Maybe it's so obvious that it just goes without saying.
Recently we have met a few Great Brits, though. If there are enough of them in this country, then it really must be great!
Take Andy, for instance. He's the guy we bought our car from.
It's a pretty unremarkable car - we've never even taken a proper photo of it. But a remarkable fellow that sold it to us.
He lives in Newton Abbott, which is not far from here - but the road between here and there (where it goes through the village of Kingskersell) is always a nightmare. It's just a bumper-to-bumper crawl, pretty well any time of day or night. You have to pity the people who commute to Exeter from here, because there is no other way to get there, only a dotted line on the map with "proposed" indicates the government's intention to start thinking about doing something after the year 2010 or so.
Anyway, Newton Abbott itself has tiny, hilly, tangled streets. I spent ages poring over the map book to find Andy's place, and we drove up there in the hire car we still had. We got there OK, Peter driving and me navigating (as usual). We examined the car, and Andy took us for a drive in it, out onto some faster roads so Peter could get a feel for it. We were very satisfied, and Andy gave it to us for a really fair price. Then we went into his place and met his wife and daughter and had a cup of tea while the papers were filled out and cash handed over.
And then - the moment of truth. Only Peter was insured to drive the hire car, I had to drive the 'new 'car home. I had not driven any car for about three years, and I had never driven in the UK. We had to both find our way out of Newton Abbott and through Kingskerswell, and the traffic had begun to build since we came there.
Peter would follow me, naturally, and keep an eye on me. After more than two weeks of driving the hire car he had finally got used to the fact that (apparently the thing in Britain) the indicator stalk is on the left and the windscreen wipers on the right, and had stopped trying to indicate with the wipers - however I knew this would still be a problem for me.
I was sitting in the car, peering at the map, trying desperately to memorize the road numbers and turns to get us through Newton Abbott. Observing my distress, Andy - who no longer had any reason to care about what happened - suggested that he drive his wife's car (as he no longer had a car) and lead us out of there.
What a great guy! And so he did. He took us all the way out of the town and stuck with us until we were on the road I was confident about. As he finally turned off, I flashed my lights and waved my windscreen wipers at him to say 'thanks'!
And then there was Keith.
We saw a notice in the local Post Office that these people were selling a bunch of stuff. We went around there and bought a few things from him.
Our little car wouldn't take the stuff we'd bought, so Keith loaded it onto his trailer and brought it around. Helpful bloke.
Then we bought this little computer from him - not the screen or keyboard, just the actual computer - to set up as a second computer in our house, in one of our future student rooms.
It's a cute little thing, and Keith sold it to us very cheaply, and it was soon set up and working beautifully. So I was working upstairs on the laptop, and Peter was downstairs on our new computer and we were having these loud conversations up and down the stairs ... but at least we weren't taking turns on the computer, it was great!
And, all of a sudden, it just died on us. Dead as a maggot, couldn't do anything with it.
We phoned Keith, because he was such a friendly guy, and we thought he might have a few ideas about what to do - seemed like a cluey chap, computer-wise.
Keith came around, took it home and worked on it - and got it going again. But he was most concerned that he might have sold us a dud, just couldn't stomach that idea.
That was great for a week or so, and then it did it again. Keith had said he would happily take it back and give us our money back. Which he did, and sold us his laptop instead - we were more than happy to buy something else from this great Brit!
