Swimming, dog-washing and OMM

Sam and Lucy have been home this weekend. It was a sort of celebration weekend because it’s Lucy’s birthday this week - the Big Three-O - and she also completed her PhD last week.

They came up on Friday night, much to Gravel and Holly’s delight, just as Margaret was going to bed, but their arrival woke her up and it was about 11.30pm when we finally went up (that’s late for us).

Sam is swimming regularly to help him to keep fit and he and Lucy went across to the pool at manor Leisure Centre in Whittlesey the last time they were up for a weekend. This time, I had said I would go too, but it was just Sam and I in the end because Lucy was full of cold. I haven’t been swimming for about 15 years and it felt quite hard work at first. I was too tense and my strokes were not co-ordinated, so that when I got to the end of a length I was feeling quite puffed.

We’d gone to the adult swim session which starts at 9am on Saturday and it wasn’t too busy, so I was able to get my head in gear without anyone getting in my way (or vice-versa). I had to make myself relax, control my breathing and get my head under and glide through the strokes. It soon came back and I was then able to knock off the lengths slowly but surely. I did around 20 lengths, perhaps a couple more, in just over half an hour (including a wee break).

My shoulders certainly felt as if I’d done a workout, but I wasn’t stiff next day. I’d like to try to go regularly, perhaps weekly and get up to 30 or 40 lengths. I’ll see what can be done. I’d also like to try to get in a bike ride at the weekend - Tom and I are planning to go to the TT races again next June and to take cycles onto the ferry so we can get around the island a bit more. It was good last year, but we could only go so far on foot. The trouble with the Isle of Man is that it is quite hilly, so I’ll need to get some toned leg muscles or I’ll never get out of bottom gear. It would also be good to give my bike some regular runs, so I can discover any problems with the old thing before I get there. It’s a Raleigh touring bike, but is about 35 years old. I’ve fitted straight handlebars and a new seat, and it’s had new inner tubes over the years, but apart from that everything is original. Last time I used it, I couldn’t keep it in bottom gear (it might need the gear selector arm adjusting). I’ll definitely need bottom gear on some of those Isle of Man hills!

After swimming, Margaret and I went back to Whittlesey to do the shopping. The past week has been warm, but foggy. We were promised an Indian summer, but what we got was 12 deg C, no wind and four days of fog. On Friday night it rained and then froze and there was a brisk northerly wind (NNW to be precise) which blew away all the fog, but chilled us as well. I had to scrape the windscreen of the car for the first time this winter, although the temperature on my garden thermometer showed a low of 2 deg C and the tender plants such as dahlias and begonias had managed to survive.

It was quite chilly walking round and the town was really busy. It’s flu jab time at the health centre and all the pensioners have been coming to get their jabs on Saturday mornings. The woman in the pet shop asked us if we’d had our jabs yet, which is a bit or a worry because you have to be 65 to get them. Once the health centre car park was full they all came across the road to the shoppers’ car park, so we only just managed to get a place. We’ve been sharing our meat shopping between Jones’ and Freeman & Daughters and this week, it was the turn of Jones. The new people who took it over have done a good job and, although we prefer Freemans’ chickens, I think the beef and sausage is nicer from Jones. In the afternoon Sam and I took the dogs for a walk across the fen. There was no wildlife to be seen, just a few pigeons. Several fields are given over to oilseed rape and that’s coming through quite strongly. I guess Michael Sly has a problem with pigeons because he has a scarecrow in one field and a hawk kite in the other. Neither seems to work as well as a Springer Spaniel and G&H managed a pretty clean sweep of pigeons - we should rent them by the hour.

Other fields have been planted up with winter wheat or barley and that’s also showing much more green than it was a week ago. One of the larger fields has been harrowed and sown in the past week and when Holly ran across it she kicked up so much dirt that her underside was covered. There was no escaping a wash! Sam washed and dried while I held and offered advice. The dogs are very good and will just stand there while they are soaped and rinsed. They do enjoy a rub down with a towel and when they were back in the kitchen, I spent some time brushing them in turn, which they enjoyed greatly. I think they get really itchy as their fur dries and if you let them dry outside, they end up rubbing themselves on a tree trunk and getting covered in algae or rolling about in the borders crushing plants and getting dirty all over again.

Margaret was doing the cooking this weekend, which was nice, and we had my sister round for dinner so she could see Sam and Lucy too. Margaret had made a very impressive pavlova in the morning and dinner was smoked mackerel pate to start, followed by torn roast chicken on roasted vegetables with new potatoes, followed by pavlova with a last hurrah of English raspberries and strawberries. It was jolly nice and washed down with Gifford’s Hall Bacchus from Suffolk and a bottle of champagne.

