Your Transport Stories

After attending all the driving schools leeds has to offer, I had given up on learning to drive. I was a hopeless case. Luckily a friend of mine was selling his moped cheap. It needed work on the motor, but I thought I would kill two birds with one stone and do some of the work on the motor myself. That way I'd learn to maintain the moped, and have a cheap means of transportation as well.

What I hadn't counted on was my innate clumsiness. I dropped a wrench on my foot, and broke my little toe. I tried to read the instruction manual, and ended up spilling enough oil on it that the pages were unreadable. My plan to repair the motor on my own turned into the reality of a half-disassembled moped in my mother's back garden.

One day my friend took pity on me, and came over to help me work on it. I had all the parts I needed (I got them cheap from a junkyard), so it should have been a fairly simple task to take the motor apart and then replace the faulty parts. But once again my natural lack of grace worked against us. I dropped one part and broke it. When my friend asked me for a wrench or a pair of pliers, I invariably gave him exactly the wrong piece of equipment for the job. Finally, I sat down and growled in frustration.

"You know, the moped fairy is not going to come along and fix this for you," my friend advised me. "You need to go slower, do this carefully, and you'll do just fine. You're rushing, and that's why you keep dropping everything."

I pouted, but I did try to slow down. Eventually, after a couple of trips to the junkyard to replace the parts I'd broken through clumsiness, we finally got the motor back on the moped. I turned the key, hoping against hope, and...

Nothing happened. The moped remained stubbornly dead. After a few tears and a few choice words, I went inside for the night, resigned to the idea of riding my bike everywhere I went for the duration.

I didn't even look at the moped again for almost a week. Finally, my mother asked me if I could just get the moped out of the back garden, and move it into the shed. I went out, and sullenly turned the key, more out of habit than anything else.

It started right away, with a purring noise. I climbed onto it, and rode it a little way. Then, gaining confidence, I rode it all the way around the block. It must have been the moped fairy, I thought to myself.

It wasn't until almost a month later that my mother broke down and confessed that she had hired someone to repair my moped while I was away at work.

Who would have guessed my mother was the moped fairy?