I can sing a rainbow.....

I had to take the car I almost never drive to the garage to be serviced today.  On the one hand, this was a bit of a bind because it meant I wouldn't be cycling and would be a little bit later for work than usual (and it seems I'm a creature of habit about that sort of thing).  On the other hand, it was absolutely throwing it down with rain at a time when I would normally be cycling to work, and when I got out of the car to walk to the office, the sun had come out and there was a beautiful rainbow.

So pretty, I took a photo.

The colours were so distinct, that I found it impossible not to think of the mnemonic that helps you remember the order of the colours of the spectrum..... except that I don't use the normal one, and two different ones are embedded in my head.

I was about eight years old and we were just learning about the spectrum of colours in science. Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain.  Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.  You know the drill.  Our science teacher then challenged us to come up with our own mnemonics.

I came up with this:

Rain Over Yugoslavia Gives Boffins Invaluable Vestige.

I was really very pleased with it.  And yes, even at eight years old, certain parts of my personality appear well established.

Sadly, it didn't win the competition as my best friend came up with this:

Really? Oh You Great Big Idiot, Vivian.

Dammit.  An important early lesson that simple is better.

A lesson I ignored, obviously.

Anyway.  So that's what I think of when I see a rainbow.  That and the gold at end, of course.  In this case, I reckon it was somewhere in Beeston.  Unlikely, but it could happen.

you'd better smile....

Here's a question of etiquette for you: you're in the car park at work, you're about to leave for home and you find that you get back to your car at exactly the same time as the person in the car right next door to you.  He's fiddling about in the boot, and you open the door of your car.  Your car isn't parked too close to his, but you know how sometimes the door slips open a little wider than you were expecting and it gently dings the side of the car next door?  His car.  Yeah... that.  And he's standing right there.  It's only a gentle ding and there's no harm done, but still....  You quickly pull the door back and look up anxiously.  The guy has clearly heard something and is looking over, you're not sure he quite knows what he heard, but he's looking in your general direction.

What should you do?

I ask, because this happened to me in the car park at work this evening, only I was the guy fiddling around in the boot.  What this guy did was he gave me a slightly sheepish smile.  But what am I supposed to do?  Go ape-shit?  I smiled back, almost reflexively.  We've all done it, after all.  It's just his bad luck that I happened to be standing right there when he did it to my car.  So I smiled at him, silently absolving him and letting him know that it could have happened to anyone.  Marvel at how phlegmatic I am being!  This car is 4 months old!  I am so calm.  I am a zen warrior.

Then I stood there, waited for him to leave - going so far as to pretend to be opening the driver's door to get in - and as soon as he left, I nipped round the other side of my car to have a closer look.  There was nothing to see.  It was just a gentle little ding.  It happens all the time.

On reflection, I'm not sure a sheepish smile was enough penance.  I know I blew it by smiling back, but come on!  Dude!  I was standing RIGHT THERE. 

But what do you do?  What would you do? 

take the world in a love embrace....

On her way into work on Friday morning, C. catapulted over her handlebars somewhere near the park and ride and suffered a mild case of concussion. With hindsight, perhaps I could have chosen a better day to bring up my plan to start learning how to ride a motorbike. We sold both of our cars before we started travelling at the beginning of 2010, and when we got back it just seemed ridiculous to have two cars at all: we live in the same house and most of the time we work in the same building. We’d always previously used the excuse that we tend to keep slightly different working hours, but frankly that was feeble. Besides, whilst we were away, one of our best friends and near neighbours started working in the same building too, and lift-sharing suddenly seemed viable. We bought one car, and for the last 9 months, this arrangement has worked pretty well. There have been a few occasions where the lack of another car has been mildly inconvenient but nothing more than that. It’s been fine.

