Driving like Nigel

Folks, when I was a youngster (I still am to compared to many, you know who you are, no names - no pack drill) I used to race around the countryside like Nigel (pictured above) in a variety of cheap as chips motors...

Interestingly I am not even sure chips are that cheap anymore, these are the English chips I am talking about, many of you Johnny foreigner types will know them quite incorrectly as french fries -everybody knows the only things the french fry are snails and members of the resistance. Last time I pooped into my local chippy I came away with not much change from a fiver...shocking

I do however love chips....

So the point, my cheap as chips motors were designed for 'boy racing' around the lanes of Britain as fast as I could.. in classics such as

The Triumph Spitfire Mk IV

It was my first motor and was nicknamed (as is the fashion amongst youngsters) Alice, which actually stood for Advanced Locomotive Intensive Cruising Equipment...mega

And my personal favourite the Delorium..

Here is a pic of me at college with my car and a cheeky young lady I picked up using the 'wing doors' (I used Just for Men - junior to create the classic grey look so beloved of early nineties student chicks).

A sad fantasy my friends, the real beast was a VW Scirocco GTX...boy could she put a ford fiesta back in its box, especially going up hill..

I have sadly evolved into a Renault Grand Scenic driver, obsessed with my fuel consumption figures (cool read out on the dash) and the amazing versatility of the seating arrangements (really, as an engineer...), this is driven in part by the fruit of my loins and lack of bulge in my wallet...

I hereby declare an intent to evolve back...I will drive again....but not in a sad middle aged racer way I hope...

The Summer is here!

Today is, according to me, the first day of summer, why? Because today on my ride into work I was sporting my summer shorts rather than my freaky tight outfit...brilliant, I have knocked over 1 min 45 secs of the time it takes me to get dressed for cycling and over 2 mins 23 secs of the time it takes to get undressed when sweaty.

This makes me very happy, added to which now, until the idiot moment when the clocks all change in march or whatever.......

for those of you who don't know here in the UK our time changes twice a year from British Summertime to Greenwich Mean Time (BST -1) and back again ...the reason, to make the morning lighter in winter and the evenings darker...bloody stupid you are thinking.. who on Gods earth would want lighter mornings (the time when you shuffle off to work) and darker evenings...the time when you leave work and could conceivably do something outside if it was not so dark. I will tell you who...Scottish Farmers, that's who, I thought they had been all cleared off the farms during the highland clearances but apparently they have crept back over the years to annoy the shit out of me with whinges about milking cows in the dark and stubbing toes on gate posts...newsflash..throughout history cows are milked at dawn.

Here is a great picture of the highland clearances...what a good job they did back then, sadly, forced population migration is a little like weeding, you have to stay on top of it regularly for it to be truly effective (even the Yanks who initially had a lot of success getting rid of the Indians are getting slack..observe all those casinos and reservations popping up overnight) ....Oh and another thing, did they just forget the lowlands???

Not only that but according to these guys we could save a few lives by either not moving the clocks or even going forward to BST +1 in the winter....brilliant.

Anyway back to my sentence.. added to which due to the increasing light I can now see where I am going without the add of artificial light which really takes away the stress of this happening.

Now that's a result.

The Future of the Taliban

Many of you out there will be wondering where I have been...nowhere in particular but I have been borderline busy...at times like this, the writing on blogs can sometimes suffer..

I have been moved back to the interweb by a thought...many of you will have noticed a group called the Taliban hanging around in the news. These characters for an awful lot of reasons have been playing merry hell over in central Asia, they look a bit like this....

Please do not confuse this group with the infamous Welsh 'tellyban' group of the early nineties whose main aim was the complete banning of Cathode Ray tubes within the valleys...these dudes want a complete ban on TV as well, but they also include more topical issues in their 'to ban' list such as freedom of speech, democracy, other opinions but theirs and most worryingly of all female education and soft porn.

My eventual point is this, how will these guys evolve over time? Who exactly will we be fighting in 10, 15 a hundred years time? I think we have been given a clue by none other than George Lucas........

Spooky ain't it?

'Wait a minute, I see some donkeys but I don't see any......oh, wait a minute, there are Taliban alright.......Errrrh Errrrh Errrrrh ErrrrrrrrrH!