50+ and proud of it.

"Let's visit Grandma!" Yeah, great plan. Grab some fuel, turn south onto the A249 at 10:01am and off we jolly well stop. Like, really stop. Turn off engine, stare at the Nissan in front and wait. Time passes and so do four Police patrol cars, three fire engines and eventually the Kent Air Ambulance. After 1½ hours I go for a walk and drag the life story out of anyone stupid enough to have their window down. More time passes and I notice that the Old Bill are turning people around in an orderly fashion and sending them back up (and off) onto the A2 on-slip. A lot more people notice too. I remarked to the Nissan driver who'd just missed his hospital appointment in Maidstone - "I think I'll wait until I'm told...", "seems like a plan", he said. At 11:57am a bloke *way* in front decided he couldn't wait and spun it round into the gap left for Fire Engines - and Police Cars - and proceeded to drive northwards towards on-coming, although stat

(ring)(ring) "Hello Dad, I was driving home from town and my car started to make a funny noise" "Well, stop then and call out the breakdown people" "No, I think I can drive home" (click) (one cup of tea later) "Hello Dad, my phone battery is dying and my clutch has just gone, I'm..." (click) I did some maths and worked out where she was. Now to be fair, when I got there, she had borrowed a nice policeman's mobile to ring up the breakdown people, and, he had helped her push it from the junction to the side of the road. I diverted to "Mr Clutch" and booked it in. Whilst waiting for the lorry she made the famous statement: "It's only a fortnight until I get a years no claims!" Girl, let me explain...

We called in chap from a different company to give us another quote for the log-burner. After the measuring and mandatory teeth-sucking he came up with a figure which was dear but seemed to tick all the right boxes. "Thanks very much", I said, "at least you didn't have to call in the fitter!" "Who was that then?" he asked "Oh, just some bloke so shoved up his own a*** that he thought we were beneath him" He thought for a moment and smiled. "Oh, that'll be Simon then."

Today (01 Dec 08) marked the end of about 60 years of fine white paper making in Sittingbourne. PM6 (Paper Machine 6) ceased production at the New Thames mill at 06:00 this morning. It will be rebuilt to make CCM (Corrugated Case Material) - a brown paper used in packaging. It is hoped full production of saleable paper will commence on Monday, 12th Jan 09. The title is a pun. Only those of us in the know will understand it...

I read with great sadness yesterday that MFI had gone T/U. Our kitchen is MFI (no, not that cheap, it was a 2-3 star one, which meant the drawers came with handles). The guarantee has run out anyway, unlike my neighbour whose MFI kitchen tap required replacement. "I keep ringing them up, but I don't get a reply", he complained to me. "So, no change there then..." We'll never actually know the time between when they left the office and them simply letting it ring. Woolworths too, have gone under it seems. I already have a search set-up on eBay for the Dog & The Sheep.

Following on from the removal of the old heating system we (OK, I) decided that we should fill the hole where the gas fire was with a nice log-burner. Now, these aren't cheap. The fire is reasonable but the flue is about £100 per metre . I called in the experts. A very nice man called Simon 1 turned up yesterday. He had a nice pair of black trousers, a nice black roll-neck top and a nice black suitcase. Very similar in fact to the Milk Tray advert man. He decided that fitting a log burner here was very expensive and very difficult . And the flue is sooo expensive at £150 per metre, "and that's plus VAT you know". "Um, is that a different flue then?, never mind, carry on" "Oh, I'll just have to call in the fitter to see if it's possible." ...and he flounced off, pissed off that he never got to show me his marvellous glossy bro-shures . Previously I had called in a man from Gillingham. He is a chimney sweep and sold & fitted fires t

No, not "'er indoors", but the Galaxy Gloworm installed when the house was new 26 years ago. Although it's working just fine, none of the others on the estate are, so we decided a preemptive strike and to sneak up on it unawares whilst we had the chance. We had British Gas in. "No problem sir, we'll just stuff it in the airing cupboard where the tank is and you can have five pipes running up the hall which you can box in later." "What about the flue?", I enquired, "we have a loft extension and you can't run it through there." "Yes we can, you'll have to move your bed and wardrobe and you can box in the flue afterwards. By the way, it's £5,300". We had an independent plumber in. "Nope, can't do a good enough job. Bye." We called in another. "Err, how about if we move it to the small loft space you have left where the (now) redundant tanks are? I'll have to pull up the floorboards to run the

I notice that the British Government are proposing to monitor (amongst other things) all emails sent and received by our goodselves. I, for one, will simply get a free Thawte signing certificate and encrypt everyone I send. However, does this mean they can catch the bastards who send me 2,000 spam emails every month? Probably not.

