After the chaos of the 'Tappy Tooleytale' flooding incident I awoke from my recovery slumber feeling a little more refreshed, and thought I'd brighten up my Yvonne's day by giving her a ruddy good laugh over my plumbing antics. So ignoring the swamp that used to be my bathroom, I phoned her up in Australia. After only about 2 minutes conversation, the phone suddenly went dead on me. Rats!!! The rechargeable battery inside it had just died. The only way I could let her know what the heck had happened was to text her on my mobile. Damn it, now I've got another problem to resolve on top of the lagoon awaiting upstairs. Realising that these batteries need charging from new for 24 hours before the phone was useable again, I panicked myself into driving straight down to Maplins in Portsmouth to get another one pronto. However, I had the forethought to remove the old battery first and take it with me for a match. You would think that would be enough, wouldn't you? Wrong!!! Portsmouth on a busy Saturday afternoon is absolute mayhem. Getting into it is bad enough, parking is something else. By the time I'd located a spot within a half mile radius of the shop, a fair part of the afternoon had gone. Legging it there as fast as my little hoofs would take me, I was confronted with a typically brainless spotty oik who took one look at my battery and said in his quaint Pompey drawl "Dunno if our one's 'll fit, mate. Looks like a special to me" It turns out that Maplins telephone batteries are the universal, one size fits all model. Which is all very well if they did, but no two phones use exactly the same interface, and their one most definitely looked different to mine. What was worse, the zitty shop assistant made it abundantly clear he doesn't exchange batteries if you buy the wrong one. Damn it! Now what? Considering they were over a tenner a throw, I was not prepared to risk buying a dud. So.....only one thing for it. Troop all the way back to my car, fight to get out of Portsmouth, drive all the way home, retrieve my telephone, and drive all the way back again. That said goodbye to nearly another hour. Parking now was almost impossible, I was left nearly a mile away from the shop by the time I'd finally found a slot. I was in such a rush now to get back, that...stupidly...I never took too much notice of where exactly the hell I was. I was going to regret that later. Arriving breathlessly back at the shop with my telephone now in my hot little hand, blow me, I discovered that with just a little persuasion the tiny little battery plugs would fit in. Typical, you can guarantee if I'd bought it to start with, somehow they would have metamorphosed into not fitting. However, things were looking up, the shop was doing two for the price of one. RESULT!!! Though God knows how long it would be before I needed another one. Mustn't grumble at a bargain. As I jauntily sauntered out of the shop, congratulating myself on a job well done, it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn't a clue from which direction I'd just come. Oh, b#gger it. For the next 45 minutes, I roamed aimlessly up and down every back street between North End and Fratton in a fruitless attempt to try and recover my vehicle. Where on earth had I stashed it? I didn't have a ruddy clue, all those streets looked the same to me. By the time I had (by more luck than judgement) finally located it, the street lights had come on and it was getting dark. I was seething. Remember, I still had the marshland to deal with when I got home WHAT A DAY...