The car started normally this morning, to my surprise, so I went into town (with R riding shotgun) to gently grill the service chap at the dealership about what might have gone wrong with it, and how I could stop this happening again. His theory (unprovable unless I’m prepared to try to replicate the circumstances, which I’m not) is that the starter battery was struggling because it’s been so hot, and I haven’t been driving any kind of distance because I haven’t wanted to go out; this caused the computer to have a bit of a hissy fit when I tried to start it yesterday; and because we had to go out at that point, leaving the car unlocked, it didn’t get put into the sleep state that would have made the computer reboot the next time the driver’s door was opened. The computer therefore spent several hours running on the starter battery, worrying about itself, and only went to sleep when the battery failed completely.
I have some issues with this explanation, but there wasn’t any point voicing them, so instead we got the service chap to run an eye over the various computerised systems, all of which he said appeared to be fine, listened to his advice about how to preserve the starter battery, thanked him nicely, and left. By the time we’d re-parked in Old Town we’d worked out that one system that wasn’t in fact working properly was the automatic parking brake, which was failing to turn itself on and off. R did some rapid research using the AI function in the browser on his phone – he’s going to have to plant a couple of forests quite soon, to offset the damage his use of AI is doing to the planet – and told me how to reset the brake, and the second surprise of the day was that the reset technique worked at the first time of trying. As I’d already dealt with a couple of other things that had gone awry during the power cut, I’m now moderately confident that normal business has resumed – but the next time the beastly machine does something like that to me, it and I are going to fall out in a very permanent fashion.
Ravenous by now – and thankful to be married to a man who understands the de-stressing effect of a well-timed egg mayonnaise sandwich – I went off to the river in search of photos, while the Man of the House walked into town to procure a picnic lunch. Odonata were rather thin on the ground today, but I was happy with this view of a very cryptic female Banded Demoiselle. In fact, her colouring blended so perfectly with the reeds behind her that if she hadn’t lifted off at one point to grab a fly out of the air, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have noticed her at all. When R returned from hunting and gathering we ate our lunch on what’s fast coming to feel like “our” bench, opposite Lucy’s Mill Weir, while watching the comings and goings along the river. One of the comings was the arrival of the Little Egret that seems to have taken up residence at the weirs, and the sad mental association between egrets and millinery reminded me that I’ve been intending for ages to post a link to a Letter of Note, from George Bernard Shaw to the Times, complaining about a hat.
R: L2, C10, D54.