"Pitwall to Timo, Pitwall to Timo, come in please" "Timo, what d'you want?" "Pitwall, err, Ron says it's 2 million" "Timo, say again, you want to Ronseal what?" "Pitwall, RON, SAYS, PLEASE" "Timo, one peas? You talk about lunch?" "Pitwall, Lewis is behind you, let him past!" "Timo, how much?" "Pitwall, a lot, just shut up and slow up a bit" "Timo, Oh, you want me to let Lewis overtake me and let him win the world championship?" "Shut the f*** up on air!" "I think my tyres have just given up" "Good boy..."

Last week door lock bust on the smart roadie. And it went back in under warranty. Now, not that I'm going to libel Drake & Fletcher of Sutton Road, Maidstone, no no, far from it. They've always been most courteous and helpful all the many times I've had to ring them up since April when I picked up the Brabus. However, the following things were noticed when I got the car back from the "lock-fix":- The outer door handle wasn't as flush to the door skin as the passenger side. Only 1mm as opposed to 0.5mm, different none-the-less. The two black stickers that hide the screws weren't replaced, meaning that the screw heads are now visible every time you open the door. OK, they're only 6d for a thousand, but... The door seems to be slightly harder to pull open. Two of the clips that hold the screws that hold the front wing on were broken. To be fair, they may have already been bust, but they should have replaced them shouldn't they? This morning was th

1. Attempt to repair a Windows XP laptop. Let me explain: Daughter comes back from university for the weekend. I manage to grab her laptop to install her new printer and notice that the Windows Updates are failing - like, all of them. Time & wine pass. Seems like a good idea to repair Windows using my genuine 1 XP Pro CD. The install fails for some reason with a CRC error on D:\I386\NT5.CAT. I scan the internet and get advised to rename CATROOT & CATROOT2 directories and try again. I reinstall and it works but I now get asked to put in the product key. And here where it all goes wrong due to Mr Merlot. I enter *my* product key from the disc. Bill says no and I'm stuffed. Whenever I try to log on, I get "please activate your copy of XP" and I can go no further. (lots of stuff deleted here about trying illegal keygens etc etc...) I panic (she needs the PC for uni) and buy a copy from eBay from the same bloke that I bought my copy from. My internet goes T/U 2 when

The smart roadster last week decided that it liked me an awful lot and showed its affection by not letting me out of the drivers door. A quick phone call confirmed it was under warranty. "Just drop it in and we'll take a look", they said. Great, but they then followed that with "if we can't fix it we'll have a word with the Mercedes dealer next door". Four days later I got it back, fixed and with a new door lock. However, they charged me for a new door handle which wasn't under warranty - go figure - but at least it was the upgraded version with the plastic bit that stops the pin falling out. Did you know, that to get to the lock (and everything else including the speakers) you have to remove the door skin ? Yes, the outer piece. There is no door card. To get that off you need to remove the door. To get that off you need to remove the front wing. To get that off you have to remove the Brabus side skirt. To get that off you break the clips... see prev

Sooo, Lewis managed another spectacular cock-up this morning by coming 12th in Japan . Fortunately, Massa only managed 8th. The fish pond however was completed yesterday and finished off with a 25%-off-fountain. We formally opened the pond by throwing in a floating ceramic frog. " I declare this pond open " I said in a fake royal accent. "Don't worry", said my wife, "we can get the pieces out later." I also noted that a Ukrainian radio-telescope has sent out a message to a nearby planet from the users of Bebo. Two things here: Assuming 1) ET is listening - " wtf was that? I just got some signal from somewhere but now it's gone ". 2) That they actually manage to decode it - " Err, it's from some social networking site or other ". " Bloody hell, for heaven's sake, don't send anything back.., shut down the transmitter..., turn off the lights... ".

