Landrovers

My Mum is a bit of a layabout at the moment but at one time she used to work quite hard and used to do two jobs over the weekend. She used to work at Lidl (great shop, more to say about Lidl later) during the day and then she worked at Jacksons in the evening. She saved up enough money to buy my Dad a special present for his fortieth birthday, which occurred at round about the same time. It was a very special present indeed, because it was a Landrover.

We called it Bob and put it in the back yard where my Dad could do it up. However, my Dad chose Bob because he was cheap and he turned out to be a false economy because he stayed in the yard for about a year where my Dad made increasingly desultory attempts to fix him so then we got Bob II, who was in a bit better nick to start off with.

My Dad does Landrover trials which involves doing daft things like driving about in old quarries trying to go through lots of sticks and trying not to hit them. He is quite good at this and sometimes is top of the ratings. Sometimes he tries to help out the club by going to find new quarries for them to use. Once we were going for a ride in the car (another Landrover, but a Discovery, not a battered old defender like Bob) and my dad said "Look, there's a quarry we could use, lets try it out now" and we were highly alarmed because it looked like a cliff, but he was only joking. Sometimes we do soft trials that are open to the public where we all sit in the car but even then my Mum gets too scared and has to get out because she is scared of going down a hill in a car at a perpendicular angle.

Our other car is a Landrover Discovery, but it is an old one. On two separate bank holidays we have had to come home in a pick-up truck because the landrover has broken down. But we enjoy that because we think it impresses the neighbours. On one occasion we were driving along a motorway when a whole load of smoke came out of the back of the landrover. What had happened was that the driving belt had snapped. However the timing was just right because we had just enough momentum to roll in to the car park of a Little Chef. My Dad fixed the driving belt and stuff himself, which takes a lot of doing according to the bloke next door who has motorbikes. Saved us £400 anyway.