The clocks went back on Saturday night, so we had an hour later in bed, although Holly and Gravel don’t recognise BST and GMT; they tend to be diurnal or, more likely wake up whenever they hear a noise. I made use of the extra hour to catch the MotoGP races from Phillip Island in Australia. Jorge Lorenzo won the world championship and the race was won by Casey Stoner, the young Australian rider who is retiring this year. Stoner is an exceptional rider, but has never been popular in England despite coming over here to start his career. He’s a typical dour Aussie in the Mick Doohan mould and also committed the heinous crime of beating Valentino Rossi. He won world championships on the Ducati and on a Honda and has been the only man able to ride the Ducati. Tom and I watched him in the rain at Donington Park a few years ago and he was miles quicker than everyone else. They were all wobbling around and falling off, while Stoner had a massive lead but was still going at race pace, sliding the bike and controlling the power out of the bends. It’s one of the best rides I’ve ever seen, absolutely amazing control, but it wasn’t a popular victory. I think he might even have been boo’d on the podium. Well he finished his motorcycle career (at the age of 27) with a comfortable victory. Lorenzo in second, needed only one point to secure the title and wasn’t going to risk a crash by battling with Stoner. MotoGP has been exceptionally dull this year, with a light grid and most races turning into a procession. To try to get more bikes on the grid, they have allowed in cheaper machines powered by production engines and that’s just made it worse, with 10 prototype machines (only four of which are capable of winning) and about the same number of slower bikes, which will only get into the top 10 if the faster bikes crash. World Superbikes, on the other hand, has been brilliant. MotoGPs answer has been not to sort its own championship out, but to buy the Superbike franchise and (one assumes) stop that competing with MotoGP. We might end up with two rubbish championships going forward.

Sam and Lucy were up quite late and then got their noses into giant slalom skiing. Margaret was in charge of cooking again, so I did a few jobs, including some financial bits and bobs. I could really do with a day or so to sort out investments. I’ve got a few that have been really poor performers and I should also take some money out of equities and into cash. The trouble is that cash accounts are offering really poor interest rates, the best you can get is around three per cent and that’s barely keeping pace with inflation. I’ve also got a couple of ISAs where the management charges are far too high. That’s a job for a wet weekend.

Sam and Lucy left mid-afternoon and we were expecting Max back in the evening. He had been competing in the OMM (Original Mountain Marathon) in Cumbria. It’s 26 miles over two days with 3,500 metres of ascent/descent and orienteering as well. You carry all your kit, including tent and sleeping bag.

Max was in a team with Toby Knights, with Andrew and Charlie also competing as a parent and child team. I looked on the website on Sunday morning and Saturday saw Max and Toby were 88th in their category out of around 140. Max got a lift back with Andrew and arrived about 9.30pm. It was odd - Gravel had been very glum when Sam and Lucy went, but about five minutes before Max arrived he went to the patio doors and sat looking out, a couple of minutes later, he wanted to go out and when I opened the back door Max was just coming to the gate. Gravel must have heard Max talking with Andrew down the road as he unloaded his kit. Margaret said earlier that she thought he was going deaf. Nothing wrong with his hearing there.

Max was damp and dirty and his ankles had taken a hammering. He said it had been very hard with some real steep climbs and almost all the route cross-country (only a mile or so on paths). He said it had been cold but clear on Saturday; they’d gone to sleep about 7.30pm, but had been woken up during the night with the rain lashing down. Sunday had been almost entirely cold and wet. Despite all this, he said he was quite keen to do it again and they’d improved their positions to 66th overall, so in the top half of the field.

Living in London

For the past two weeks I’ve been a London resident (well a Monday to Friday resident). I’ve been flat-sitting in Highgate for Tom and Hannah while their place was empty. A tenant moved in this week, so that’s the end of my second home in the capital.

For me, living in Highgate means my normal commute of around two hours is reduced to about 45 minutes. It’s still quite a long time, but Highgate is on the High Barnet/Mill Hill branch of the Northern Line so to get home from work I have to take the Victoria Line to Euston and then change for the Northern Line. If the first train is an Edgware train, you either have to wait for a High Barnet one or, if there’s a long wait for that, go on the Camden where the Charing Cross and Bank loops converge and wait for a High Barnet train there.