It started with us taking the daughter down to Brighton to start that fascinating part of life known as "university". The most traumatic part being the fact that the girl in room 7 decided that it was too difficult to work out that the numbers on the kitchen cupboards should match the number on her room. "C T-C" as she's now known annexed cupboard 2. Daughter - not impressed. If that's all she's got to worry about then that should be fine... Back home, the raised fishpond was not going swimmingly well. I filled it full of water to test it out and it promptly collapsed. Plan B involves ½ tonne of sand and some more wood. We can dry out the conservatory later. Sunday afternoon proved to be more fruitful . Hamilton came third in the Singapore Grand Prix - the Ferrari's scoring bugger all. And, I managed to get the last clip that holds on the skirts of the Brabus into place - that's only taken me about 3 weeks. How to change the plugs on a smart R

We did the quick monthly trip to ensure that Mother was still OK, and on the way back down the M1 I was overtaking a slower-moving vehicle (who was doing about 75...) and I was suddenly aware that my rear-view mirror had gone black. Now, bear in mind that I'm still alongside said SMV and I'm doing about 85 - this Range Rover thingy is approximately 10 feet up my chuff. Fair enough, I complete the manoeuvre, move over and he goes whacking past. I noted the plate - "B4 INS", Mr Bains, no doubt. My wife calmly remarked "He could do with an R in that" There's already two in the driving seat...

After 12 careful years of looking after my work PC, I left it turned on this Monday gone because one of my work colleagues needed to use it on Tuesday (it takes too long to boot - but that's another moan). I came in today to find it in a permanent state of reboot because some t*** in Finland decided to remotely load on some new crap that required a re-boot. No one spotted the "please reboot" question. That crap was F-Secure. The "waiting reboot" (we think) left the PC unprotected and somehow the MSBlast virus got on it - probably not, but we've no other explanation. Anyhow, none of the normal fixes worked so we decided to use an XP install disc to "repair" Windows. Yeah right. Setup failed halfway through with a SVCHOST crash and that was that. No way out. After 7 hours of trying to fix using the keenest minds in Britain we've had to re-install a clean O/S. So that's Thursday and Friday knackered then. I hate Microsoft. I hate the Finns ev

My son's car alarm has developed a fault and goes off every so often. Last night was no exception. Guess who moaned at me? Yup, the Budgie Woman. Now, I didn't engineer it that way, honestly. But let's just say I'm not going to provide any help what-so-ever to help solve the fault... :-)

The roadie performed faultlessly last week when we drove down to and toured Brittany. I was surprised at the amount of attention it got from the locals - many of them doing the usual peering inside with their hands shielding their eyes from the reflection in the glass and then going around the back to see what the make was. We even got the classic "peer-and-shrug" from one them: (peer) "Qu'est-ce que c'est alors?" (shrug) "Je ne sais pas..." We stopped in a gite on a farm and the owner (whose first language was Breton and spoke pidgin French ) asked to look at the engine. "What did he say?" asked my wife. "Dunno, something about a suitcase, I think." I don't speak French that well. I can order a beer and a meal, but that's about it. I was wondering how to sum up a roadie to a local in one word if asked. I eventually worked it out - "inattendu" Unexpectedly changing gear. Unexpectedly not accelerating when it re

"I know," I said, "let's go on holiday to France and let's go in the Brabus". Sounds like a good idea, after all the smart Roadster will be doing about 50mpg and the holiday is only in Brittany. Last Friday, I checked the "how far to go to next service" button. Ah, 800 miles. Um, let's ring up the Merc dealer and get it serviced. And here's the point of this entry. "No problem sir, we can do it tomorrow, we'll knock 20% off the price of the service, 10% off the cost of parts because it's over 3 years old, we'll wash it too 'cos that's what Mercedes dealers do". And to top it all, I got a very nice Parker pen at the end of it. "So how much did that all cost?", asked the wife when I got home. "Err, £150, but they checked the car over as well as changing the oil and filter." "How much was the oil?" "Ah, £30, but it is expensive-fully-synthetic-stuff", "...and the filt

Today is "A" Level results day. The time is 07:15. In the old days you had to wait for a letter to arrive in the post. Not any more. My daughter has just checked the UCAS web-site and has found that Brighton Uni has accepted her. Pleased? Damn right I am. So why was she crying? No idea - me neither. That's the sort of thing her mother would do, it must be hereditary... "Bye-bye Lassie" 1 . 1 Only members of the family will get this one.

400 miles in torrential rain over the weekend. My smart Roadster doesn't leak. That's it.

