OneAndOneIs2

You know those people who send out smug little essays at the end of each year, to everyone they've ever met, detailing how well everything has gone over the last year?

Well.. this isn't one of those.

So. 2011.

The year started out reasonably well: The kittens we'd got after the puppy was put to sleep were doing well, and unlike the year before, I hadn't been repeatedly stuck at Gatwick Airport in a futile attempt to reach my parents for Christmas. But the good omens proved misleading, as my car became unreliable enough that I was forced to switch to my motorbike.

You might say I was being unfair to the car - after all, it had only caught fire twice whilst I had been driving it - but after it refused to start for the nth time, leaving me stranded at work and obliging Tina to come and get me - which would have been easier if her GPS hadn't thrown a fit and forced her to navigate by watching the planes coming into land at the nearby Gatwick - I felt that the best thing to do was switch to my reliable new Honda cycle.

This worked well for a while, although I got through a lot of hot drinks as the winter grew colder. Sadly, it was at this time that some of Tina's pupils accidentally slammed her hand in a door.

In fairness, they didn't do it deliberately and they were horrified when they realized what they'd done. But heavy fire doors don't care about intentions, and she was left with a hand full of broken bones.

Naturally, being so competitive, I had to one-up her, and promptly found a patch of icy road on my way to work suitable for having an accident on. I then phoned my boss at work and explained that I had made every effort to get to work, and was in fact a mere two miles away, but was no longer capable of moving the bike. Or myself. Or my right arm.

After a long few hours in hospital, I was sent home and went back via Tina's workplace, where I told her startled co-workers that she had apparently had enough of me being late with the rent.

So we were both somewhat battered, and it wasn't an easy phonecall to make to my parents, what with my mother having a deep-seated dread of her sons being on motorbikes. As luck would have it, my brother helpfully supplied a useful distraction by falling on a tennis court and shattering his wrist into an impressive number of pieces. A mere shoulder fracture paled by comparison.

So January wasn't really the best start to a year, for either of us. February came and went, as February's do, with little of note happening other than the kittings having their first experience of the outside world. Tina's intrepid Base, having looked longingly out at the garden for months, was very taken aback when she finally found the door to be open, and started at it suspiciously for a long time. My little Aidy, in the meantime, had no interest in the great outdoors, but was very unhappy about being separated from me, so in the end it was her that came out first, to join me on the garden seat. Base more than made up for lost time, though, being the first cat to leave the garden, and the first to climb a tree. And the first to get into fights with other cats. So it goes.

Come March, my shoulder began to recover enough that I could me at least a little more mobile, and we had to look at the transport situation. My bike was clearly out of the question for the rest of the year, I had to get back on four wheels.

It was clearly the electrics that were the problem on the Fiesta. Despite using correct technique on several occasions, it simply would not start no matter how often I clouted it.

We tried replacing the battery, the ignition switch, the starter motor.. no luck with any of them. In the end, I had no choice but to flog the car to WeBuyAnyCar.com for a not-unreasonable sum, and get a new car.

Sadly, what with the crash and everything, I couldn't afford a reasonably-good second-hand car from a private sale. So I had to get a more-expensive car from a dealer, since those come with monthly repayment options rather than requiring the lump sum up front.

We went on a tour of the local car-sellers, but ultimately it was the nearby Honda dealer that we wound up going back to, where we struck up a friendship with a salesman named Craig, whom we saw a *lot* more of than expected by the end of the year.

In Tina's life, her whole department got moved out of the science block for the school to do site-wide renovations; and it's always fun trying to do science lessons without any science equipment. But she DID get a job offer from a near(ish) private school, which she accepted and then spent the rest of the academic year stressing about whether or not it was a good decision - "The devil you know" and all that..

Since the new job would mean a commute north for both of us, it made sense to start thinking about maybe moving somewhat north, since petrol's getting dearer by the day and both of us were bored by the pace of life in our current town. So the DIY work that had needed doing since we moved in gained a new urgency, and it was at last considered time to redecorate the bathroom. What with the last owner having considered it a good idea to install a shower mounted on an uncovered plasterboard wall...

Sadly, a large part of the plaster came away when the wallpaper was stripped, so it turned out to be a rather bigger job than originally hoped for. So the room was still unfinished when Tina came to her final day at her school and began the holidays. I was back at work by this point, and due at the Perl conference in Latvia, which I duly attended.

Latvia, by the way, is a great place - I enjoyed it almost as much as Romania, which is a fabulous country. Perl Conferences are also well worth attending if you're a developer.

Whilst I was away, the bathroom was finally replastered and finished. Around the same time, the birthday present I had ordered well in advance for Tina at the beginning of the year finally turned up, only a few months late. This IS the peril of ordering products from companies that don't actually exist yet...

Tina then started at her new place of work, which has far better kids but somewhat less effective staff. It was also a substantially longer commute, and she began to burn through petrol at an alarming rate - it pretty much swallowed up her pay rise. A solution of sorts to this problem came in the form of a hole in my tooth, necessitating a trip to the dentist. Tina kindly offered to drive me there, but on the way back, we discovered the hard way that somebody had spilled oil on the wet road,

So that was the end of her Mini. Ultimately, we both walked away from the accident, slowly and gingerly, but still upright on our own two feet. I added a new pair of glasses to the unpleasantly large dentist bill on my previously-unused credit card and we bought a large box of Smarties, or as the pharmacy calls them, Ibuprofen.

I have a whole bunch of medical appointments to get to in the New Year, the fun never ends... but I'm hopeful I'll get some money out of the insurance companies (I'm arguing with three of them at the moment) before the end of 2012.

By this time, our mate Craig at Honda had sold two more cars through Tina, so when it came time to sort out a replacement car for her commuting needs, we hobbled into the showroom, bandaged and bruised for the second time to ask, hypothetically, how fast he could sort us out with another new car.

I immediately deflected his accusing gaze by explaining that MY car was still perfectly fine, it was HER that needed a new car in a hurry this time.

And that was fine, until a few days later when she drove my car around to have it assessed for repairs, after a muppet in a car park reversed into me whilst I was stationary. Yep, my third accident of the year! A grand's worth of damage, which my unfortunate new acquaintance wound up paying out of his own pocket since he didn't want to go through insurance.

So now we BOTH have Honda Jazz's, and it's amazing how her fuel bills have shrunk since she went from a supercharged Mini Cooper to a sensible, if dull, Honda supermini. Possibly the fact that we're both so paranoid about driving these days that we never get up to particularly high speeds might have something to do with it, too.

So we end the year with a whole lot more bruises, broken bones, and scars than we started it with. We also start it with both of us paying off new cars that we were forced to buy at very short notice. The insurance money will help with that, eventually, but in the meantime we're feeling like a rather pelican farmer - surrounded entirely by large bills. Oh, and my little Aidy has been diagnosed with a heart murmur, so she's on a diet and a close watch from now on.

Still.. mustn't grumble!