draliman on life

This has been quite a couple of months, money-wise. And weirdly, all my “extras” have come to around the same amount (£130) – hence “Club 130”. What are the odds of that? (Well, one in one, though calculating the odds of something after it’s happened could be counted as “cheating”.) I’ve even created a logo using my mad design skills. Though I suspect that “brokus” isn’t actually Latin for “broke”.

The new, professionally created, Club 130 logo.

First off I loaned, yes, you guessed it, £130 to a friend.

Then, out of the blue, my car tax reminder arrived. Technically speaking, it wasn’t really out of the blue. It’s been due at the end of June for years. There’s a disk in my windscreen with a big “6” for June on it. So I guess I should really have known ahead of time, but time seems to be fairly zipping along at the moment and it just crept up on me. How much for the year, I hear you ask? £130 (ish).

Now, the third member of Club 130 really was a surprise.

Thinking that the beginning of July would be OK weather-wise, I booked the first two weeks for my annual leave. I wasn’t planning on going away, but there are plenty of places in Cornwall to visit for day trips – everything from beaches to cliff walks to moorland.

Then the Jet Stream got lost. This particular Jet Stream is supposed to bring warm, dry weather to the UK. Instead, it wasn’t where it was supposed to be and it rained. And rained. And rained.

Every day.

I think I left the house maybe 4 times during my holiday, and all were necessary trips (shopping and so on). Ultimately, I didn’t use my car from the second Tuesday until the following Monday when I went to work. After work I went shopping and parked on a hill, and returning to the car I saw the street lights glinting off something in the rear foot well. The last thing I expected it to be was a puddle!

So, look on the bright side. Surely everybody wants a swimming pool in their car? How cool is that! Well, it turns out that it makes the car smell damp and I’m sure water sloshing around didn’t do my fuel economy any favours. So off to the garage I went. They were great – ferried me to and from work two days in a row, fixed the door seal, dried out the car and helpfully pointed out that the air-con was no longer working.

Apparently if you don’t use the air-con for a few minutes every couple of weeks, the seals dry out and all the gas escapes! Who knew? Maybe if I’d read the owner’s manual when I bought the car. But I’m a bloke – I don’t read instructions.

I told them to fix the air-con as well, so they did that and chopped some money off the total, which spookily brought the total back to… £130!

So now I’m hoping that I don’t get any more eligible bills for Club 130 (not until my next pay cheque anyway), and I’m counting myself lucky that I’m not writing about “Club 250”, because that would have been no good all, money-wise.

So if anyone wants to join the club, just send me a receipt for around £130 and in return you’ll receive a laminated membership card^* and exclusive secret decoder ring^**.

^*Membership cards not available

^**No secret decoder ring will actually be sent