50+ and proud of it.

I am very fortunate to have a small collection of very good friends. (On occasions, they do not consider themselves fortunate in reverse - like the day I pulled out in front of a Range Rover with "N" in the passenger seat of the Mustang. Well, I thought he was indicating...). Anyway, N has hired a villa in Sicily for two weeks and has invited a few select friends to join him. My wife and I are going out in the second week and I naturally asked the question "Where is it?" He promptly mailed me the email tennis he had with the villa owner. Which started with " meet me in the cafe in the middle of Ragusa " and ended with " we have never sent anybody directly to the property before, unfortunatlely there is not a postal address, the post does not go there! This is why we always make the meetings in Ragusa and the owner takes you to the property himself. "(sic). The interim conversation involved questions about GoogleEarth coordinates and Lat/Long fi...

I'm not normally one for writing gastronomic reviews - particularly ones about pubs - however, I thought this was worth a mention. There's a village near us called Stockbury and right in the middle is a pub called The Harrow . It's used to be cr *p, but has recently been taken over by a French bloke and his wife - both of whom are chefs. Don't get me wrong, they don't (as yet) do French cooking (I'm working in him about that one), but they do really good value, quality meals. The first time we went my friend had a steak & kidney pie. He was poking his fork around the dish. "What's wrong?" "I'm trying to find the gravy, there's no room for it with all the steak and kidney they're put in" I removed the pastry lid from my chicken and leak pie - same thing, loads of chicken and leak. Excellent. And the beer is good too - Shepherd Neame , but hey ho, you can't have everything. We asked the chap about his background. "...

A tiny problem manifested itself late last week with the 106. The air temperature dropped somewhat and my daughter had trouble starting the 106 and then keeping it ticking over. A brief investigation revealed that the new idle control motor fitted recently wasn't actually doing any idle control motoring at all. I rang my "favourite" Peugeot Dealer on the grounds that they had left it in that state in the first place. "Before I bring it in, how can I test it?" "Oooh, we can't tell you that, or we'd have to kill you. We would put it on the *special machine* and do an actuator test" "Oh, so you would start the car and see if the motor was stepping in and out ?" >click It wasn't. I found a new one on an identical 106 in the local breakers, so I bought the whole injection unit for £35 and swapped out the stepper motor. This seems to have had the desired effect. Watch this space. Something I found out:- The part numbers for Bosch Ste...