Levels of Enlightenment

Having just read Simon’s post about the process of getting our car registered in France, I sort of wish I hadn’t! Generally, whenever Simon is talking to me about the tedious-but-necessary things he is doing, I am grateful that auditory processing is not one of my strong points. Whilst I like to pride myself on the fact that I can be a good listener, I am actually not a very good hearer. I suspect I spend much of my life walking around with metaphorical fingers in my ears, and mentally la-la-la-ing, so that I don’t have to hear things that I don’t care to know about.

Unfortunately, my visual processing skills are somewhat more strongly developed. Suddenly seeing all that stuff ‘in print’ (so to speak) gave rise to a couple of notable thoughts.

The first thought was basically along the lines of, “Holy Shit!!! How much?!!!”

The second thought was slightly more complex. It included a little bit of , ” Ah…so that’s what he’s been babbling on about all these weeks,” and, somewhat more charitably, a lot of, “Bloody hell, poor Simon – he’s been having to do loads of horrible stuff, and I haven’t even really been listening!”

I really don’t know what I’d do without him.

I wasn’t entirely oblivious to the whole process of course. Whilst the dull and tedious bits washed over me, and failed to hold my attention for much longer than a nanosecond, I certainly noticed the more entertaining bits of the whole palaver.

Let’s, for example, take this line from Simon’s post…
“Get new headlights, and fit them – so they dip to the right rather than the left”

Although Simon had actually fitted the new lights well in advance of the Contrôle Technique, he didn’t get round to adjusting them until the day beforehand. (Obviously, we don’t go out much at night). So the time arrives to do the deed, and we both head outside into the gale (of course, it had to be a cold and windy day) to work out how to achieve this seemingly simple task. “I need to shine the lights on to a flat surface” he says. Hmmm. Precious few of them around the end of our road, with its cliff-edge postion and open views.

So Simon decides to park the car across, and completely blocking the road – hoping no one will want to drive past, so that he can shine the headlights on to the not-at-all flat surface of the front of our house. “That’s not at all flat” he says, disappearing into the Pandora’s Box also known as The Garage. He emerges with a very large piece of cardboard and a pencil. “Hold that still in front of the lights and I’ll mark where the tops of the light beams are”. I stand awkwardly sideways on to the big and bendy expanse of cardboard. The gale blows. The cardboard tries to take off. I try to hold it still against the wall, but without obscuring the beams of light playing dimly on its flapping surface. It starts to rain.

But hang on a minute….the car is on a slope. The road is on a slope. We obviously need to start with a level car. But Roquetaillade is a village on a big hill, full of little hills. All the roads slope, up and down, and side to side. So, with bright ideas lighting up the blank walls in his brain, Simon returns to Pandora’s box and returns with an old shelf. He places it carefully under the front wheel of the car – the one on the down-hill side, gets in the car, and edges it forward until the front, right tyre is neatly balanced on the old shelf.

Hmmm? The car still looks wonky. Simon disappears into the garage again. I stand in the rain and wind, with my friend, the wet and flappy cardboard. I consider its potential as a make-shift umbrella – but the wind is too strong, and it temporarily metamorphoses into a hang-glider.

Simon returns with the Dreaded Tool that marrs many an attempt at a ‘quick’ bit of DIY….The Spirit Level. My heart always sinks when the Spirit level emerges – I know we are in for a long and dreary attempt to make imperfect things seem perfect in an imperfect world. Simon respectfully places the Icon of All Things Flat onto the ledge of the front bumper. Sure enough, The Spirit Level confirms what our eyes are screaming at us. The car is not at all level.

More bits of old shelves appear. I had no idea we had so many old shelves. I wonder briefly why we don’t use them to make Very Useful Shelves. Simon carefully reverses the car, places more pieces of wood in front of the wheel, and v..e..r..y sl..ow..ly edges the car forward again.  I recall all those times when he has admonished me for carelessly driving cars over kerbs. I recall that this is supposed to be an off-road vehicle, so driving over kerbs is probably allowed now.

The wheel takes the obstacle in its stride, and mounts it beautifully. We stand back and proudly admire the vehicle’s proven off-road capability. The front right wheel is veritably disappearing into the body-work. But something is amiss. The wheel is evidently MUCH higher than its left-hand neighbour. But the car is still sloping down the hill. Even the Spirit Level agrees that the shelf-mountain has failed to correct the car’s down-hill slope.

Does the Spirit Level lie? Do our eyes deceive us? Are the Laws of Physics mere playthings in the hands of the Headlight-Levelling gods?

“Ah ha!” exclaims Simon, as another bright light switches on in his bemuddled head. “Of course!!” he nods and smiles knowingly. In the windy wind and increasing rain, I wonder what is making him smile. We’ve been out here for half an hour and he hasn’t even tweaked the headlight-beam adjuster once yet.  He shares his moment of enlightenment with me. “It’s got self-levelling suspension!”

Well, durr….Obviously. Any fool knows that. (Self -levelling?? but it’s still all wonky??). What that actually means is not that the car will kindly make itself level on its own, so you can adjust its headlights. What it actually means is that the wheels can go up and down independently, wildly even, and the overall carness of the vehicle will maintain its equanimity, so that the lucky passengers will have a relatively smooth ride. Nice.

But at this juncture, singularly unhelpful. We resign ourselves to the fact that the car will resolutely maintain its degree of overall slope regardless of how many old shelves we throw at it. We think laterally. We decide simply note the degree of unlevellness as demonstrated by the trusty (and slightly smug) Spirit Level, and I hold the cardboard at precisely the same angle of wrongness.

Within minutes, Simon has marked where the beams appear to be shining, noted their degree of failure to match the slope of the cardboard, magicked away inside the bonnet with the most Alleny of Keys (7mm – an odd thing to own), and got all the wrongnesses to line up in the Right Way. I wonder vaguely if anyone has invented a Spirit Unlevel, that can be fixed to maintain matching degrees of slope between objects – something along the lines of those digital scales that can be set to zero with a bowl on top, so that only the difference in weight is measured. Simon wonders whether our splendid, job-well-done will be good enough to satisfy the Man at the Testing Centre.

Well the rest, as they (who?) say, is history. The Man was satisfied, and the headlights were not in any way deemed to be a cause of Contrôle Technique failure. And a few days later, when we emerged from our local supermarket and were trolley-riding our weekly provisions childishly back to the car , Simon espied a wonderfully flat-and-level white-painted wall, at the side of the very flat-and-level car park. Unable to resist the opportunity, he drove up to the wall, switched on the headlights, and sat back in his seat with a sigh of satisfaction. The bright beams glared back at us off the wall’s surface. Absolutely-bloody-perfect. “I think we did a good job there” he said.

Sometimes I envy the way that Simon can find happiness in such Little Things.