50+ and proud of it.

I could have entitled this " The Most Stupid Traveller " too. It was my turn to visit my mother yesterday to check she was OK. Yesterday was, of course, the end of the school year and, the worst day (to date) this year for rain. I drove to the West Midlands without any trouble - apart from zero-visibility-from rain on the M6 at some points. Prior to returning, I checked the travel news: "M40 blocked southbound, M1 blocked southbound at J10, M5 blocked everywhere, M4 blocked east bound..." etc etc etc. After about 30 minutes of sheer desperation staring at Ceefax, one of them changed: "M1 J10 easing" - that'll do Donkey, and I set off. The journey was fine apart from a) J10 M6 onslip closed for roadworks (ha ha, didn't spot that one did you Mr Garmin?). b) The first 80 miles of zero-visibility in spray. c) Possibly exceeding an average of 50mph through the Luton Roadworks (I'll have to wait and see) and, d) Fine up until J5 of the M2 which they...

My wife and I went to a place called Castello di Donnafugata which is a 16th(ish) century building near Ragusa. Very nice it is too - we reported back at base that the others should take a visit. "Oh look, it's in the TomTom's POI's, I'll program it up now for when we go tomorrow." said P. 'Tomorrow' arrived and P's wife (W) had a change of plan. "Let go with the others (us) to Cava D'Ispica instead, we'll drive." "Oh look, they're in the TomTom's POI's...." (time passes as we drive down strangely familiar roads) " Arriving at destination, on right. Bugger. Make a U turn, when possible"

Whilst sitting down in a very expensive restaurant in Ragusa Ibla, we spotted a man on the adjacent table who looked suspiciously like the chap in "The Italian Job" (original version, not a lot of people know that). You know, the one who says "...and England is that way" (pointing with his RayBan's). I turned to my colleague and said, "If you see a car coming down the road with its back window open, duck". "It'll be too late", he replied, "I'll probably get caught by the ricochet". In a completely different conversation, my other friends were talking about palindromes. "...indeed", one of them said, "A ricochet is just another palindrome". (hey ho, worked for me).

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...

I'm ashamed to admit that I gave in and took the 106 to the main dealer... "What's wrong with it?" "It's using too much fuel and the CO is way too high at 13%, and it's coking up the plugs". I then proceeded to give the woman behind the counter the long history of what I had, and had not, fiddled with. I stopped when her eyes glazed over and I started to visualise her as the old woman in Airplane . I went home on the train. 2 hours later: "Hello, it's all fixed. It was your O 2 sensor" "Erm, is that the same O 2 sensor as the one I changed for a brand new one? Oh well, so long as it's fixed. What the CO reading now?" "Oh, he's a technician, not an MOT man he wouldn't check the CO." "Do you think that might be a good idea on the grounds that that was the original problem? It'll take 2 minutes to shove the pipe thingy up the exhaust to check won't it?" 3 hours after the first 2 hours: ...

...really, really annoyed. I fixed my daughter's Pug a treat except that the stupid ECU won't learn that the throttle position sensor (TPS) has been moved - and repaired. It now is over-injecting (13% CO, 24mpg, coked up plugs, ergo, engine stops after a while and you have to remove the plugs and clean them to get it going again. It's a "Peugeot main dealer thing" to reset the ECU. There's nowhere on the net that tells me what the two pins are that I have to connect a 9v battery to reset the ram. ...still waiting for the Pug dealer to "get back to me" and no doubt going "ho ho ho, that's a bank loan for that mate." I have however found a nice 1999 model on eBay...

For some weeks now my daughter's Peugeot 106 has been randomly misfiring and/or cutting out and generally misbehaving. Therefore it makes sense to randomly replace things rather than to sit down and logically work out what's wrong. Armed with an eBay user name and a bank account I have bought "some bits" and replaced them - funnily enough - to no avail. Today I replaced the last item before throwing in the towel and taking it to a Peugeot dealer. I replaced the ECU temperature sender with a new one from the local parts shop. Plugged it in, plugged it out - no difference. Let's have a think. Tick over fine, open throttle and it works, move throttle a bit more and it stops, open throttle some more and it works. Close throttle and it stops... I eventually decided that this reminded me of the "old days" when the volume control on a radio needed cleaning when the sound, rather than increasing slowly as you turned up the volume, crackled and leaped from ...

Armed only with a Tesco's carrier bag + two wishbones I toddled off this morning to the very same MOT garage that spotted the movement in the ball joints in the first place. My logic being that if they'd caused me all the trouble over the weekend in the first place then why shouldn't they share in it as well? "Morning', you very kindly volunteered to press in the ball joints for me. I'm off to work now, thanks." "We're a bit busy right now, but the press is over there, I trust you to use it. Have a nice day". Hmm, not part of the plan, but to be fair, as this particular press requires two people to operate it and hold the job in it, the MOT man did help me. The first one went in without much trouble - apart from two small things:- 1) We put the joint in upside down and 2) I swung the press arm around and caught him smack in the forehead causing a lump as normally seen in cartoons. We removed it and put it in the correct way. This one took abo...

