then the same with the pest control guy.

Finally, we loaded the car, got up at 3 a.m., and set out for the UK. Arriving fairly uneventfully after ten hours on the road, and after a short wait for the crossing on the Channel, where we were lucky enough to be granted a spot on an earlier-than-booked crossing.

However, as I was sitting there behind my steering wheel, travelling at an unrelenting, unaltering 85 miles per hour for the six hours of fairly boring French motorways, I had a brainwave and decided upon a totally different future for Julina.

So I started composing this newer version. And going over in my head if I would need to go back and change anything already posted.

So, we got to the UK. I opened the door. And found several letters, one of which was from the furniture company with a bill for £45.00 for not being there to accept delivery on the 13th.

More fun and games with that ensued. The furniture did turn up on the 27th, we unpacked it (and had two full car loads of packaging we had to drive the four miles to the dump with) and set up the room. Not quite as I had imagined it, the armchairs were bigger than expected, and all in all, I arranged it so that just one piece of furniture wasn’t going to be able to be in that room. Never mind, it will do at a pinch for some shelving in the spare bedroom.

It took three days of hard shouting, imploring, screaming and whispering to get everything as I wanted and needed, with no extra bills to pay and so on. The Internet worked! One evening, we drove to the Sportsman gastro pub at Seasalter, about an hour away, and had one of the best meals I have had in a long time, so it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Not at all.

So we got up at 3 a.m. again on the Sunday morning and departed. Again we got an earlier-than-booked crossing and settled down to the long 400-mile stretch of French Motorway. Now it is exactly 803 kilometers from the French terminal at Calais to my front door in Switzerland. I was just approaching the half-way mark (397 kilometers behind us, 406 to go) when the car lost power and there was a strange noise from the front.

Long story short, the turbo had decided to ‘blow up’. Nothing is open in France on a Sunday. We were low-loadered off the motorway, dumped at a garage in a flea-bitten and deserted village some 20-odd kilometers from the town of Troyes. Suffice it to stay, we eventually managed to get a taxi to come out to us, take us to an hotel in Troyes, where we had a pretty average lunch and a worse dinner before sleeping the night away. Breakfasted (OK) and then we needed to find a car rental company. And then arose a complication that I had never expected. French car rentals don’t want their cars to go into Switzerland. We could drive to the French sides of either Geneva airport or Basel-Mulhouse, but from there we would have to physically carry our car full of stuff through the airport to the Swiss side and rent a further car from there to complete the last 100-odd kilometers of the journey.

Some jumping up and down, which barely dented the standard Gallic indifference, eventually resulted in getting I car we could use to get home to Berne, some 32 hours later than originally planned.

So I hope you now understand why I have been ‘off the map’ for a while.

My next trip, in a car hopefully repaired by then, is scheduled for July 28th to August 3rd.

Then I shall fly to the UK (with my daughter and grand-daughter) on August 28th to pick up my brand new, 0 mileage, luxury car on the 1st September.

So it will all be plain sailing from now on, won’t it?

Joolz.

P.S. JoB chapter that is coming is up to 10k words already, but I doubt I have done half of what I want to, so I will write it and finish it, and then consider either posting it as one humungous story, or find out where to split it. I reckon the finality will be around 30k. (FYI – episode 1 is about 21k, normal episodes around the 8 to 9k mark)

A week or two more should see it completed.

JDP