So there you have it. I can say with complete certainty that Bluetooth works on XP and not on W2K. Ok, to be a bit more precise - you can connect to a phone using BT on W2K but you can't use the phone as a modem to connect to the Internet. It just don't work, I've spent the last fortnight trying. You can however use a USB cable to connect no probs, BT forget it. To use BT with XP, install the drivers from the CD supplied with the dongle, do not under any circumstances use the crap Microsoft stack - it don't work - unfortunately, these get installed by the add h/w wizard when you plug in the dongle! You must then uninstall the M$ driver from the Device Manager. BTW: You get a 10Mb connection with USB & a 1Mb connection using BT, hey ho. Use the cable... Why am doing this? Why indeed. My wife is currently on hols with the youngest son where there's no phone line and she wants to use the net to find local attractions etc. So I get it working and what happens? S

I was late this morning for various reasons, so I abandoned the roadie in the street just before rushing in to get changed to go to work. I got out of the car and with a small deft tap of my knee knocked the car keys from my hand:- One smart Roadster (Brabus 101) - £8,300 Fuel for one fast dash in from Herne Bay - £2.50 One crowbar - £4.50 Dropping your car keys down the drain when you're in a hurry - priceless. Here's the picture: me lying prone in the road, with no shirt on, ear pressed to the tarmac, hand down a storm drain full of very dead leaves rummaging around 18" of stagnant water. It took me about 15 minutes to get the damn drain cover off as it was cemented in with 25 years worth of dirt and gravel. Fortunately, the dead leaves supported the weight of the keys and they hadn't sunk to the bottom - still not sure how deep the water actually was. I was trying to imagine the conversation with the insurance people when trying to get them replaced as I was convinc

Due to a lack of exciting or scary things at the moment - or as they say in the media - a slow news week, I thought I'd jot this little ditty down after seeing the wife on the beach: 'Never do a bikini line shave and then wear a very thin speedo swimming costume' I shall leave it up to the reader to ponder this one. Also, the most interesting thing that has happened recently is that I got a flat rear tyre on the Brabus. Spooky, it was flat as a twat last night, I pumped it up to 29psi using the most efficient, smart supplied German air pump, drove home 20 miles and it was still 29psi. This morning it was the same 29psi. Odd. The flat is due to me hitting a f*g great pothole in the dark in the middle of Kent the other week. The alloy rim bent about 1" but the tyre remained up although leaking slightly. The tyre man made the astounding revelation "If it goes down, then you'd better get it fixed". Well it went flat yesterday, and although it's still &quo

How scary is this then? I'd just picked up the brake bits from the smart Dealer and driving back in what seems like the only break in the rain this month, I was enjoying 1 driving north up the A249 from the Stockbury roundabout in the left hand side of the dual carriageway - now that bit is important. The south-bound road is on the other side of a very secure central reservation and crash-barrier. Fortunately there was only me and an M3 beamer on the road. Round the bend on MY side of the road driving south in the "fast" lane is a newish blue Corsa (or something). As I explained to the Police later, the last thing you do when faced with a 100mph head-on collision is take the other blokes number or go "my, that's a nice SRi with aftermarket wheel trims". ring ring ring "Hello, I've nearly been killed" "Don't worry sir, so's a few other people too" If you ARE the b*d who was driving, you owe me a laundry bill. 1 i.e. giving it

Hmm. When I test drove the smart Roadster in April I complained that the brakes were strange (like, they didn't work going into a roundabout). Indeed, I understand that they are a bit odd anyway at the best of times. However, the selling garage said that "they'd get them fixed". They did and things were fine. Last week they got progressively worse - so much so that I figured I bust a slave cylinder or something. I pulled the rear drum off and had look. The offside pawl was missing, resulting in no slack being taken up by the ratchet as the shoes wore down. "Hello, this bit's missing, I'd like you to fix it under guarantee." "Oh no, sir, it's part of the brakes and they're not covered." "Um, no, brakes are the weary-down thingies that... never mind" "Ok, you get the bit and we'll pay for it" "Fair enough, I've got nothing better to do at the weekend..." I must be mad.

Oh 'eck. I left IBM on Friday to join the company 'next door'. So, let's get this straight - I was working for a place that contracted IBM to provide the software services. This company sold out to "them next door" who will take over the entire site in November (long story - but IBM probably won't be there after that). I go for an interview and get the job - and more money. My new boss agrees to lend me back to the original firm (not IBM) to do the same job and sitting at the same desk. Someone somewhere knows what they're doing.