It can involve a fair bit of platform hopping and great frustration if you just miss a train because you were stuck behind a fat person, someone pulling a house-sized bag or dolly daydream walking and texting. Since the incident with the nun last year, I’ve resolved not to push anyone on the tube, so I often get held up and there’s no worse Northern Line experience than the doors of a High Barnet train closing in your face, looking up and seeing the board say Edgware 8 mins.

Sometimes it works perfectly - you get in the end carriage of the tube at Victoria, this aligns you exactly with the connecting passage at Euston between northbound Victoria and northbound Northern Line; out of the Victoria line, there’s a train just pulling in on the other platform, which gives you enough time to nip across the passageway and onto the Northern line. If the doors are beeping, pile on and change at Camden if you have to; if there’s time, walk down so your exit is aligned with the exit at Highgate. It’s a precise science, commuting.

The other big difference between the Northern Line and virtually any other other Tube line, but especially the Victoria Line, is the speed of the trains. The Victoria Line is like the fast lane of the motorway; the Northern Line is like a single track road on the Isle of Mull - it’s slow. So slow that sometimes I get absorbed in my newspaper or book; I might notice Archway go past and find I’ve read two or three pages without knowing where I am. I panic and think I’ve missed my stop, but I can read another three pages before the tube train rattles into Highgate.

I don’t think I could learn to love the Northen Line and in the summer, I’d choose to walk to Finsbury Park along the Parkland Walk, the old railway line that goes through Crouch End and is now a footpath.

Tom and Hannah’s flat has seemed very different without them. It’s all very familiar, of course, and I’ve grown to like it more and more, but it seems quite bare and empty with just the main furnishings. I’ve been sleeping on the bed settee in a sleeping bag and managing with a knife, a dessert-spoon and a tea-spoon; one plastic bowl and the glass plate out of the microwave. One night, I’d planned to make myself a tuna sandwich, but only realised I hadn’t got a tin opener when I picked up the tin - that was a sparse evening.

I thought about having a pint in the Woodman - my favourite Highgate pub (except Wednesdays when it’s Jazz Night) - but it’s not the same without Tom, so I desisted. Nothing worse than getting all maudlin in the pub; sobbing into my Deuchars IPA and telling the Polish barmaid: “I used to come in here with my son, but now he lives in Brussels.” Worse still, if I stumbled in on Blues Night, I could end up suicidal!

Anyway, Northern Line excepted, it’s been nice living in London for a couple of weeks, even if it did take me 45 minutes to travel seven miles.

Come to the cabaret

Cabaret, starring Michael York, Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli, has always been one of our favourite musicals. Margaret and I saw it at the cinema in the early ‘70s and I can still remember vividly the impact it had on me. Brought up on Rogers and Hammerstein - musicals such as Oklahoma, Calamity Jane, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and The Music Man, this was like no other musical I’d ever seen.

Kander and Ebb (composer and lyricist) don’t choose easy subjects for their musicals and Cabaret is a series of love stories (hetro’ and homo-sexual) set against the backdrop of 1930s Berlin. The decadence of the capital’s nightclubs contrast with the rising threat of the Nazi party.

We enjoyed the film so much that when the stage play was revised at the Savoy Theatre in London this autumn, we decided we had to go. The role of Emcee (played so creepily by Joel Grey in the film) was to be taken by Will Young and that of Sally Bowles by former EastEnders actress Michelle Ryan.

Will Young is well known as the winner of the ITV talent show Pop Idol and is one of the few reality show winners to carve out a successful career lasting longer than the year after the show. He’s grown on me over the years and the camp, louche and creepy role of Emcee could have been made for him. Michelle Ryan was an unknown quantity, I didn’t know that she could sing or dance. She was popular in EastEnders as Kat Slater’s troublesome daughter, Zoe and then went on to play the Bionic Woman in a US TV series that was an almighty flop.

We managed to get tickets for the show last Friday and went along with Pauline and Chris and Jane and Alan Crossland. It was Pauline’s birthday, so we arranged to have dinner in the Savoy Grill before the show.

The Savoy is a wonderful place, sumptuous and beautifully restored. I was to meet my wife and friends there around 5.30pm and for me it was a quick ride on the District Line to Embankment and a short walk up to the Strand, so I arrived fashionably early at about 5.15. I would have liked to have had a cocktail in the American Bar, but there were no tables free, so I sat in the foyer and waited for them. They were a little late, but the Grill had opened, so we took our table.