The wife trotted off to Manchester this weekend to see some college friends whom she hadn't met for about 8 years, and, by a remarkable coincidence, the bits I'd ordered from 50resto turned up. So, armed with a hugely inflated confidence and a nice warm morning, I decide to replace the lower ball joints... It all started with the nice MOT man spotting that there was some up-and-down play in the front lower ball joints (last September). "I can't fail it 'cos the guidelines say I can't, but I'd like to..." What can be hard about taking off the wheel and undoing 3 nuts? Nothing, except that the disk brake back plate very neatly gets in the way of the lower arm - so you have to remove the disk and brake caliper. Now the trouble with a 1½ tonne 1990 Ford Mustang is that they're over-engineered - and those three nuts are actually torqued up to 100 ft/lb. Which is fine, but you have to balance said 1½ tonnes two feet in the air on axle stands to be able ...

I found out loads more stuff about Rome this time - including that best kept secret - the metro . Buy a ticket for next to nothing and ride for the duration of your stay! However, it shuts at 10:00pm - but the taxis take over then where I also found out that lane discipline is for wimps and the reason why every single vehicle over 2 days old have no straight panels...

One of the nice things about Rome is that you can always disappear down a small alleyway and generally find a decent bar - and avoid paying the tourist rip-off prices found around The Trevi Fountain and so on. This was the case on our last night. We walked due west from Piazza Navona and were discussing the aforementioned fact. "I bet there's even one up there", my friend remarked, pointing up a very dark street. Indeed, silhouetted against the only street lamp, there was a man moving a table. We walked up and sat down at the only table for four left. A nice German couple (from Dresden) sat down next to us a few minutes later in the only two seats left in the restaurant. It seemed only a few minutes after that there were people queuing to get a seat. "We did some extensive research on the Internet and found that this restaurant is the best this side of town", the German chap explained, "we took ages to find Da Francesco in Piazza Del Fico, it's not on...

We visited Rome for the third time last week with some friends (who have never been before) and, like most people, went into the crypt of St Peter's Basilica to view the tombs of the (late) Popes. A one-way system operates and we were surprised to find three people coming out the in - two people supporting a clearly disabled elderly gentleman who was having extreme difficulty walking. They were moving very slowly and as they reached the small doorway we held back to allow them to exit. A woman behind us (nationality withheld to prevent a war) harrumphed, overtook us and nearly knocked the trio over as they exited the corridor. "What the f'h was that all about?" My friend looked at middle of the departing trio. "I think they're trying to smuggle one of them out."

Having spent the last 24 hours with a daughter in a state of frenzy, which included her running around with hands pressed against her ears going "no more, no more, I don't want to hear anymore driving advice!", I was heartily relieved to get a text at 11:01 this morning that simply said: "i passed" She got 6 "minors" (whatever they are. In my day, as long as you got from the test centre via points A and B and back again without killing anyone, you passed). I got her a secondhand SatNav as she has no sense of direction - and I have "fully trained her" in it's use:- "Turn left" "Nooo! Not here!"

Yet again another example of so-called "Sat Nav Error" surfaced over the weekend. A lady drove her "£90,000" Mercedes into the river because her Sat-Nav told her to. She ignored the sign that said "Not suitable for motors" and the one that presumably said "Stop, river ahead", and the obvious clue that the road had changed from gravely-colour to ripply-water-colour and kept going, "No the Sat Nav fitted to a Merc can't possibly be wrong, the river is obviously in the wrong place". "In, 300 feet, turn, left, and drown"

Now I'm not normally one for getting scared about such things, but an odd thing happened today at work. We've recently moved offices from our satellite office in "town" to our main office "out of town" (which, incidentally is much better for me as I live on "that" side of town). We're all still in a complete state of disarray 1 and so we stopped on after finish time to tidy up a bit more. One of the Support guys came down from upstairs and asked who had been in the Comms Room. "Dunno, Why?" "Several of the telephone patch leads have been removed again and tucked under the racking." "Again?" "Yes, it's happened about three times already to my knowledge." Long conversation about scary stuff ensued and we decided that someone obviously was taking the key and getting up to mischief. I mentioned this to the night receptionist on my way out. "Ah. Let me tell you a story about the guy in the blue jacke...

So there we have it. 3 months of an hour here and an hour there. Someone mentioned planning permission, and "was there a slope on it to let the rain run off?" Um, the answer to both is "No". However the really important questio n is "Are the glasses underneath?" - we'll never know.

Well, after a fairly traumatic week (we said fairwell to Ellen) I managed to get on with the decking. My neighbour popped round to help. Help which was gratefully received as I was in the middle of trying to balance a 4.8m deck board on a workmate whilst trying to cut the 45 degree angle with one hand and hold the other end which was by now flapping in the breeze... We got on a pace and eventually ran out of wood. (Yeah, I know, I had enough short bits that all added up to the required length, but none long enough). We retired for a beer. His wife strolled up to see how we were getting on. "Hello dear, where are your glasses?" I was suddenly reminded of the "Carpet Fitter And Budgie" joke.

Sadly, our friend and neighbour Ellen lost her fight with cancer this morning at 3:00am. Our thoughts are with her two children and husband.