You have to get a mental picture for this one. We'd been invited to a "longest day party" at an Aunt-In-Law's and my wife had been asked to make a dessert. She made a hazlenut meringue with whipped cream and part-melted chocolate on the top. This part-solid, gooey mass is carefully placed in a (long) Tupperware container. "Go and put that carefully in the car and I'll lock up the house" Can you see where this is going? I opened the boot 1 of the smart Roadster with the radio-key in one hand and the sweet in the other. Have you ever held a pack of brand new playing cards and squeezed gently? The result is something out of Alice In Wonderland (no, the original, not that version) where all the cards fly in the air and land all over Alice. Now picture that, substituting the cards for the Tupperware box, the meringue and the boot carpet. How do you get meringue and chocolate sauce out of black carpets, boot locks, number plates, exhausts, shirts...? 1 UK=b

Well, not quite as I shall explain. The wet suit thing came about because I foolishly said "yeah, I'll help you crew your catamaran sometime" to a friend of mine. That time came last weekend and I found out that it was a 2 day event of six races off the coast of the Isle of Sheppey for Dart 18's and not a gentle trip across the bay as I'd been led to believe. Saturday was fine. Light winds (or "airs" as it's known in the trade) and lovely sunshine. I asked my friend what his plan was for the day. "I'd be happy to come last, I enjoy sailing" Mine was not to drown. We came 17th overall (out of 34) and in the second race came 10th. Not bad for an amateur. Sunday however, was different. At the start of the first race (in fact in all races - apparently) we're all milling around the start line with various people shouting "up!, UP!, UP!" and "no water!, NO WATER!" - which is sailing speak for "fuck off, you'r

Oops. I didn't fit the oil filler cap correctly. That's the view of the garage. They spent Friday "looking" at it and even drove it about 30 miles and absolutely nothing came out of it. My view is that the oil pixies got into the engine. We have no idea what's gone on here.

Ah. There I was minding my own business driving back in my smart Roadster from having a wet-suit fitted (more on this later I suspect) when I felt sick. You do the usual things - blame the car in front, blame the farmers, blame the Government. However, this smell just didn't go away. I got home to find that the turbo oil feed pipe 1 had fractured and dumped about ½pt of Mobil One all over the engine and exhaust. The next morning 2 I found a patch of oil about 1ft diameter that had simply come off the engine whilst standing overnight. "Hello garage, please come and get my car that's under guarantee." "Oh no sir, we're the largest Mazda dealer in Maidstone and we don't have a car transporter. You'll have to get it to us yourself. Here's a number of someone local, he'll only charge you an arm, you can keep your leg." >click< "Hello RAC, please take my car from home to Maidstone." "No problem sir." >click<

After realising that I've got about 100 email addresses due to various ISP changes and the like, my latest move to BT (which gave me another two...) prompted me to bite the bullet and purchase a domain name. Now I have just the one. I wonder if you can guess what it is?

I'm still a member of an American Car Club (who have always allowed non-Yanks) and we did the "Great Bucket And Spade Run" yesterday. Much to the annoyance of the organisers, I insisted on parking my smart Roadster alongside my friend's vehicles (well, they did have the awning and the chairs). My wife was always sceptical about turning up at an American Car Club meeting without the Mustang. Within 5 minutes of parking I was deeply engaged with two members of the public about the size/fuel economy/bad backs and steaks (one was an ex-butcher, hence steaks and back backs). This pattern continued throughout the day. Many visitors (and photographs) later, my wife casually remarked "Y'know, I never thought there'd be some much interest in it!" I knew that. Pleased? Yup.

Not an amusing post, but I got a new job starting 1st July. Now, it's the same job, at the same desk, at the same site but working for someone different (not IBM, hooray!) And, here's the best bit - more dosh. In true IBM style, I don't hear or see a manager in months and 5 minutes after the "I quit" Note is sent (a "Note" is an email for those of you who don't use Lotus Notes - or Lotus Not, or Doesn't as it's known) I get a phone call from my manager. "Why are you leaving?" "Who are you?" I thought that put it rather nicely, don't you?

Last February I thought it might be a good idea to switch broadband providers from the lesser known eZeeDSL and get a "total package" with my current home phone provider, Homecall - basically it's cheaper... Anyway, I got a MAC code and rang it into Homecall. Time passes, and so does the expiry on the MAC code. "Hello, what's happening about my broadband?" "Who are you?, Oh yes, err um, your MAC code isn't valid." "Err, did you bother telling me? What's up with it?" "It's for an LLU exchange thingy" >click< Get another MAC code in March and ring up another Homecall Muppet. "Here's my MAC code. Is it all right?" "Oh yes, here's your order number. Stuff will be in the post shortly." Time passes, and so does the expiry on the MAC code. The mat by the front door is suspiciously empty of routers etc. "Hello BT, this is what I want" "No problem sir, it'll all be with you

