Another Quote for Good Luck

"It's quite a commentary on our so-called scientific progress that while we can send men to the moon (well, possibly you can, even if this correspondent can't), getting stuck on the high fell road between Scotch Corner and Carlisle is just as liable to happen now as it was in the sixteenth century. In some ways it's worse nowadays, when your carburetter's flooded, not a call-box in sight, and nothing for it but a ten-mile walk; in the 1590s you could always huddle up in a corner of your satin-lined luxury coach, swathed in silks and furs, beguiling your impatience with peach brandy and sweetmeats o' Peru, while outside in the raging blizzard your lackeys heaved and whimpered to get the show on the road, and Coachman Samkin clumphed around giving futile instructions to the grooms, like "Keep them nags in low gear, the chestrnut's over-revving!" -- assuming, of course, that you weren't just any old wayfarer, but the pampered and wealthy Lady Godiva Dacre, proud flower of the nobility, owner of half East Anglia, and accustomed to having every whim, let alone crisis, attended to instanter by droves of head-knuckling servitors."
- George Macdonald Fraser, The Reavers, pp.22-23