It was a very nice meal. I had champagne, omelette Arnold Bennett and salt-marsh lamb with colcannon mash and savoy cabbage. We’d eaten off the main menu (it was a treat) but the Crosslands had gone for the cheaper set, pre-theatre menu so there was a negotiation when we came to pay. Our share was £120 which is expensive, but the food was very good and the service top notch. we were also only a few yards from the theatre so were able to stroll across 15 minutes before the start.

The audience were very keen for the show to be good, so it was a good atmosphere from the start. The set was minimalist. The band was sited on a mezzanine above the stage and the main props were a long ladder suspended at the top that could slide across the stage and a set of wheeled steps that were pushed and spun about at will. Both were used to give height to performers and as part of the dance moves. The dancers were brilliant, lots of leaps and flying moves, great choreography and good singing.

Will Young, as expected, made a very good Emcee and Michelle Ryan was stunning to look at, very good voice, but her acting let her down. It seemed almost am-dram at times and she failed completely to convey the intensity of the love affair between her character and Clifford Bradshaw. There was a much different plot line in the stage play, but it worked well and the comedy songs such as Money makes the World go Round and Two Ladies were really well done. Tomorrow Belongs To Me, which is a chilling moment in the film, was given a different treatment, but no less chilling.

This was a much darker production than the film and the ending was stunning. In a representation of the repression of the Berlin nightclub culture by the Nazi party, the letters KABARET stand on the stage and are pushed over one by one by a Nazi as Will Young sings the closing song. As the letters fall, the chorus strip naked and stand against the back wall to be joined by Will Young at the end of the song. It’s clearly the inside of the gas chamber and lighting simulates the introduction of poison gas and the death of the cast. Many cabaret performers and writers were arrested and killed by the Nazis and the cabaret had political, satirical themes as well as songs and sex.

It got a standing ovation.

We were booked onto the 11.30 train, so there was some time to kill. I’d have gone for a drink, but the rest wanted tea, so we went back in the Savoy for a cuppa (I'm destined never to have a cocktail in the American bar). I had tea and Margaret had G&T. Annoyingly, the Peterborough party had come via East Coast, so my season ticket wouldn’t work on the way home and I had to spend £28 on a one-way ticket. I could have had a splendid cocktail for that in the Savoy.

We were back to London on Sunday morning to clear a few things from Tom and Hannah’s flat - their TV, which I swapped for Margaret’s so I had something to watch while flat-sitting next week, a painting, his sample book from MCN and his Panama hat. We also took the opportunity to clear leaves and mulch from the path, patio and drains. It was an early start, so we were back in Peterborough for 11.15. I’ve put the big TV in our lounge, so it gets some use until he can take it back to Brussels. Margaret was ready to moan about the size of the screen, but she was commendably restrained. She now has a decent TV in her bedroom as I’ve shuffled the lounge TV to the sitting room and the sitting room TV to her bedroom. When Tom takes his TV back, I’ll buy a new one.

It’s interesting how the Sky+ box interacts with your TV. Tom’s big TV never looked very good in standard definition and I always thought that was down to its size. However, when I plugged my TV into the Sky+ HD box, my TV looked awful in SD. Down in Highgate last week, I tuned Tom’s TV into Freeview and the quality was great even in SD. With my old Humax Freesat PVR, there was no difference between SD and HD (or a very small one). Why is this? Does the Sky+ HD box deliberately make SD look poor, so people will run HD. Certainly since I’ve had it, I’ve abandoned SD channels unless I really have to watch one.

Still bloomin' lovely

Despite the miserable summer, despite it being mid October, despite Holly and Gravel charging around, there is still some nice colour in the garden.

Begonias have been brilliant this year, giving a real splash of vibrant colour, and the lobelia and alyssum have also kept going right through the year. At this late stage, we still have masses of cosmos still in bud, some colourful sunflowers and some surprise bloomers, including an aquilegia, which is traditionally a spring flower but which has decided to put in a late encore.

Another surprise packet has been a score of tomato plants which have germinated from seed in home-made compost which I’ve spread across the top border and around the blackcurrant bushes. No hope of any tomatoes and the first frost can’t be far away, which will destroy the tomato plants and all the flowers, except perhaps the sunflower and sedum.

Here’s some pictures of the late bloomers:

No idea why this aquilegia is flowering in October!

Sunflowers look lovely at this time of year when there's
precious little else in flower

I have protected these sedum from the dogs and they have been beautiful this autumn.

The cosmos were much bigger than expected and they're blooming very late - lotsof flowers though (if they survive the first gales)

What colour is The Highway Code?

Here's me with my course certificate.

