The worst weekend of my life to date!

[Brian]

Have you ever had one of those weekends when nothing goes right? Mine started on Friday when I went to put blight spray on the potatoes. Two plastic boom pipes failed, one a coupling decided to unstick, the other for some reason snapped.

So then in the afternoon I go to town in the Cougar (Ann's away at the moment) Drove into the main car park and met a truck coming towards me in the wrong direction of the system, no problem, plenty of room. CRUNCH!!! Our council in their wisdom have just re vamped the park and have inserted some 10"x10" upright posts in unexpected places. They are only about a metre high so you cannot see them when you look out of the side window. We now have a nice dent in the back wing. Glad I am going to be away when she gets back!!! My friend Colin did the same thing a couple of weeks ago. He was in a brand new Discovery and it now needs two new doors and possibly the frames as well. I was only moving very slowly thank goodness.

Saturday.
Arranged for the car to be repaired after a visit to the insurance repair shop. Used to be in Dereham but now its a 30 mile trip. Got there for 8 am this morning and made arrangements for the car to be collected on August 12th. Drove back to Dereham and did the shopping. Drove home and reversed into the gateway to be stopped by one of our near neighbors. She tells me that her husband has just be diagnosed with stomach cancer. She is quite upset and we talk for a long while about life in general. These are lovely people in their late 60's. She has been waiting for an operation on a brain tumor for three years now. they are trying to shrink it before operating. They used to come round and talk with my father when he was alive. The wife is a tall attractive blonde and father used to enjoy their visits.

What more could go wrong you ask? Well I am clearing the workshop and loading Rover, Also have Nuffy and the trailer in the yard to load up the burnable rubbish I find. All goes well and I take a load down to the bonfire on our field. I tip the trailer and all is well. I decide to park the trailer and bring the tractor home so draw forward and start to manoeuvre. As I stop to select reverse I see that I am close to the edge of a small but steep sided pit that is found in Norfolk. As I try to change gear the tractor rolls forward. I stand on the brakes, nothing!! she is sliding. So Nuffy is now parked with her nose under water slightly leaning to one side until I can find someone with a major winch to get her out!!

And I did not have my camera with me either

[Kiwi Kev]

Brian
There's 3 ways you can deal with your weekend
1. You can wind your clock back 24 hours, go back to bed and get up again( could end up even worse though)
2. Accept it as "good character building stuff"
3. and probably more importantly, take your camera with you next time as we all feel:

Have a good weekend
Kiwi Kev

[Mark]

I can sympathize with you Brian, I've done in the clutch on my pto and somethings wrong with the hydraulics.
At least you didn't get hurt, that's a good thing.

[Brian]

OK so here are the pictures Kev wanted. She came out this morning very easily at around 9am behind a battered NP Super and a massive Boughton Winch. It was done so fast that I never got time to press the shutter on the camera.

Many thanks to Shawn from our local woodyard. He is the owner of the 4WD Super Dexta. All its cost me so far is a number of pictures sent all over by mobile phone, a lot of ribbing about diving for ducks and a Fordson Tractor Club of Australia base ball cap.





The water in the pond is of course, stagnent, Nuffy smells awful but I am damn glad that no one was hurt and the problem could have occured on the road.

I had been using her on the road yesterday afternoon to drive down to the field and it was very hot. This morning, after a night in the pond, the brakes work normally. Not very good but do stop you. Another job for the near future

[Oscar]

Whoa, Brian! Glad to see it all got resolved in the end, but you could've been a lot worse off. I don't like how Nuffy is lying in that ditch - she could easily have sunk further into the mud and/or have tipped over.... with you sitting on top of it .

I had a narrow escape too recently. Last weekend I was at my buddy's farm and he had got his Atlas crane stuck deep into wet clay. It couldn't get out by itself, it was right down to the frame. So we took a 4WD New Holland out there and a big chain. He'd been clearing mud there with that crane and the terrain was terribly uneven. While positioning the New Holland directly in front of that crane, she almost tipped over. It was my buddy, who was on the crane, who yelled at me to level her - personally, I felt like I was still pretty far removed from the critical angle. But he was right - it was a close call.

[Brian]

Oscar,
She looks straighter in the pictures than she was

The trailer in the last picture was level, the tilt to the left was how I held the camera. To all intents and purposes she was lying on her side.

Luckily the diesel tank, which is at the front, was only a quarter full and she was pretty oil tight so there was no environmental consequences.

One of the people who helped pull it out watched as I climbed along the edge of the wheel to get to the gear shift said " If I had been in the seat when she went in there my a**e would have been biting lumps out of the seat cushion"

[Kiwi Kev]

Brian
Is this the same ditch that you were cleaning out earlier in the year, when you got the JCB stuck.
Kiwi Kev

[Pascal]

Brian,

I´m glad that everything turned out well, seeing the circumstances.

Hope Nuffy is 100% soon.

[henk]

Brian,

Do I understand it right?
Are you all the way in Scotland because Nuffy is smelling so badly?

Glad you are okay.