Yes, I know. I said I'd reserve that for Mustangs, but today I learnt something. "The Book" (i.e. the smart Roadster manual) mentions something about "sports starts". Basically you hoof the throttle down all the way and the engine revs to 3000rpm before the clutch engages. Now I've been doing this already and to be honest I wasn't that impressed with the 0 to anything speed. ('anything' to 'more than anything' is still very impressive however). Today I sat on my favourite roundabout in lane three and this taxi drives up my inside. Something tells you that he's going right as well. We can't have that now can we? No. So, I tramped it as normal - but this time something went "click" and the gas pedal went down just that bit further - the car accelerated so much that I actually couldn't let go to get to the upshift nor reach the "+" paddle without endangering the fact that I was trying to steer left around the

So there I was flying along this country road in the smart Roadster and this *big* van comes hacking round the corner. To be fair, if I'd been in the Mustang I wouldn't have been going that fast, but I was. A lot in fact. "It was his fault Officer, he shouldn't have been doing 40" "How fast were you going?" "Erm, a lot more" ...that was the conversation I imagined in that brief instant when your life flashes in front of you. However, I jut braked, hard, and swerved. The SAM too had a little conversation with itself. "Oh dear, I suppose he wants me to take over then" I was absolutely stunned to find the car had simply stopped with no drama an inch from the bank. Very, very impressed I am with these things... Have I learned my lesson? Yes, I won't be going that fast just there again.

Last seen today being driven away the new owners. I will miss it - a lot. I wish them well with it.

The smart Brabus Roadster is just great... This is the only car I've ever driven where at some point in each journey I've either laughed out loud or gone "whoo hoo!" (or the like), can't do "yee har" that's reserved for the Mustang. Sorry, got to keep some things sacred. It's turning a respectable 45mpg at the mo', but I suspect that's due to me not being *entirely* careful with the throttle. There is one problem I can see - I enquired as to how much a rear tyre was. Not because I need one, just to see what I'd let myself in for. "It's £80" the man said, "but, I don't carry them on the shelf, they take a couple of days". Could I be without my roadster for 2 days? Nope. Note to the unwise: smart's don't carry spare wheels, there's no space to put them - but you probably guessed that.

So that's it then. Sold to day at 12:10, my 1990 Mustang GT Convertible. I didn't want to, but it had to go. There comes to a point where justifying 18 mpg on a good day just doesn't cut it and, it needed a bit more TLC than I had time for. I spoke to the lady who bought in on behalf of her currently-in-Asia husband. "He wants it to play with it on the weekends". This is exactly the sort of person who I wanted to sell it to - so I'm convinced it's going to a good home. "Where do you live?" I inquired. "Scotland". Here's a tip to all readers. Go buy shares in Esso.

"Hello, you know when you test drove the Smart Roadster last week and said the brakes felt a bit soft?" "Yes, I actually said that there was something wrong with them 'cos I had to pump them to stop." "Well we bled the brakes" "And?" "Err, it didn't work, so the mechanics said they had to do something else and had to order a part but I don't know what it was." "So?" "Well, you may not be able to pick it up Tuesday." "Oh ok, well as far as I'm aware, the only other component that exhibits that sort of symtoms is a brake master cylinder." "Oh, that was it."

Buying a Z3 seemed like a good plan. After all you could get about 38 to the gallon and all the straight-sixes do the same mileage (nearly) - so the 2.8 seemed excellent. But, around town that drops to around 23 - the Mustang does 19. Get a smaller engine? Yeah, but they're rubbish (not my opinion, but that of most of the reviews I read). I went up the local Co-Op. And, spookily enough, there was a Z3 ("M" 3.2) sitting in the car park with some old chap driving it (he was older than me, so I can say these things...). "That's it - there's someone else in the village with one, can't have one of them". I drove home and spotted another one. Need to go back to Plan A. Plan A always was to get a Smart Roadster, but they're not that quick - but they can do 70 to the gallon. Then I discovered the Brabus variant... I'm picking up my 16,000 miles, '04 plate, silver one on Tuesday.

So the "new" replacement Garmin i3 SatNav let me down for the umpteenth time again on Wednesday. Having variously decided to " Lost Satellite Reception " and move me 25 miles north into the Thames Estuary, I finally lost my rag with it and took the batteries out. "That'll teach it" I thought. I rang Garmin yesterday who were surprisingly helpful, "I'll get you an RMA immediately", she said. Nothing to do with me threatening to buy a Tom-Tom? 1 Anyway the reason I was using it was to find my way down to Alders Automatics - the gearbox specialists in East Sussex. He took the Mustang a mile down the road. "Your overdrive clutch has burnt out, it's knackered." "Hmm, how much is the car worth with a good gearbox?" "About £2,500" "And how much without?" "Fourpence". "Better give me a lift to the station then." 1 No, probably not.

