So it's goodbye to all the folks at JRFS. It was another beautiful frosty morning and I mustered an army of two helpers to help me get the lorry out of the field. I soon discovered that we should have bought a scraper for the front windscreen of the lorry as a credit card doesn't reach far enough when you are only five feet nothing, standing on a sloping field and I can only reach the very edges of the windscreen even when you are standing in the cab and trying to lean out. Fortunately the hot air blower was very efficient and that, with the help of the friction of the windscreen wipers on XXX fast speed the window was clear enough to at least get out of the field. Except, the ground was so frosty the wheels kept slipping and I kept stalling and I was beginning to wish I hadn't asked for helpers so that I didn't have to do all this with an audience! I fully expected Liquorice to not want to get on the lorry as he was dead keen to get back out in the field with his new chums but I remembered that James said "either you think you can. or you think you can't and either way you're right," so I thought I could and he loaded just fine, and I did it all by myself (my helpers had melted away after the fiasco with frosted up windscreen, the slippery field and the stalling and everything).
The damn TomTom's battery had discharged itself - as I predicted, but thanks to Victoria's excellent directions I found my way back to the M3. Who says women don't know their left from their right! Well I don't apparently. I must have taken a left, instead of a right at the end of the A303 and I eventually ran out of M3 and found myself avec half a ton of horse, heading straight for central London!
I noted, with interest, that I was entering a low emission zone and, funnily enough, I had been having a conversation with a woman this very morning about how her horse box was too old to drive on the M25 because it did not conform to low emission zone regulations, and I remember thinking (rather smugly as it happens) that my swanky new lorry would be able to drive anywhere in London, and here I was - how lucky was that!
Anyway I didn't cry, I just did a U turn, got back on the M3 going the opposite way and rang Kevin to ask him where I was! I should have known better. I told him that the sun was on my left so was I going in the right direction, but he just said that it depended on where I was coming from! Men are such useless individuals when it comes to finding things. Anyway, just then I saw a sign for Southampton so, as usual, If you want a job done, do it yourself! The extra bit added about a hour to the journey but as James says "the longer a horse is on a horse box, the more time he has to get relaxed and will be less worried the next time he gets on." So that all worked out all right then.
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