As the spectre of Edinburgh looms ever closer, cracks in my sanity have begun to appear. I thought I was ok until a couple of weeks ago.
During Wimbledon I distracted myself by staring intently at the tennis, dreaming I was Sharapova without the grunt. This is going well, I thought, it’s sunny and I’m sane. But towards the end of the tournament I had my own supremely blonde episode. No matter that I’ve never been blonde – if you were to turn this story into a drama I’d have to be played by a blonde to fit the crushing cliché that is this narrative.
It involves a car of course. A little old car. A sewing machine on wheels. A car you have to drive flat out to get up the mildest of hills without ever going near the speed limit. The sort of car you could not drive on the motorway without being mown down by every passing Yorky munching truck driver. Not the sort of car you expect to be stolen by the London Mafia on a quiet street in Balham on a sunny Friday during an Andy Murray match.
And yet when I parked this car in Balham during the Murray/Federer semi final and came back an hour and a half later to find it had gone, I knew immediately it had been taken by the meanest, burliest, roughest of gangsters famed for roaming London’s streets during Pimms-and-strawberries-and-cream week.
I was very brave and did not allow the shock to hamper me – I was straight on the phone to the police and had a crime reference number before you could say ‘Kia Picanto.’ I had parked in the road of some friends. I’d made a conscious decision to park in their street not because I was seeing them but because it was convenient for where I needed to be. So on making this discovery I staggered bewildered to their house to deliver the news. They were dwelling in a crime hot spot and even my innocent, not very valuable car had been the target of blatant thieves. Of course they didn’t believe me – so annoying! What did they think? That I’m mad? That I want to spend my Friday night on the phone to the police and the car pound? After a few large vodkas they were persuaded and ashamed to find they lived in such an irrational, unreliable not to say dangerous part of South London.
I reported the theft to the insurers, gathered all the documents they needed and sent them off along with the keys.
I knew exactly what the fate of my car was to be. There’s no way you steal a car like that to sell on or use in a get away. You couldn’t even use it in a ram raid – the car would come off worse than the shop window. No, there was only one reason to steal my car and that was to pack it with explosives and drive it into some enormously famous London landmark. Of course this thought did worry me, but at the same time it was out of my hands, there was nothing I could do.
So irritating the wall of doubt you face when something like this happens. One friend said: “You didn’t just forget where you put it did you? I know a Policeman who told me it’s unbelievable how many women do that!” I was sitting in the passenger seat of her car, tight lipped, frostily affronted that women were being stereotyped in this way. Of course my car had been stolen! You just wait, I thought, when you get home and turn on the TV to watch Loose Women, there it’ll be a newsflash and one 10 year old Kia Picanto buried deep in the Houses of Parliament.
And then… and then… erm… and then two weeks later I went back to visit my friends in Balham. My husband was driving his car. “No,” I said, “You turn left here, they live on this road.” “No they don’t,” he replied, “They live in the next road.”
Oh! Oh! Oh! Cogs, penny, confession quick detour – discovery; one Kia Picanto covered in parking tickets, undisturbed where I’d left it – in the next street to the one from which I’d reported it stolen.
Never mind. All this silliness will be behind me soon – just one week to go before the show and I’ll be focused in Edinburgh, now where did I put those train tickets…?
