I was in Edinburgh and I needed a new battery for my watch for the songwriting workshop I was to be doing. You can't hoick your iPhone out to check the time; you need to surreptitiously glance at your wrist, and my wind-up watch had given up the ghost. An old watch was back in service.
The first jewellers had the security gate half open- but also half closed, so I went to the next one.
Yes Madam, well send it away and get it back to you tomorrow.
No. So I walked round the block and went back to the first one.
Yes, they could do it on the spot.
But no, they didn't have a battery.
Next morning in Ayr I had time to kill and I trundled my suitcase into town. On the way I noticed that my soft guitar case had broken. I wondered if there was a music shop and just as I wondered, a music shop appeared on the corner of the street. Ayr Guitars (ho ho) was closed, to I went to the Post Office to send a CD off to be reviewed. Inside the Post Office was a vinyl shop, much to my surprise, and I got talking to the owner, who promotes gigs about the area. I left him a CD; he told me where the jewellers were and I trundled back down the street.
The first jeweller I passed changed the battery- but then told me he couldn't change my £20 note. So I had to go to the cashpoint and get a tenner out, then I had to go to Greggs to buy a roll to change the tenner into a fiver, and then back to the shop to pay the jeweller for the battery.
Phew.
By this time Ayr Guitars was open and I managed to get a new soft guitar case and leave the old one there to be thrown away.
The taxi that took me to work at the University was a welcome luxury.
I recognise you from January, said the taxi driver. You're the lady who stays at the Carrick Lodge Hotel.
A very ordinary sequence of events with some extraordinary minutiae embedded within. I can't work out which were surreal and which were not.
1 comment:
You should have been in Hawick - we have a very good jeweller who does your battery immediately, and we have a music shop!!
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