Yes, pass me the post-coital cigarette, I've just been screwed. Well, I say 'just' but it was actually a while a go, I've only just realised the extent of said screwing today. Remember I bought a Jeep Cherokee a while back, in a fit of stupidity, to please She Who Must Go To Far Away Horsy Events With The Boy Rat? Well, it went in for its MOT today and there are a number of 'features' that have caused it to crash and burn spectacularly. And according to the bloke down the garage (who I trust, as I once got a bill from there for £9.40 -- and you don't see that often) the things it's failed on must have been like that for a while. Certainly since way before the last MOT.
Now I always regretted buying this car, pretty much from the moment I drove the thing away from the cramped little second-hand car place where we got it, but this takes the biscuit. If there's one thing that makes my blood boil, it's being ripped off. Well, that and sticking my head in a microwave, that'd make it boil too, but then it would solidify a bit like black pudding and my eyes would explode. BANG! Which is hell to clean up, if you've got no eyes and a microwaved head.
Where was I? Ah yes, ranting. Bastard! I don't believe in putting people I don't like into my books in order to enact some sort of fictionalised revenge. If you go into one of my books, it's because I like you. Give some fuckwit a character in the book, so they can be read about all over the world? No thanks -- people who piss me off I tend to ignore, not aggrandise. But this time... This time I am SO tempted to have a weasely second hand car dealer tortured to death in his own garage. Simon Kernick's hand drill scene in THE MURDER EXCHANGE will seem like an episode of Winnie the bastarding Poo, by the time I've finished with the greasy little sod. Aaaaargh!
It's going to cost us nearly a grand to fix what's wrong (thankfully the bodywork and everything else is in good shape) and then the things going straight to the sales. Bye, bye, we will say, waving her off into the sunset, drying our eyes on a cheque that'll probably be for half what we paid for her in the first place.
I think, on balance, that I'm not having a very good week.