Do you know what colour the Highway Code is? I do, it’s blue. That was one of the interesting facts that I learned on my National Speed Awareness Workshop at the Holiday Inn, Thorpe Wood on Monday night.

There were many others ... the Highway Code costs £2.50, it would make a good stocking filler for Christmas, 10 new things (on average) are added every year, so if you’ve not read the Highway Code for 10 years, there are 100 things you don’t know that you should know.

One of these new rules concerns warning triangles on the hard shoulder. Advice now is to leave the car and get as far up the bank as possible as soon as possible, don’t walk down the hard shoulder to place a warning triangle - you will be run over.

I’m attending this course because I was caught speeding - 37mph in a 30mph zone on the outskirts of Southwold while on holiday in Suffolk. I had the option of attending a speed awareness workshop (cost £85 and five hours of my time) or face a £60 fine and three points. Having had nine points on my licence at various times during the past decade, I thought it wise to take the course.

There were 21 people in the session (17 men and four women), which is just shy of £1,800 in revenue. Take away £200 for the room, £500 for the trainer and £100 for admin, I’d be very disappointed as a businessman if I couldn’t clear £1,000 profit. All profits, according to the trainer (who was called Tony), go to road safety projects in the county. My course fees are paying for lollipop ladies to see schoolchildren across the road. I hope that they are.

Bill Gates - yes, that Bill Gates, the boss of Microsoft (and no, he wasn’t on the course) - once said that if you couldn’t tell a story in 12 PowerPoint slides then you would lose your audience; Tony must have had well over 100. It was death by PowerPoint! They weren’t even good slides - plain Helvetica on a white background and the same AA DriveTech logo and yellow strip across the bottom of every one. The text was not positioned in a pleasing way, there were no animated transitions and there were several incorrectly placed apostrophes. Tony also had that anathema of good lecturers - a laser pen - he could definitely do with a remedial PowerPoint course ...

He was actually an OK chap and I did feel a little sorry for him. His job must be a bit like a comedian at the dreaded Glasgow Empire - if not a hostile audience, we were a group that resented being there and in a pretty grumpy mood. Tony told me he did about four of these a week - 500 boring PowerPoint slides, he must be able to do it in his sleep and if it was often boring for me, it must be agony for him.

He tried a few jokes to get us on side. The first 10 minutes were spent on Health & Safety issues - fire alarm, fire escape routes, muster points and so on. “We have a designated area for smokers,” said Tony, “it’s called outside.” No-one laughed. “That’s a joke,” said Tony. Still no-one laughed - we were not there to laugh.

Tony’s teaching method included a lot of repeated rhetorical questions, in fact I’ve never heard so many in such a short period of time. His favourite was “does that make sense?” Sometimes he threw in “can you see where I’m going?” or, more concisely, “point taken?” It’s surprising how those little things start to grate after only a short period of time. Does that makes sense?

Tony was a nice chap, but he also had a slightly threatening manner. He kept calling us “you people” and he was obsessed that there might be a ‘mystery shopper’ in the room (clearly the courses are monitored occasionally to assess the standard of teaching, although probably not by anyone with any knowledge of PowerPoint). A simple request to turn off mobile phones took 10 minutes and comprised a lecture about how this hotel conference room was the equivalent of a court of law; about confidentiality, that it was a criminal offence to disclose any information about the course or name people on it (hope no-one’s reading this blog!) and that impersonating another person would result in all your property being confiscated followed by transportation to the colonies. He underlined his point with two anecdotes. I’ll leave you to decide if they’re true or not.

The first occured when Tony had a celebrity on one of his courses (he’s had lords and all kinds of people, he confided, probably breaking his own confidentiality rules in the process). Some joker took a picture on his mobile phone and put it on Facebook; the celebrity’s minders were alerted by the celebrity’s publicity people, the culprit was found and was ejected from the course. There didn’t seem to be anyone worth ‘papping’ on my course unless Madonna has really let herself go. That was the mobile-phone anecdote, by the way.

The other was an impersonating-another-person anecdote. During the coffee break of one of Tony’s courses a chap confided to a fellow offender that he’d been paid to come on someone else’s behalf. “Of couse,” said Tony, it turns out that he was only talking to a very high-ranking police officer in plain clothes (as if she’d be daft enough to come in uniform), who promptly called base and got a couple of officers to come to arrest him. “They didn’t send round a squad car,” Tony recalled, “it was a proper police van, he was handcuffed and shoved in the van. There were big windows right next to the lecture room and everyone saw it. How embarrassing was that?”