So the 25-year "do" on Saturday went swimmingly well. In fact, almost like clockwork. We did have a panic the day before though. "Hello, it's the chairman of the Village Hall here, why haven't you got the local pub to do the bar?" "Um, because I fell out with him 15 years ago and haven't been in his pub since?" 1 "Oh, you're taking one of our 12 licenses... blah blah blah" "So what? He'd be using one anyway what's the difference?" (time passes and eyes glaze over) "Hello secretary of the Village Hall here, when do you want the keys?" "What's this about licenses?" "Oh, he doesn't understand anything. I run it all. Have a nice night" A few things did go slightly awry: The queue for the bar was too long, and somehow it was my fault that I didn't know the drinking habits of people I'd not seen for 10 or more years. The last dance CD skipped. My feet hurt through dancing.

This is going to be a long blog. I can tell. It all started last Wednesday night when daughter comes home to tell me that "my car sounds very loud". Ok , changing a Peugeot 106 exhaust is easy, but when it's about to fall off and requires changing *now* then it all gets a bit of a rush. Thu. am: Order exhaust. Drive to work and the Mustang does an odd gear shift. Check tranny oil. A bit low. Thu. lunchtime: Get a litre of ATF and top up correctly to the mark (engine hot & running). Thu. pm: Pick up 106 exhaust and change it. Thu. evening: Wife pokes herself in the eye with a hairbrush whilst packing to go away to Prague on Friday. Spend the evening in casualty. Doctor implies the eye will explode at 30,000 feet due to the scratch. We decide to ignore that piece of advice and go anyway. Fri am: Go to Prague with our friends and have a nice time. Sun lunchtime: Learn about the interesting storm coming in from the Atlantic. Decide to ignore that too and go to a local b

...a long while ago it seemed like a good idea to marry someone special. Well, I did just that and now it's our silver wedding anniversary. 25 years ago someone else did all the hard work now it's our turn! A simple and seemingly innocuous phrase like "let's hire the village hall and have a disco and some food" might seem like a good idea, but it's never that simple is it? Hire Village Hall -easy. Hire a disco - easyish. Get the local pub to do the bar - right arm & leg removed, but easy. Getting a caterer - ah, not so easy, only if we wanted to re-mortgage. Doing it yourself? "over my dead body" was the reply. "that can be arranged". We eventually went for Sainsbury's buffet service. I'll let you know how it goes... Invitations. Now, this is where it all goes wrong. How many people to invite? People who were at the wedding? New friends? Old friends? What's the fire limit on the hall? Let's start again - How many people

My retired parents-in-law decided that living in London no longer had the charm that it used to(!) and took the (IMHO) brave step of up-ing sticks, leaving their friends and moving to near Herne Bay. We were "volunteered" into helping clean over the weekend in readiness for the furniture turning up on the following Monday. My father-in-law (under *strict* instructions to remove a built-in wardrobe from the 2nd bedroom, soon-to-be the dining room) asked me to give him a hand. I arrived at 10:00am and he had started at 08:00am. "I've managed to get the doors off" he remarked, "it's almost a crime to take this apart!". "What can be hard about smashing out a bit of chipboard?" "Err, it ain't chipboard son, it's 5/8" timber..." I have never seen construction like it: 3" wood screws every 6", mortice and tenon joints for the frames and marine ply used as a skin which was glued on using Araldite. Whoever did the

Here's a tip for those people who run MS Outlook. Outlook is very good at archiving stuff from your "inbox" and "sent items" and the like. So when you accidentally set your PC clock to (say) 2013 it promptly moves *everything* into your archive folders. This caused me some concern, to say the least, as I use my inbox as a "to-do" list. So, next time you're trying to bypass a 30-day trial period of some software or other, remember...

