In which a car succumbs to a predictable fate and Mark, laughably, takes up welding

Hemingway too spent some time in France, and he famously had this to say about it: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." I'm not sure how that might relate to our situation, though, because we're living a long way from Paris, and I ain't exactly a young man any more. Still, I do feel lucky. I think. Sometimes.

It's lucky, for instance, that our house here comes with a car.

It's unlucky, though, that the car is at least twenty years old and – judging by the fistfuls of pine needles and oak leaves that I dug out from under the hood the other day – appears to have spent most of its long life parked out in the lonely woods somewhere.

It's lucky that, after taking it to the local garage, the mechanic pronounced it to be in fine running condition. Of course, given the antiquity of the car, we were only guardedly encouraged by this opinion.

It's unlucky that, on exactly the same day that (in a previous blog entry) I predicted the car would "one day leave us all stranded by the side of some picturesque rural road somewhere" we were, in fact, stranded by the side of some picturesque rural road somewhere. We were chugging our way over the hills to Brignoles, on a narrow shoulder-less highway, when the engine just suddenly died. And not only wouldn't it start up again, there wasn't even the slightest encouraging sound when I cranked the key. But, actually, my prediction was just a little bit wrong: We weren't actually stranded by the side of the road. There was no side to the road. The car was sitting dead right in the middle of the motorway.

It's lucky that, despite being a complete mechanical moron, I was able to get my head under the hood and to diagnose what I thought was the problem: A loose of set of electrical wires. And, in a stunningly unlikely turn of events, after poking haphazardly at those wires for a few minutes, I was actually able to get the car going again.

It's lucky too that Quincy is thoroughly sensible in the midst of stressful situations. She smartly suggested that we drive directly to the local mechanic to get the damn thing professionally fixed.

It's unlucky, however, that I just don't listen.

It's unlucky that, buoyed by the semi-magical fact that we were suddenly unstranded, I somehow convinced myself that I could fix that wiring problem myself. In hindsight (and, really, even in foresight, if I had possessed such a thing) my self-confidence was completely preposterous. Not only because I'm a mechanical moron, but also because we have no tools at all – not even the simplest wrench in our possession.

It's lucky, though, that I have some training as scientist, and a desire to test hypotheses before plunging blindly forward. My tests – most of which involved pulling wires in and out of places that they either should or shouldn't be – appeared to confirm that the problem was, in fact, exactly what I thought it was.

It's lucky I didn't end up with a faceful of battery acid.

It's unlucky, but hardly unsurprising, that I not only failed to fix the problem, but also made the original problem much, much worse. Wires that once were merely loose became increasingly impossible to connect at all. Not only that, but my amateurish efforts caused another essential wire – which apparently was as brittle as the ancient pine needles that I continued to excavate from the engine – to break entirely in half.

It's lucky that I was home, so at least I had a familiar bed to lie down in that night. It's unlucky that the night passed as a sort of sadistic parody of my famously miserable night in Aix-en-Provence a couple of weeks before. I spent the night in an all-too-familiar sleepless torment, relentlessly rehearsing my errors and failings, and imagining the immense variety of ways in which any additional attempt to solve the situation would render it even more hopeless.

It's lucky that I don't really take those kinds of thoughts too seriously. It's even luckier that, although we have a nodding acquaintance with no more than 3 people in this entire town, one of those people – Ollie – is a plumber by trade, who drives around in a van stocked with an immense array of tools, including a substantial soldering kit that would come in very handy indeed. It's lucky too that Ollie speaks English with the near-perfect fluency of someone who was born in Holland, which he was. And luckier still that, despite the fact that I'd only met him once before (when he and his wife treated us – near strangers – to a sumptuous feast at their house in the olive orchard, so he certainly doesn't owe me any favors), Ollie was entirely willing to take time away from a massive plumbing project that he's doing at a bar here in town and to instead spend a valuable chunk of his afternoon rehabilitating the ruined wires under the hood of our car. And when I offered to compensate him for his time and effort, Ollie demurred, and suggested that we should soon go bicycling together instead (which we did, today).

Yes, it's freakishly lucky to have accidentally befriended someone so helpful and generous. In fact, just yesterday, Ollie and Nathalie invited us to their house to use their laser printer and fax machine. And, while there, for reasons that remain shrouded in the mystery of his impulsive munificence, Ollie put a welding helmet on my head and a power supply into my hands and invited me to try my luck at arc welding. And while I was amateurishly spraying hot showers of sparks all around, he proceeded to invite me to borrow his motorcycle and his chain saw too.

And, with that, I think that we've entirely transcended lucky, and entered the domain of downright scary.