Oil Delivery

The lane has been ABUZZ with our oil saga, there has been high drama and much enjoyment.
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Gorgeous Charlie bless him came through for us and on Thursday we received the heavenly phone call: “this is your oil delivery driver, I can’t get to you because there is a Hyundai parked in the middle of the road, I have driven past the thatch but can’t get any further”….”ARGH!!!! Hang on….driven past the thatch? Oh, no, you need to reverse! We are the thatch!”. Then nothing. No noise, no truck, nothing. I ran into the lane – where was he? The Hollyhocks are not fully grown yet, they can’t have eaten him? Then I replayed the message in my head…oh lawks. …he’s stopped at the thatch before ours, further down the lane!!! Right now he is probably filling our neighbour’s tank with OUR PRECIOUS OIL!!! 

I swooped into the living room “KIDS: PUT YOUR SHOES ON NOW”, remarkably they did and we ran for our lives, for our sweet warm heated house lives, as we began to approach the next thatch, we spotted a group of people waving and gesticulating and blessed beautiful, wondrous silk of joy: our oil delivery, waiting patiently behind this creature of the dark side, this HYUNDAI parked in the middle of the lane. 
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Our gorgeous neighbours (the waving group) had sent him up towards our house – they are so lovely, so many friends and delivery drivers stop at their house to ask where we live: when I hosted my first Shakespeare reading group a couple of years ago (the most exciting moment of my local life was being officially asked to join the village Shakespeare group, we take it in turns to sit in our old houses and read the Bard’s beautiful words, it’s terribly hush hush – mainly because we know people would laugh in our faces, maybe even cover us in spittle) most of the group got terribly lost and nearly all of them stopped at our helpful neighbours house to ask directions. She actually knew several of the members and thought the whole thing was utterly hilarious, I wish we had thought to wear disguises. 

The waving group pointed down a bridleway to two slow moving beings. In true Sherlock Holmes style, they had already deduced that the beast of Satan (The HYUNDAI) belonged to these felonious hikers and were attempting to chivvy them along: “Come on” yelled my neighbour “this poor family are freezing, look at them (actually we were all red in the face and very sweaty – I was still in post Joe Wicks PE wear so also brilliantly stinky, real #stayhomechic) “they need their oil, this is an emergency!!!”. 
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The couple continued to amble along which began to infuriate the entire two metres apart group that had formed (their family of five and Granny and Grandpa, the oil delivery man and me and my two slightly bemused children). As they came into focus we sheepishly realised that they each had a baby carrier strapped to their fronts. We stopped the gesticulating but felt it important to maintain a slightly critical Paddington glare.

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“Well”, said my neighbour, ” You can’t just abandon a car in the middle of a lane, traffic needs to get past” (I didn’t point out that we haven’t seen a car in two weeks), “The farmers need to be able to access the fields and…” at this point the rather embarrassed father of tiny dinosaur twins (I think they were dinosaur fleecy all in ones but I could only see the heads above the carriers) yelled “I didn’t park it in the road…I parked it by the gate…this farmer’s gate”. Again the Sherlock in all of us began to look at the clues (I’m more of a Jessica Fletcher actually) so I smiled with rosy cheeks as I deduced that the note on the front of the car was from The Farmer (he really had been totally blocked in by our meandering pre historic ramblers) and had therefore gently nudged the offending oil-barring vehicle out of the way but sadly into the lane.

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The parents hurriedly strapped their young T-Rexes…or maybe they were dragons…and moved the car aside. The large group of detectives moved off on their daily walk and the unusually clad small family hurried to their house to await the glorious moment that they could switch on the heating in a celebration more joyful than the Oxford Street Christmas lights.

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What a day! What an adventure! I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this makes the local newsletter. Wait until I tell my Shakespeare group in my Zoom reading next week, that will spice up the meeting.