Viva Brighton Issue #78 August 2019

COLUMN
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Lizzie Enfield
Notes from North Village
Illustration by Joda (@joda_art)
We’re about to set off, but the car window’s been
broken and nothing appears to have been taken.
“Not even the Neil Diamond CD,” I say to the
children who tell me there should be no ‘even’
in that sentence, that my including it suggests
the CD was worth taking and it most definitely
was not.
So our journey is delayed, while we call out a
glass repairer. Eventually we set off. Girl, You’ll
be a Woman Soon, is playing. The kids are saying
the lyrics are deeply dodgy and I am wondering
why anyone would break the window of a car for
absolutely no reason.
But then we reach the roundabout, known in the
family as ‘the roundabout where we always take
the wrong exit’, and husband, who has poor recall
for names of people and places – and objects –
says “Oh they’ve taken the thing.”
“What thing?” everyone asks.
“You know the thing on the window.”
“The National Trust car park sticker?” I venture,
thinking we clearly have a different class of thief
in Fiveways.
They might not appreciate Neil Diamond but
they love a bit of Capability Brown.
“No not that.”
It’s like twenty questions but we’ve got plenty
left.
“Well it’s not the tax disc,” I say, staring at the
window wondering what could have been taken.
And then one of the children pipes up.
“It’s Dorothy!” And I realize it is, indeed,
Dorothy who has been taken from her home on
the windscreen.
Dorothy was our Sat Nav, named by the children
on account of her propensity to tell us to “follow
the road.”
She did that more often than other Sat Navs
because we never loaded the maps properly. It
took too long and we don’t drive north that often
but when we did she would think we’d entered
some sort of vortex and start yelling at us to “get
back to the road!”
Generally, though, she was quite calm and
conversational and we were quite fond of her.
Now she’s been taken, everyone seems a bit
subdued – and lost, because there is no one to tell
us to perform a legal U-turn and go back to the
roundabout we exited wrongly.
“Poor old Dorothy,” says my son, who, when
he was younger, thought she was an actual very
small person who lived inside the black plastic
unit we suckered to the windscreen – a bit
like our Dutch neighbour who does the safety
announcements in Dutch for Easyjet who he
wanted to say hello to on a flight to Amsterdam.
“What do you think they’ve done with her?” one
of the girls asks.
I suspect they’ve taken her to the nearest
pawnshop and converted her to cash, which is
probably in turn being converted into drugs, but
I don’t tell them this.
To be honest, we’re not great drivers and
Dorothy’s time with us was a bit dull for her. So
I tell them:
“She’s probably been taken by someone more
adventurous than us and is embarking on the
road trip of her life…”
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