50+ and proud of it.

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....

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...

This was going to be entitled "Woman Drivers". Now, it's not that I consider women to be bad drivers - in my opinion, the bad ones are just as bad as men, and vice versa. No, it's just that having spent a nice Christmas at my mother's (and not managing to throttle her) we returned home to find that my daughter had managed to roll her lovely 106 up a bank near the local junior school. "Well, it was icy" she explained, " and there was mud on the road!". "Umm, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you knew that, why didn't you slow down or something?" "Humph, that's not fair!". Fair, but accurate, I feel. Why the title? Well, we have a third offspring who has yet to start driving. Numbers One and Two children have now managed to roll a car each. Watch this space in 2 years. It may then be called "The Three Stooges" or the like... A thought just occurred to me. The same driving instructor taught them to drive. ...

Y'know, call me cynical if you will but I've just been reading an article in the Daily Mail about the sad case of Madeleine McCann. If I had lost my daughter, I too, would be doing everything in my power to find her again. Maybe I wouldn't have gone down the pub, and eaten in instead, but that's as maybe. The article (in brief) is that the Barcelona detective agency say "they'll find her by Christmas". "We know where she is". "We know who's got her". etc etc. I have a real problem with this. "Hello Mr Bad guys, we know where you are. Would you like to stay there while we fetch the Police?" Hmm, no. I really can't help thinking that this is an elaborate form of the 429 scam. They have a six month contract to find her:- 'Repeating his earlier promise to find Madeleine before March, he said: "We have a six-month contract. We have always said we want to fulfill it by finding her."' "We only need a le...

After 25 years of not going to watch the RAC Rally (as it was then), I got an invite from WW & Hubby to go down and see them - and as a bonus WW got some tickets for the final leg of the WRC, SS13 in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff. "Look," she said "it'll be sitting down in the warm and under cover, not standing around for hours in a cold & damp forest!". Well, at least one of those was correct... WW managed to wangle some parking under the stadium itself. We had to go into "Gate 4, car park W", which happened to be the start of SS13 itself. Having driven through something marked "Timing, Stage Start", we parked next to a car marked "FIA Steward" and proceeded to wander off looking for a way up. A nice man stopped us. "Err, who are you? Where are you going? Are you staff?". WW looked at him blankly "You mean we shouldn't be here? I thought the place looked empty!". "Look," he said "...

It's like this - "Control Panel / Add/Remove programs" shows small icons down the left and bugger all anywhere else. In other words, you've got no hope in Hell to add/remove/update anything. Would you like to know how to fix it? Yup? You re-install Internet Explorer. Go figure. Also, I've just watched England lose in style to Croatia 2-3. Hey ho. I'm one of the people on the "Lost 25m Child Benefit Records" and, to put the icing on the damn cake, my exactly-one-year-and-three-day-old-your-guarantee-has-just-run-out O 2 sensors on the Mustang are returning EEC IV codes 41 & 91. Go Google 'em, sorry, I can't be bothered to explain... More wine? Yes please.

I finally got the last bit of trim back into the interior of the Mustang over the weekend. I have to confess to waiting until "David" the air-conditioning chap had returned to re-fit and re-fill the system just in case the evaporator had done something unpleasant (like split). I'm not (that) stupid - I know that if you're my age and take out screws and don't put them back within 3 seconds, you're going to forget where they went. So leaving them out for 3 weeks would leave me no chance. Ergo, I religiously put each screw back into the hole it came from as I removed them. However, having replaced everything and now had a completely vacuumed out and cleaned interior I was left with four small screws in the magnetic bowl. I know where one goes, so that's OK. The others? No idea. Nothing is loose and nothing rattles at all. This is my point - at my age The Screw Fairy is someone who leaves 2mm Japanned self-tappers around when you’re not looking, and not someon...

I read with interest this week some internet articles entitled "How to change a Fox Mustang heater" and "How not to change a Fox Mustang heater". All of them were variously sub-titled "I'd rather have root canal surgery" and "How to spend a week in the cold" and so on. There's a chap somewhere in the USA who reckons you can change the matrix without removing the a/c evaporator - and this is the same chap who freely admits he's done the job six times. One wonders if he's got the message yet? Well, to you sir, "No, you sodding well can't" . If you've got hands the size of a garden gnome and an 8mm socket made out of tin foil and a pipe-cleaner, then perhaps, maybe. Look, just cough up the money and get the aircon evacuated! This is a marvelous opportunity to vacuum out all the otherwise inaccessible places and wash all the plastic bits that come off. I also found the door chime - now, I didn't expect that . I ...

Whilst driving the Mustang to town on Saturday I noticed a strangely familiar odour, not noticed since the passing of the Morris Minor. "What's that smell?" asked my wife. "Um, that's anti-freeze". Yup, most of the coolant was pouring from a small hole in the bulkhead. It looks like Mr Ford thought about this - and duly designed a drain hole for coolant leaking from the heater core to exit into the engine bay rather than onto the carpets. Now, personally, I would have preferred them to have a) Designed a stronger heater core and b) Made it easier to get to. Let me explain how Ford build Fox Mustangs. They sweep out a big room and place a V8 engine in the middle and place a heater matrix beside it. Then they build the rest of the car around them both...

My son is moving into the (new) flat with his mate on Saturday. It appears to be definite now, as they were waiting for confirmation and it turned up in spite of the Postal Strike. Basically his mate's Mum (June, not her real name for reasons which will become clear) is moving to "a large town far away". June said to her son that he could come with her or stay where he is now. The son says that all his mates were here, so he started to look for a flat. My son had secretly been thinking about moving out for a while and this was an opportunity to split the rent. Now, my daughter has already packed and has moved her things to the landing outside his old room. Also, we ordered a new wardrobe and cupboard for her via home delivery from Argos - which of course we don't want now... Have you ever tried to cancel a Home Delivery? Once you pressed a zillion buttons a get through to a "real person" it's quite easy really! June is moving away to start a ne...

We were more than a little surprised on Saturday to receive a phone call from my eldest son. Not surprised in that he gave us a ring (he's always doing that), but in its content. We were spending the inheritance at the local pub and were halfway through a sandwich when the call came in: "Hello Mum, do you think it would be alright if I left home?" My wife kept calm and asked normal things that mothers do - "Err, have you thought about it a lot?", "Have you worked out how much it's going to cost a month?" and the like. "Well", he asked "Is it alright?" "Alright? Alright?!", I exclaimed, "I'll help you pack."

Today marks a step forwards into the murky world of the retired. Yes, I've joined a Whist Drive at my church. I haven't played whist for years, so I thought I'd brush up on the rules and printed them from Wikipedia. Rules include: ". ..against the rules to in any way comment on the cards... " and " One may not signal his partner. ". Now that brings up an interesting point. Imagine the scene - a hushed Church Hall full of pairs intently studying their opposites for the slightest give-away, the steady ticking of the wall clock, the click of the cards being played on the wooden tables and the gentle sharp intake of breath as one pair wins a difficult finesse. And, because you can't signal your partner - "JIM, IT'S YOUR BLOODY GO YOU DEAF BUGGER" Does this mean I've got to the top of the hill and now I'm over it?

Last week, we were taking a late break in Mallorca (Majorca) and on the Monday (17th September), my wife received a phone call to inform us that one of our circle of good friends had just been killed in a motorcycle accident. He leaves a wife and three children. We all will miss him.