Walking towards my twenty-year-old Land Rover Defender, I thought it looked very much at home parked in South Molton High Street, then I wondered why the rear number plate was propped up on the front windscreen. Upon examining the number plate, I found a piece of double-sided tape was stuck on the back of one corner. The back of the Land Rover possessed double-sided tape for the other three corners, but not the number plate. Mystery solved. It had fallen off. Probably 50% of malfunctions involving Land Rovers, relate to “something falling off”. Fortunately, the locals around here are used to it, and someone picked up the debris and put it on the windscreen.
As I was in town, I went straight to Exmoor Hardware, a store that sells everything, and bought the most powerful double-sided tape they stocked and a pair of scissors. They were reluctant to let it go to a non-professional carpet layer etc, but I was insistent. Within an hour I had the number plate reattached to the vehicle. It took an hour because the tape was indeed so sticky, that I was repeatedly; stuck to the tape which was in turn stuck to the number plate but not the vehicle or the vehicle but not the number plate or stuck to itself or stuck to myself and not the number plate or the vehicle. With beginner’s luck I was performing a pitch perfect rendition of the classic circus clown routine where two clowns can never put down a sticky object because it is always stuck to one of them. A small crowd gathered to appreciate this street mime. Nobody stayed for the whole hour. Most just watched for a few minutes or so. When I finally had four corners of sticky tape on the number plate and four corners of tape on the rear of the vehicle, I mated them together in slightly but obviously the wrong place. It now sits at an angle to all other horizontal visual reference points, like the window, the bumper, the rear cross member, the light above it, the taillights. And as this was the monster heavy duty sticky tape that was that. It is now there for the rest of history. From the moment of contact it stuck like a weld. There was no adjustment. At least it was on, or so I thought.
When I set off that sense of certainty changed. I became obsessed with the vision of it falling off again and checked the rearview mirror every 5 seconds to see if it was bouncing down the road behind me. I got out and checked it at a set of traffic lights and was immediately struck by how lop sided it was. It made the whole Land Rover look like it was leaning over. I suspect the number plate light will only shine on one side of it. It was stuck solid. To prove it I pulled at it until if I had pulled any harder the door might have come off with it, which is always a possibility and probably an inevitability at some point. I have heard about rear doors of Land Rovers falling off at inconvenient moments. If it happens to me, I hope it happens when I am driving, and it kills an e-scooter rider or a cyclist [said in jest but it’s obvious I don’t like either, even though I am a cyclist).
