Day 10 Spot what's missing?

As Fred can tell you when we were kids I could never repair a bicycle. I could take it apart, sometimes with hammer, but I could never put it back together again. With the years I just stopped repairing my bike and just waited for it to be stolen to buy a new one, second hand from Brick Lane.

Bikes like any other object we have in life is never bought or owned. It is rented. We have it for the time we enjoy it, until we break it, lose it, forget it or sell it.

The only problem with this strategy is that the older and tattier the bike looks the less likely it is to get stolen. During school holidays kids in the Isle of Dogs would go on razzias nicking all the bikes in the secured garage of our building. They took Zara's and Mariya's several times but never mine. I never repaired it and now it is languishing on top of Camila's back. I hope it doesn't attract too much attention in Romania...

I was counting on Mariya who comes from a family of mechanics to keep Camilia rolling. But as she says: "You never see the butcher's dog cutting a slice of meat." She had seen it done but never did it herself.

So I was tasked with up keep of the vehicle. I didn't tell her about my childhood experience. I didn't think it was really relevant since we didn't have a hammer on board. Maybe for the best.

Every morning I checked the oil, water in the engine and tried to put air in the tires and air suspension. I tried to add some oil thinking it should go into the small tube where the testing rod sits. After thinking about it for half and hour and waking up Mariya to ask her I decided to take the risk and put it into the engine box.

I must have been so worried about doing the wrong thing that I did not screw the cap back on properly.

For the oyster card users who know the London tube map by heart and think all cars are black cabs that mysteriously mutate into Somali-driven minicabs after 12am there should not be a hole on the black box to the left of the lettters Fiat. An engine with no oil is like a skinny latte without milk, soya or other.

Oil must have spurted all the way from Linz to Budapest. We were probably lucky to have stopped driving at 10pm, only because we ate quinoa that made us sleepy, as we usually drove till 1am. Otherwise the motor would be kaputt and the journey seriously delayed. This time we would have an overweight trailer with no campervan.