So why the sudden desire to learn to ride a motorbike? Well, it was actually C’s idea in the first place: right from the start, she thought that getting a scooter or something would be a great way of having a simple, cost-effective alternative mode of transportation. My dad will be having kittens at the very thought of it. He spent 20-odd years as the on-call medic for a large section of Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire, including a large stretch of the M1. Even in retirement, he never travels anywhere without all of his medical kit – including a defibrillator – in the back of his car (could you imagine having the skill to do something but not the equipment to do it? That’s a pretty heavy responsibility….). In that time, my dad has seen more than enough to know that, as a motorcyclist, no matter how good a rider you are, you are unbelievably vulnerable.

I can understand his reluctance to see any of his sons on a bike: how many dead motorcyclists would you need to see to be against the idea? Still, the idea of having a little run-around has been growing on me for a little while. You know, just something to pop around town in. It’s not like I’d ever be using it to cruise down the motorway. As well as being practical, I thought perhaps it might be fun too.

When I mentioned it to C. on Friday, mild concussion notwithstanding, she thought it was a great idea. Of course, it turns out that she’s been thinking about a little moped. As it happens, I think I’d look absolutely ridiculous on a scooter, so I was thinking more in terms of a small, geared (but low powered) motorbike. To be fair, as I’ve only ever ridden a scooter once or twice on holiday, and I’ve never ridden a geared bike at all, I don’t really know what I want, but I’m curious enough to try to find out.

So, I did a bit of research to find out what was required, and was pleasantly surprised to find the “Get On” website. As well as having loads of useful information about the qualifications you need to ride a bike on the roads and the kit you will need, it also offers a one hour “trial” ride, absolutely gratis. You get to learn about the bikes and you get to spend a bit of time being coached in how they work and having a go to see how you get on. Sounds like a brilliant idea, and about an hour after submitting an enquiry on the site, we were all booked in to have a go just around the corner from us at the beginning of June. If it all goes to plan and seems like fun, then we can simply take the next steps towards qualification and onwards towards a massive, mid-life crisis Harley-Davidson from there.

My dad will seriously kill me though. He really is. If I haven’t been able to tell him about my tattoos yet (and I’ve had one of them for 8 years), how on earth am I going to bring this up?  I could always blame C., I suppose....

road rage....

After the six inches of snow that fell on Friday and Saturday, my journey home from Oxford took me about twice as long as usual.... and that doesn't include digging the car out of the driveway.  The M40 was clearly in better condition for driving than it had been 24 hours earlier, but it was still somewhat polar, with the snow reducing traffic sometimes to a single lane and with abandoned cars littering the hard shoulder.

As the weather down there has continued to worsen, it looks like if I hadn't seized that opportunity to drive home on Sunday morning, I'd still be down there now, selling fine fragrance in our Oxford shop.... not that this would have been an entirely bad thing, it was a fun few days I spend doing exactly that last week, and I'd get to spend some more time with the excellent friends who live down there too.

Yes, it was an interesting journey..... but even that three-and-a-half hour slog through the snow was not a bit as stressful as the five minute journey I have just made from my front door to my osteopath.

My appointment was at six, so I escaped from work in time to nip home and change into a pair of jeans.  All I had to do was leave myself five minutes or so to wind my way through the back streets of the suburb where we live to my Osteopath's office.  I've made this journey at this time of day literally a hundred times and it's never been a problem.  Perhaps it was a combination of the time of year and the time of day; perhaps it was lunar eclipse; maybe the winter solstice.  Whatever it was, every driver on the road seemed to be behaving like an absolute arsehole.

Like most suburban towns, ours is made up of a load of residential streets that crisscross between the major roads.  Also like most suburban towns, drivers impatient to get home and reluctant to sit in queues of traffic at the lights will seek every opportunity to gain a few seconds by weaving their way through the residential streets.  Rat-runners are easy to spot: they're the ones driving through an otherwise quiet residential street far faster than anyone else.  Well, once you've made the decision to short-cut, something in your brain tells you that you have to push harder to make that short-cut worthwhile; you have to get ahead of those suckers queuing at the lights.

