7 Hours of Sweaty Wrestling

April in Central Texas is the seasonal shoulder month. Imagine an arm of pleasantly warm weeks connected via the April shoulder to a half-year long volcanic steam insanity of flesh-scorching sun, and you’ll appreciate the Easter period all the more.

In the run up to Easter, I have spent around 7 hours flat on my back, leeching heat into the concrete of my garage  with one singular aim: to remount the London taxi gearbox that I so frivolously pried from it’s resting place of many decades in March.

I say March, it could have been February, it’s hard to say. After all, March is one of those short months in the novice vintage British car mechanic’s calendar, being not comprised of the requisite eight twelve day weeks. The sort of span that it might take said spanner-noob to get those nine bolts back in place, between the kids the jobs and the trip to Dallas.

The idea of course is that this is character-building fun. It’s certainly a great excuse to skype with my dad at all hours of day and night for moral and technical support, holding up assorted bits of car to the webcam for a remote diagnosis.

And it is fun. The lonely battle against time, heat and the rectitude of 1960s engineering. And against doubt and fear and the odd stabbing pain.

If it had taken me 28 hours, I would still have enjoyed the end result – a calm meditation on angles and pivots of half-monkeyed rigs and jigs. Calm and serene though punctuated by furious rage and attempts to jam, shove and lever things into place.

I’m sure there are elegant ways with simple tools to get tab A into slot B. Brute force and persistence were my path, and I felt all the better for it as I nearly drifted off to sleep at the end of the bout, spent in a puddle of sweat, chilling myself like a reptile on the cool rock below my aching shoulders.