On the Battery God Being Belligerent.

I was on my way out to go to Ashbourne for my weekly shopping trip this morning, but when I pushed the button to unlock the car nothing happened. I tried it from a different direction but still nothing happened. I tried it from several directions, and even returned to the house and came back again, thinking it might be one of those odd temporal shifts in the matrix. And then I unscrewed the key fob and jiggled the button cell in there. Nothing. Not a clunk or a wink-wink was in evidence to set my mind at rest. And of course, the door wouldn’t open.

Thus began a long period of telephonic and other activity aimed at remedying the situation, the details of which may be mostly omitted to avoid the risk of inducing an atmosphere of terminal boredom to the relating of the tale. Apart from one interesting fact:

When I made the first call using my mobile phone I noticed that my phone battery had hardly any charge in it, so I plugged the charger in and proceeded with the calls in situ. But the screen kept flashing up a message saying ‘charger plugged out.’ Only it wasn’t plugged out, so now I had another problem. Was it a fault with the charger, the phone battery, or the phone itself? You never know these days, do you? That’s one of the problems we have with modern technology in the modern world.

But here’s the interesting bit: at the end of all the testing and theorising, the problem with the car was diagnosed as being simply a flat battery. It wasn’t flat yesterday, but now it is. ‘That’s the problem with modern batteries,’ said the mechanic. ‘Full of life one minute and dead the next. They don’t give you any warning any more.’

A new battery was ultimately located and fitted, and now the little French princess is purring and blushing prettily again just as she should, and opening her doors freely to welcome my august presence into her midst.

But isn’t it odd that I should have two unconnected battery failures at the same time. Is there a god of batteries up there in the cosmos somewhere, and might he have a toothache today? And there’s a little adjunct to the tale:

Yesterday I went to the GP surgery for my spring Covid booster, and when the nurse came to insert the needle she jumped back. I suppose I probably asked some feckless question like ‘do I really smell that bad?’ (because that’s what I usually do). ‘No,’ she replied, ‘I just got an electric shock off your arm.’ Well, maybe the battery god has a more extended portfolio which includes all matters electrical. And maybe he’s had toothache for two days. Whatever the likelihood or otherwise of such speculation, there definitely seems to be summat up (as they say in the wild north country.)