When I pulled out of the Grove this evening, I was confronted by two cars facing off against each other on our street, rat-running in opposite directions.  Neither wanted to give way.  I was sat out of their way, but didn't have the time to get caught up in their games.  I backed down the Grove to leave them room, and after staring at each other for a full thirty seconds, one of them blinked, pulled out of the way, and allowed the alpha rat-runner to speed of down the road.  After both had moved on, I set off for my appointment.  I crossed the main road and headed towards my osteopath's office - not rat-running, but taking the most direct route from my street to the residential street where the clinic is based.  At one point, where the road was lined on both sides by parked cars, I gave way to a car coming in the other direction.... like you do.  He didn't thank me.... and you aren't obliged to, I suppose.  But then another car pushed down too, followed by another ten.  None thanked me, all elbowed their way past me on their way from one main road to another, determined to make time by cutting out the traffic lights.  Some had to make a real effort to make sure I didn't have time to pull out before they got there.  When I finally got away, a few streets later, the same thing happened again.  Gah!

The whole journey only took five minutes, but by the time I reached my destination, I was furious at the basic lack of manners: I'm more important than you, so you can damn well wait.

Well, fuck you too.

Season of goodwill, my arse.

[/middle-aged rant]

quench my thirst with gasoline...

Having looked at the queues on the forecourts of pretty much every petril petrol station I drove past on Thursday evening, I cast a slightly anxious look at my own quarter-full tank and decided to fill up on Friday morning. Like tens of thousands of other British drivers, I brought forward my decision to refuel by a couple of days as a result of a fear of shortages. Just like all those other drivers, my decision only helped to contribute to the shortage and to fuel the growing panic, as did the media coverage of the queues. As it happens, my local petrol station didn't have a queue when I pulled up the next morning, and I was able to fill up without any problems (even if my 20 litres cost me well over £20), but you never know, do you? The official message is that there is no reason to panic and that there is plenty of fuel - the very fact that there is an official message at all is driving people to the pumps.

The reason for all of this? A strike at the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland. Grangemouth is not only the gateway to the North Sea oil fields (via the Forties pipeline, which carries about 1/3 of the UK's daily oil output), but it is also a deep water port that receives crude oil from around the world for processing. Is the strike catastrophic? Not really, it only really supplies Scotland anyway, and besides, oil arrives in the UK elsewhere too, and there are also apparently about 70 days worth of fuel stockpiled across the country.

And yet here we are, with queues at petrol stations.

I was going to go on at some length about this; about how this shows what sheep we all are; how - for all that hot air about carbon footprints - we're still terrifyingly dependent on fossil fuels; about how, like the floods last year, this reminds me how just how close our wonderful society is to the stone ages... about 70 days for fuel, but far less than that for things like bread and milk. If we get like this over a slight flutter over fuel, can you imagine the panic if supermarket shelves started emptying and not just their forecourts?

I was going to talk about all these things, but then I learned what the strike is about: apparently these workers are out on strike over proposed changes to their pension scheme. It seems that everyone working up there is currently on a final salary pension scheme. Not only that, but at the moment they don't pay a penny for it as all of their contributions are paid by their employer. Pensions have been much in the news over the last few years, and there have been several high profile schemes collapsing. Final salary pensions are rare enough, but a scheme that you don't even have to pay anything into yourself? Well..... rare as rocking horse shit, I would think. Not surprisingly, given the current financial climate, their employer is worried that the scheme is not sustainable in the long term and wants make some changes - to close the final salary scheme to new members and to begin to phase in some employee contributions. I've been through consultations like this that affected my pension, and clearly no one is going to voluntarily give up a scheme as good as that (indeed, 97% of Grangemouth's employees voted to go out on strike against the proposals, so they're not giving it up without a fight). But really, how realistic are they being? Isn't it in everybody's best interests that a pension scheme is properly funded? Surely a scheme as good as that is no bloody use to anyone if it implodes before you get to benefit from it?

And meanwhile we're queuing on garage forecourts. What planet are these people from?

....And don't even get me started on teachers striking for a 5% pay increase (linked to the retail price index)..... Times are hard and most people in the private sector will be lucky to get any kind of a payrise at all this year. And many of them work all year round....

