An Introduction to Mr 5th

Today I had a brief use of fifth gear.  I am sorry to confess that I never use fifth gear on my car, it just seems a little irrelevant.  I think it was because I started off in cars that didn’t have fifth gear and as far as I remember Dad didn’t use fifth gear much, if at all.  You didn’t get such things in a Morris Minor or a Truimph Toledo.  I did once have an Alfa Sud, which actually had six gears, and I really liked it but I never seemed to go fast enough to warrant all that gear changing.  I also had a TR7 which was a bit of a disappointment to me.  It was bright yellow and looked the part but I thought winking came as standard and it didn’t.  Once I was standing waiting to cross a road and a TR7 came past and it winked at me - one of the lights came up and went back down.  Someone tried to make my TR7 wink for me but it was never the same car after that; the electrics went funny and the Eight Track came on intermittently when you were least expecting it.  Carl always grumbles and says, “Wouldn’t you like to introduce yourself to 5th gear at this point?” when he is in the car and I am driving - a, thankfully, rare occurrence.  What put me off was one car I had where reverse and fifth were very close and when I tried to reverse I often got it into fifth by mistake and I kept imagining I would be driving down the motorway and accidentally put it into reverse instead of fifth and shoot backwards all of a sudden.  Anyway, today I was changing from third and accidentally went into fifth.  I have to admit I have been wrong all my life and actually fifth gear is a quite worthwhile experience.  The car appears to go better and the deflectors on the exhaust do not make a sort of grindy, tiny sound they used to do; Dad used to complain about that and now I know why we both have the same problem with the car!  I shall now be introducing myself to Mr Fifth a bit more often!

It was on my way to Mum’s this morning that this introduction happened, we had some bits to sort out.  This afternoon was a rush round of feeding, watering and filling hay.  I am very pleased to report that Lily, the suri cria, ate from the trough for the first time and Little Star had a sniff at it.  Emily, Carolyn’s cria, loves the camelibra but will only eat it out of my hand.  However, Cool Dude will still not touch it!  Plan B was to try mixing it with some sticky hay type stuff Les gave us but that didn’t work - Plan C tomorrow!  I really want to write about the lovely Lina now but that will have to wait until Saturday.

Carl is now out in his shed constructing a gate and I am involved in a delicate operation involving a lot of bubble wrap, cold water and some suri fleece.  I won’t explain more at the moment as it all looks like going horribly wrong. Also today I sold another book - that is £5 profit!  And another thing - I had an email from Shaun Daniels (from the British Alpaca Society) today -well, it wasn’t only to me, I was just a part of it - the outcome will probably be me making yet another fool of myself but I spent ages in the depths of the airing cupboard looking for my old Filo fax from a past life!

Back up to 10 eggs today but, luckily, I dropped one having been ram-raided by Stumpy and Mossop, the sheep.

This entry was posted on 02/11/2009 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.