The message was clear - if you are attending the course on behalf of another person, keep your trap shut; if you’re sitting next to Simon Cowell don’t give the story to Facebook, sell it to the Sun.

Tony had laboured for 30 minutes with essential messages, warnings, rules and threats before we even got started on speeding and road safety, then we had to sit through a “sponsor’s message” about who organised the course, how lucky we people were to be given this option, why Cambridge Fire & Rescue Service has the word ‘rescue’ inserted in its name (because it had to attend so many road accidents - as if they never rescue people from burning buildings).

When we did get down to the safety aspects, there were a lot of stats and we were all given little handsets so we could vote for what we thought was the right answer, just like ‘ask the audience’ in Who Wants to be a Millionaire? You can play too:

What percentage of people speed in an urban area? Is it:

1. 25 per cent?
2. 43 per cent?
3. 69 per cent?
4. 78 per cent?

The correct answer is 3 - 69 per cent.

Some of the facts were interesting, but none were really surprising. I liked the fact that Tony mentioned looking out for motorcycles several times and not in a manner that demonised bikers as reckless people. He also pointed out sensible things such as the thickness of A-pillars in cars these days and the need to look around them.

His advice to keep your car in third gear in a 30mph zone gave him an opportunity to tell everyone that his car had seven gears. No-one asked him what make and model it was and he was clearly keen to tell us. Other advice was somewhat contradictory - look ahead, you should be looking as far ahead as you can see; keep checking your speedometer 31mph is breaking the law. He spoke a lot about tailgaters, which many people who are caught speeding use as mitigation. My family will all recognise the phrase: “there’s someone up me arse!” Well, Tony promised to tell us how to maintain that protective bubble around our cars. It turns out the advice is that when you’re being tailgated, slow down and allow more space in front of you. Touch the brake lights and then brake gently, put your hand over the mirror so you can’t see them gesticulating at you and let them overtake if they want to. I’ll try that next time I have a Polish HGV driver three feet from my rear bumper. I just hope he’s not come non-stop from Warsaw, fuelled by Red Bull and Barocca.

We had been warned about some graphic scenes, but they wouldn’t even have rated a PG certificate. We all know that road accidents are awful and the three that he showed us were extreme examples where speed was a major contributory cause. A youth in a Ford Ka doing about 40 in a 30mph limit had collided with a 14-year-old boy crossing the road in a village. The youth had survived, but was severely brain-damaged - very sad. I would not have been doing 40mph through that village and I’d condemn anyone that did.

Example 2 was in St Neots High Street where a car doing 50 in a 30 limit had hit a girl and her boyfriend on a crossing at 1am on Christmas morning - an extreme example of causing death by dangerous driving. None of us had done anything like that, we’d all crept over the speed limit a little (in my case because it was a wide open, straight road that I’d assumed incorrectly was 40mph). None of us would drive like the idiot that Christmas, but we had to listen to Tony recount the story with (I believe) genuine emotion in his voice.

The final incident was a blind crest with a junction just over the crest. It was a 60mph limit and there were slow signs. A driver doing 60mph had crested the rise and found a car waiting in the road to turn right at the junction. He hit him up the rear and pushed the car into the path of an HGV and the driver was killed. There’s a valuable lesson there - don’t turn your wheel as you come to a rest to help facilitate the turn. That’s what we were taught to do when I learned to drive, but as Tony pointed out there’s really no need now all cars have power steering and if you’re hit from behind when waiting to turn right, you will be pushed into oncoming traffic.

We people were asked if we thought the training had been useful; we all said it had. Tony asked if we thought other drivers should take training, even if they hadn’t been caught speeding. Several people said they should and why didn’t the government make them. I don’t expect to see that in David Cameron’s next manifesto ...

The room was getting quite philosophical. Someone asked how much speeding was down to the fast pace of modern life and Tony agreed that we could do with slowing down in our lives as well as our cars.

It was also getting stupid. When Tony told us we had the highest child casualty rates in Europe (I’m not sure that’s true) someone suggested that children ought to put on a course. Perhaps they should, agreed Tony, clearly thinking of the extra work.

I guess that as I was caught speeding, I did require some retraining, but how effective are these courses? Tony told me that they had not been running long enough in Cambridgeshire to get reliable statistics, but elsewhere people who had attended a course had a re-offending rate of four per cent, which he thought was justification that they were doing a good job. I’ve been driving 42 years and have been caught speeding three times, which is an offending rate of about six per cent. The course was well-intentioned and I think it’s a better idea to retrain people rather than simply fine them and it does no-one any harm to spend some time thinking about our driving skills.