---

Speaking of cars, I was reminded of quite how little control we sometimes have over own destiny on the roads when I was driving down the A46 to Leicester on Saturday afternoon. I was travelling at a reasonable lick, and pulled out into the outside lane to allow something big and slow-moving to join the road from the slip-lane. At about the same moment as I did that, the car behind this slow-moving vehicle decided that this was the ideal time to shoot out across both lanes to try and overtake. The driver either did not see me or had seriously underestimated my speed. Either way, the result of her manouevre was that she pulled out right in front of me, forcing me to slam on the brakes and fight for control of my car as my momentum and my natural desire not to hit the back end of her car forced me towards the central reservation.

I ground to a halt with a screech of brakes and a touch of tyre smoke but thankfully without hitting anything. I let out a huge sigh of relief that all of the BMW technology in my little car had prevented my brakes locking out too badly and had almost certainly prevented a collision. After a moment's contemplation, I sounded the horn, but to be honest I wasn't so much angry with this idiot as relieved that I was still alive. After that escape, even the souped up Nova full of silly boys on the M69 barely even registered.

Sometimes you realise just how slender the thread that holds us here is.

baby you can drive my car...

An unlooked for sting in the tail of any New Year is the reminder that my car insurance is due at the end of the first week of January. It's been like this for the last ten years, so I probably ought to be used to it by now, but somehow it always seems to come as a surprise. If there's a worse time of the year to get this bill, I'm not really sure what it is. Still, it is what it is.

My reminder was waiting for me when we got back from France in the last week of December. After a bit of procrastination, I had a quiet moment at work this week and finally managed to get myself motivated enough to have a quick look around and to make sure that my quote was still competitive - a tiresome but necessary task, but does anyone really get excited by trying to compare the excesses on different policies and working out if a courtesy car and breakdown cover are included or not? really? I doubt it (clue: if the policy is cheap...then almost certainly nothing like that is included).

Anyway. Even though I have something daft like ten years "No Claims" discount, the quote I had was competitive. Extortionate..... but as good as anything I was going to get, so I decided to just get it done and forget about it for another year. I picked up the phone to do the deal, and realised that one significant factor has changed since I last renewed my car insurance: the name of my second driver has changed, as has my relationship to her. Well, I like to think it hasn't changed at all since my marriage, but apparently they see these things differently in insurance land, so I thought I'd better get it changed. I mentioned this to the nice Indian man who was handling my call, and he was very quickly able to do the necessary.

And you know what?

Being married reduced my quote by something like £35. After nine years with the same person listed on my insurance as my second driver and without a single claim to my name, I've no idea why this small change makes any particular difference now. Still, I'm not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, am I? Thirty-five quid is thirty-five quid, right?

I'm not saying that a slight reduction in your car insurance premium is a good reason for getting married, but it's certainly worth bearing in mind, innit.

every move you make...

I took my car back into the dealers this morning for a couple of little things to be sorted out**. As part of the process of checking it into the service department, they popped my key into some kind of reader attached to a computer. A printout duly came out showing how many miles I had done, how much petrol was in my tank, how much engine coolant there was, how long before each of the major components (brakes, engine, gearbox, etc.) would need servicing.
The service guy saw me looking at the printout:

“It won’t be long before it can tell us how fast you’ve been driving”
I wasn’t fooled.
“I bet it tells you that already”

He smiled at me.

The sat nav already tells people where I am and where I’ve been. Is there anything else anyone needs to know about my movements? What I’ve been listening to on the stereo? The colour of my underpants?

Yes? Well, why not? They already know pretty much everything else.

....The new Maximo Park album and dark grey.

So now you know.

** some broken pixels on the sat nav screen, some ropey paintwork on the edge of the petrol cover, a small patch of warped bodywork on the side of the bonnet and a cracked key. Nothing major.

beep beep! beep beep! yeah!

Amidst all the entirely understandable excitement of my first day back in the office for more than three weeks, I had to drag myself away early at a little after 4pm.

The reason?

