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Call me weird but I have a favourite suitcase. Given the amount of travel we have done over the years, a good, strong, reliable suitcase is pretty essential, and we found one in, what I call The Parrot Bag. (It’s not particularly important but the images on the bags hard shell surfaces are not, in fact, parrots but toucans. And toucans are NOT parrots. Still, I call it the Parrot Bag just because I’m me.)
Its capacity is good for around a fortnight. For instance, I took it with me to Toulouse for the Cooking Retreat and it served me well. Sort of. No, it did but there was an incident which almost doomed it to the knacker’s yard.
The wheels on the Parrot Bag had started to wear, as you’d expect, and, during the trip down to the south of France, one of them threw off its solid rubber surround. This meant I was, essentially, dragging it on three wheels. It was not good. At first I thought it might be terminal.
(I had flashbacks to our 2009 trip to Edinburgh, walking home from Farnham station, dragging a full suitcase because there were no taxis, and the wheels fell off, rendering the bag as effective as an anchor. It met with a rather vicious pair of scissors.)
Anyway, having read The Maintenance of Everything: Part One for BookBusters, I knew I should make an effort to repair the bag rather than just dump it. And, of course, my first stop on this road was YouTube. Various videos alerted me to the fact that spare parts could be purchased and replaced.
I took the important measurements and hunted down a set of new wheels. They arrived yesterday and I fitted them today. And it’s like having a new bag for a fraction of the cost.
I was well happy with the result.
I was not so happy with the vet’s assessment of Freya’s condition when we visited today. The poor thing is not well. She seems happy, but it’s really the drugs that are keeping her that way. We will have to take her to the pet hospital for x-ray, ultrasound and various other horrid tests.
All we can do is keep up the dosage and try to make her comfortable. It’s such a shame I can’t just replace her broken bits.
And now I keep remembering when we first met our little monkey back in 2015. Back in happier times.