This post, I suspect will inflame a few people, but what the heck. My son's AX GT bit the dust last Friday at the MOT station - "Err, we've run out of red pages, and, please don't drive it away sir." So, rightly or wrongly, my wife and I 1, decided to "help" our son buy decent(ish) car. We did the old eBay thing over the weekend and found what looked like a nice Astra in Ipswich - which we bought. Ignoring the fact that it's impossible to get real cash out of a bank without getting the Police & Church involved we drove up on Monday to pick it up. The SatNav amazingly held itself together for the journey up there 2 and we (eventually) found the cottage in the middle of nowhere. Nice chap, of some Asian descent, going out with a girl of obviously English parentage and living in her parent's house. Her parents hated him. They were stereotypical slobs - the house was full of catfood, cats, parrots and ground-in dirt. The sink was full of filthy

An odd thing just happened. A while back I thought I'd shove two fingers up to Microsoft and stop using their illegal software that I'd ripped off 1 a while back ("that'll teach 'em", I thought). So I uninstalled Micro$oft Office and got a nice copy of OpenOffice 2.something. Anyway, I imported all the Outlook stuff into Thunderbird. It all worked beautifully (apart from the fact that I can't get mail merge to merge labels using a CSV file) and merrily got on with typing e-mails. Everything was lovely, except that when I pressed "Send" it kept coming up with the "Please enter password" box and then failed to "SMTP" correctly. If I repeatedly pressed "Send" eventually it would send the mail without me having entered anything. It was completely random. Sometimes it would work, more often than not, I would have to have about 10 attempts to send. The "Outgoing Server" setting was just fine, it had my account

So I took the Mustang up the drag-strip on my way to work this morning. That'll be the legal, fully mashalled, off road drag strip you understand, and not the 1km straight country road out of a neighbouring village. To quote the EAP Test Pilot after the inaugural flight - "Yup"

I'm really not sure how to start this one. I went to my local tuning bloke on Monday who had a novel approach to the now infamous Mustang crap fuel economy and no power problem. "Lets start from square one", he said, checking the oil, "lets see what the engine is actually telling me, rather than what the computer is. I'm not that familiar with V8 SEFI yanks by the way". Well, you're the only bloke left in the South Of England with any idea at all so, carry on. He attached a lot of leads to the engine and shoved a pipe up one of the exhausts. It looked like a scene from "ER". After pressing a lot of buttons he came to the conclusion that there was, in fact, absolutely nothing wrong with the engine per- se . He even checked the timing. "13 degrees BTDC ", he remarked "Yup that's about right for tick over", I replied, "By the way, if you remove this thing called a SPOUT connector, you can check the static timing.&q

The week before last I relented and "bought it now" another 106 for my daughter (don't worry, she'll pay me back...) It was one of those "why is this so cheap?" eBay auctions. Having studied the auction, I decided it was because the guy actually had no idea how to sell a car - this was his first "sell". Last weekend we toddled off to Hertfordshire to pick it up. Things went perfectly until driving through Ware high street and half a mile to go, the SatNav decided to lose all satellites. When we finally arrived we were presented with a pristine 10 year old 106. "Err, where are these 'supermarket dents' mentioned in the ad then?" "Here", he said, pointing to marks that can only be seen with a scanning electron microscope. "You said the tyres needed replacing? These have still got 3mm of tread on them, these are fine" "Oh, are they?" We paid him the £750 and rushed off into the sunrise before the real wo

So, I toddle off in the Mustang to "Newport Imports" near me and I spent about 3 hours there with 2½ hours spent - a) drinking tea - b) waiting for a guy to come back from the station to move his car so I can get mine into garage (it was the wettest day since, well, the last one) and c) explaining that 'yes, I have changed the plugs/leads etc.'. What was really annoying was the fact that when I got there he said "Oh, we can't plug in the IDS 'cos your ECU is too early". Hmm, wasn't that why I was there in the first place? Eventually he plugged in a £1,000,000 Sun (or was it SnapOn?) scanner that said "Code 91 Left HEGO Lean". Err, didn't my £40 scanner blink its LED telling me exactly the same? Still, it's nice to know that I can still count. Oh well, no joy there. Off to BD Engineering on Monday.

I'm not normally one for quitting, but this has got me stumped. To quote from an old "Garfield" book - that's the cat, not the USA President of old - "It's not the veterinary medicine I dislike, it's the animals I have to work with..." The Mustang has suddenly started doing about 14mpg. I say "suddenly" because I really only started to notice it when the petrol price hit £1 a litre recently. So I did all the usual bits, plugs, leads, rotor, cap etc. etc. and even went as far as to check all the sensors, vacuum and HEGO's. Final straw was to change the MAF unit and TPS at $75 a pop. No luck. I even thought maybe I'd got the wrong plugs, so I found the 'correct' ones from the MotorCraft website and went to the local Ford Dealer instead of my usual part centre. Now, spookily enough, one of the chaps there has got the same model as mine. "Why don't you go and get it properly sorted by a chap whose got all the right test