I picked up my new car.



So far I have driven him the grand total of about 6 miles and have already given my stupid brain plenty of trivial things to worry about.

Even so, I think it's pretty cool....



I had no plans to assign this car a name - it's just a car, right? Why would a car need a name? But somehow my car has already acquired a name. When the dealer rang me up to offer me a choice of three different number plates, I chose the first one he mentioned because I didn't much care. I got home that night and C. asked me what plate I had chosen. Her instant response when I told her? She turned around with a big smile on her face.
"Vynnie? Vynnie the MINI!"

The reason for her excitement? The number plate I had chosen ends with the three letters "VYN". Something I hadn't given a moment's thought to until that second. They were just letters. In that instant those three letters became a name.

So now I drive a car called Vynnie the MINI.

What can you do?

Right. Enough procrastinating! Write that damn holiday post man.

cos tony's got a new motor, SR Nova driving like a joyrider....

---
My new car has arrived! My new car has arrived! My new car has arrived!

Well, to be a little more exact, my new car has been delivered to the dealer. Not surprisingly, the dealer was quite keen for me to come in and pick it up. I could take it away this week and have a "56" registration plate, or I could wait until the 1st March and have a "07" plate on the day that they are first released*. Apparently, some people get excited about their registration plate and always make sure that they get their car on the very day that the plates change over.

Me? I couldn't give a monkeys.

"Ah, but you could pick your new car up before you go on holiday!" He's quite the eager beaver, my dealer.

Er, yes, I could pick up my new car, drive it home, and then leave it parked on the street outside my house for three weeks whilst I go away on holiday. Hmmm. Tempting, but no thanks.

I did still have to go down to the dealership to sign some paperwork and to make arrangements for the pickup. Part of me was hoping that they would offer me the chance to see my new car.

They didn't.

* I can't be bothered to explain this, so for an explanation of British car number plates, try here

here in my car I feel safest of all....

I put my car in for its MOT this morning. Given that I will be part exchanging at the end of March when I pick up my new car, I was naturally quite keen to avoid any unnecessary expenditure. The guy I rang a few weeks ago to make the appointment seemed mildly surprised that I was only wanting to book in for an MOT and not an MOT plus an annual service, but why would I want to pay £200 instead of £50?

I dropped my car off at 8am and drove to work in the little Ka they lent me. The garage then rang me a little after 10am.

“You car has failed its MOT on one tyre and another tyre is borderline. We can replace the tyres for you no problem. What do you want us to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what kind of tyres do you want?”
“I’m part exchanging my car at the end of the month so I want the cheapest tyres you’ve got”
“Oh, right. Well the cheapest we have is £55. Do you want us to change both tyres?”
“Do I need to change both tyres to pass the MOT?”
“No. Only one was a definite fail. The other was borderline. It’s down to 3mm and the tracking is off. I couldn’t say how long it will last.”

I thought about this for a moment. For some reason, my instinct was to change. But what would be the point? Looking at last year’s MOT certificate, I could see that I have done the grand total of 3000 miles in the last 12 months – bugger all. Every time we travel any distance, we use C’s company car. I’m picking up my new car in four week’s time – and for three of those weeks I am going to be in Ecuador. I made up my mind.

”No. Just change the one tyre.”
The guy at the garage changed tack and revealed his hand: “If you buy both tyres, I can knock a fiver off them both”.
Right, so that means instead of paying £55 for the tyre I needed, I could pay £100. It suddenly became crystal clear to me exactly why garages are opposed to the Government’s proposal to make MOTs mandatory every two years (currently, all cars over three years old need to have the test every year).
“No thanks. Just change the tyre I need to pass the test.”
“OK”. He sounded slightly crestfallen.
“Is there anything else that needed doing?”
“No, that was it as far as I know.” He now sounded a bit grumpy.
“Excellent. See you later then.”

I hung up. £55 for a tyre. £50 for the MOT test. I suppose it could have been worse. I made a mental note to borrow C's car for my trip down to Feltham tomorrow.

Roll on the new car.