50+ and proud of it.

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....

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...