Tony asked us all to think about how we would rate ourselves as drivers and give ourselves a mark out of 10. I gave myself an eight. He then told us he was a professional driver, police trained and his skill level was seven. No-one rated themselves as just average, but that’s exactly what we were. At the end of the session we had to use our ‘Millionaire’ handsets to rate the course and the trainer. I bet Tony rated himself as eight; I gave him an average 5.

See other posts:

Ian Hutchinson - Closer to the Edge

How grand prix racing has changed

Mad Sunday T-shirts banned

Trip to the TT 2012

Riding vintage motorcycles

The joys of motorcycling

Cars I have owned No 3

Morris Mini 1000

Everyone of my generation had to have a Mini at some stage of their motoring career. When the Bedford van was no longer worth repairing, I had to look for something else and the Mini was a step up.

I bought it for £165 from a chap at Sandiway. Margaret and I were engaged and saving hard for our wedding and a deposit on a house so this was an expense that we could have done without. Fortunately my dad came to the rescue and said he’d buy the car for us.

As for the Mini, it was an absolute revelation. By 1974, when we bought it, the Mini was a real fashion icon, a symbol of the ‘60s, but it was also really well designed and, to me, it felt revolutionary.

There was a transverse engine, with the gearbox mounted underneath the engine block and sharing the engine oil. The radiator was in the nearside wheelarch, it was front-wheel drive, had independent hydraulic suspension and the body was a monocoque, so that there was no separate chassis (with bodywork mounted on top, the bodyshell was stiff and strong enough to carry passengers, with the engine and gearbox mounted in a subframe bolted into the bodywork and the rear suspension carried in another subframe. The battery was in the boot. Suspension in early models was rubber blocks, but mine used hydarulic rams with an air reservoir on each unit. The air compressing in the reservoir created the spring and you had to pump up the suspension periodically as the suspension would settle and get lower and lower.

After the slow Ford Pop and the utilitarian Bedford van, the Mini was fantastic. It handled beautifully, the engine revved willingly and it would corner like no other car I’d driven, even on crossply tyres. When I replaced them with radials, it was even better. Ours was the 1000cc model (there was also an 850cc and a 1075cc Cooper) and had about 38bhp. It was good for around 70mph.

Best of all, the headlights were fantastic. For the first time, I really could see where I was going at night. The Mini was the first car Margaret and I owned together. I must have bought it when I was 20 and we had it for about three years.



It was mid blue with light blue-grey trim and only a few rust bubbles outside, which I rubbed down and touched up with brush paint. This time I bought the proper matching colour and acrylic paint - no more purple household paint. The bodyshell on Minis was prone to rot on the inner sill below the driver and passenger door and mine was doing that. There were some big bubbles where the rust was eating its way through from inside the box section and there wasn’t a lot you could do to stop it. The box section sills were one of the main load-bearing components of the bodyshell and so corrosion here would eventually lead to the car being scrapped as it could snap in the middle.

Rust on cars in the ‘70s and ‘80s was a major preoccupation and the cause of most cars being scrapped. Manufacturers did little to protect their cars and people used to take their own precautions and repairs. I used to jack the car up and brush used engine oil underneath, I also had some thick vinyl tape (called Protectatape) which was super sticky and would adhere to the  inside of wheel-arches or the bottom of sills to protect from stone chips. There were also cans of foam filling that you could use to fill up box members on the bodyshell - you’d drill a hole in the side, put a tube on and keep pumping the stuff in until it came back out of the hole. It then hardened like cavity wall insulation in your house.If you bought a new car, you could pay extra and get it undersealed (which basically was a bitumen coating sprayed to the underside of the car. This would help, but if the surface was broken by a stone chip or scuff, water would get inside the sealant and it could make things worse. Much later, companies would offer something called Waxoyl, which would not only be sprayed underneath, but also inside box sections. If done from new, that was quite effective.


There were some horrendous bodges keeping cars together (and I'd used a fair bit of glass fibre myself), but the worst I ever saw was a Ford Cortina Mk I owned by a photographer on the Northwich Guardian called Ken. He was a terrible photographer and his car maintenance skills were clearly no better than his flat, out-of-focus pictures. Ford used a contraption called the McPherson strut which held the front wheel on. Basically, it was a lower wishbone, to which the wheel was attached, and a strut which contained a coil spring and damper. The strut was fixed to the wishbone at the bottom and then at the top to the bodyshell of the car inside the wheelarch. It was simple, cheap and effective, but the trouble was that the top fixing on the bodyshell would corrode and the strut could push through and collapse. Both struts on Ken's Cortina had gone and the suspension was in danger of collapsing inwards on itself. To solve the problem, Ken had jacked up the car and fixed a piece of 3x2 timber across the engine bay from strut top to strut top. This was all that was preventing the front of the car sitting cross-legged on the tarmac. Ken drove around like that for a few months until his wife's parents, fearful for the safety of their grandchildren perhaps, loaned him the cash to buy a new VW Beetle.

