No hiding from trailer failure

“From every wound there is a scar, and every scar tells a story. A story that says, ‘I survived’.”

I’VE been feeling my age this week — and then some. If my body is to be believed, I am now somewhere in my mid-80s.

It’s not just my knees. They’ve been “grumbly” for decades. Since about April, their symphony of discomfort has been joined by a nagging pain on my left shoulder.

I wish I could put it down trying too hard with free weights in the gym, but the best I can put it down to is poor posture while sitting at my desk or bad sleeping form.

But this week my right wrist feels like it’s had a hammer taken to it, my left hand has been banged, I have a nice purple bruise on one thigh that looks like I played all over a medium pace delivery on a green wicket and I had a bruise on my right shin the size of a fried egg.

And with all these ailments I have the cause: my inability to reverse a trailer. I brought a fully laden trailer home on Saturday ahead of a planned day selling at the Sunday market. Usually I drive up my driveway, unhitch the trailer, manually turn it around, back the car out and up the drive and re-hitch the trailer. This time I decided to park in the street and manually push the trailer up the drive. I figured that because it was a relatively painfree process normally, there would be only a little extra exertion required this way. I was wrong. So wrong. I couldn’t even push the trailer off the road and on to the drive. After continually banging various limbs against unyielding metal, I gave up and resorted to my previous method.

Of course this would have all been unnecessary if I’d been able to reverse the trailer up the drive.

But somehow looking in the rear vision mirror and turning the wheel the opposite way you need the trailer to go (or is that the other way around?) makes my brain go to fudge.

It’s bad enough trying to back a trailer in at the local tip, when the ground is flat, there are no other drivers coming at me, I have three empty bays on either side and a council worker directing me. At home, my driveway looks as inviting as a category one Tour de France climb and trees seem to hem me in on every side.

It really is easier to hire a skip.