Yesterday was a little bit special.

My coffee shop is back!

Not only is it back open for business but it is back to pre-pandanic days without all that damned yellow tape on half the tables supposedly stopping people from sitting at them [we all have to keep our anti-social distance, don’t we?]. So I had my mug of coffee [or two] and Penny had her chicken. We sat out on the terrace in front of the shop and the rain pissed down. We got a tad wet, but that was a small price to pay. God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.

Back home, I had a bit of a caffeine buzz but was happy with life. I looked forward to a quiet afternoon.

My phone rang.

It was Daughter who was in a bit of a spin. Her car had been in at the car hospital getting something done to its exhaust and was ready for collection. Could I possibly drop her over to collect it before the bank holiday weekend set in? Naturally, said I, no sweat.

I should explain something about Daughter. She has this loveable little quirk of doing things slightly out of the ordinary. Life for her is a challenge where she seems determined to surprise us by doing things in the most complicated way possible. You or I would head for the nearest town to buy something like say a pair of shoes, but she would decide to buy the same shoes in Donegal or Galway or somewhere equally strange. It therefore came as no surprise that somehow the car we were to collect was in Trim. How the fuck it ended up there is a question I doubt anyone could answer rationally.

Trim is way up north of Dublin in the middle of nowhere. It is almost within hand grenade’s throw of Norn Iron, it’s that far north. So I picked up Daughter and we headed off. No sooner were we on the motorway than the trouble started. Traffic was mental and was backed up as far as the eye could see. It then hit me – of course The Great Unwashed were all heading off somewhere for the long weekend! So we crawled our way around the M50 and then turned off and crawled our way up another motorway. Daughter apparently knew the route so she was my navigator.

We finally turned off whatever motorway we were on and drove on for miles through areas I had never heard of and eventually arrived in Trim. To be quite honest I was completely lost and would never find my way out of the maze of roads and villages. This area of Ireland is way outside my comfort zone. Here there be dragons. Luckily I had my SatNav.

Daughter collected her car and told me to follow her. She said that if I followed the SatNav I would end up on motorways with lots of tolls and her way was the best. So I followed her. I had programmed the SatNav to take me home anyway, so it spent its time complaining that I was on the wrong road and for fucks sake would I turn onto the motorway and pay my tolls. I ignored it and carried on following Daughter.

We eventually arrived on the M50 southbound and for the first time I actually knew where I was. So I bipped the horn and passed out Daughter to make my own way home.

I got lost!

I don’t know how it happened. I was half following the SatNav’s directions and half following my own memory but I turned off the motorway to take to the back roads and suddenly found myself in a strange land of deserted office blocks and roads that suddenly ended in construction sites. It was a maze and a nightmare combined. Even the SatNav was confused and was no help whatsoever. I eventually extricated myself from this weird place and found my way back onto the motorway again. This time I followed the motorway all the way home and suffered the traffic chaos.

Daughter is changing her car. She reckons that others need a van with wheelchair access more than her so she’s swapping it for an ordinary car. I asked her where she was collecting the new vehicle.

Athlone!