The Mini was amazing after my previous cars, but it was a utilitarian car, built to a tight budget. The bodyshell had exposed external seams, so across the front A-pillar and down the rear C-pillar, the body parts were welded together along a seam which stuck out from the bodyshell. Hinges for doors and the boot were external and the windows were sliding, rather than wind-up/down. This meant that the space within the doors, which would hold the winding mechanism and where the glass would retract, could be used. Space was at a premium in the Mini, so the door space was used for two massive bins, which would hold lots of stuff. Door handles in early models consisted of a wire drawn across the door, which you pulled to open the catch. My car, being a little later, had a small lever near the lock. There was a leather strap which stopped the door opening too wide.

There were some design flaws on the Mini. The distributor cap was right at the front of the car and was vulnerable to wet. A well-known problem was the engine dying if you drove through a large puddle. Another was more serious - a lot of Minis caught fire in crashes. If the car turned on its side, the filler cap for the petrol tank, which stood proud rather than flush to the bodywork, would be ripped off, allowing fuel to spill. If the car was scraping down the road on its side, there would be sparks everywhere, so a fire was inevitable.

Inside, the only instruments were held in one unit in the centre of the dashboard and comprised a large speedometer with a number of warning lights set within the speedo. There was a temperature gauge at one side and an ammeter at the other. There was a storage shelf across the dashboard and small storage bins at the side of the rear seats. The steering wheel was massive and set close to the horizontal (like a bus driver), while the gear lever must have been four feet long, disappearing under the dashboard where the gearbox was sited.

You could get four people in the Mini (and we often did), there were seat belts in the front, but none in the rear.

We both loved the car and it served us well. We did have a few problems with it - the SU carburettor needed its oil damper filling every couple of weeks and the cylinder-head gasket failed. My friend, John Quigley fixed that for me one night. Our longest trip was from Northwich to Birmingham for Margaret’s brother’s wedding (Graham and Lynne). We took Harvey and Kath (who was heavily pregnant with Louise), so this was a real test for the Mini. Three six-footers and a heavily pregnant woman. It was fine, except that (on the way back) the car started to overheat as the fan belt was slipping. Because the radiator was at the side of the car and out of the airflow, if the mechanical fan wasn’t turning, the engine would overheat. We managed to stop the engine boiling over by backing off to 50mph and turning the heater up to full belt. It was a warm day, so we had to have all the windows open. It must have been a pretty uncomfortable journey for Kath!

The Mini was sold when it became more and more expensive to repair. Final straw was the need for a new steering rack which would have cost more than the car was worth. We sold it for the best price we could and I bought car No 4 - a Vauxhall Viva HC.

Our Mini decorated by workmates before our wedding in 1974

Timber!

Cross sections of the tulip tree trunk

A couple of days holiday and we have spent it doing some major garden work, pruning the conifers (which is always a major task) and the corkscrew hazel, also taking down my tulip tree.

It was sad to see the tulip tree go. I had in mind that Janet and Andrew Knights had bought it for my 40th birthday, but when we cut it down I took some ring sections and could count only 14 or 15 rings which would have put me at 45 when the tree started out.

I’m not sure whether you can accurately date a tree’s age by the rings because it must have spent its first few years as a skinny shoot a centimetre across. I can remember Janet and Andrew bringing it around and putting it in our kitchen standing in its pot. It must have been no more than five feet high.

It was a very good present. Years before I’d read about the magnificent tulip tree avenue at Kew Gardens and what a wonderful sight it was when they flowered. Margaret and I had been to Kew about 35 years ago to try to see them, but had missed the flowers by a week. I must have told the story to Janet and Andrew, so they bought me the tree and I planted it in the garden - cue (or Kew) years of my own magnificent displays.

The tulip tree is so named not because its flowers look like tulips, it’s because its leaves have a distinct three-lobed shape, just like the traditional rendition of a tulip flower. It grew straight and strong and very quickly and, after a few years, I was able to discard the stake and tie. But although it was clearly thriving, there were no flowers. It became a standing joke to ask me if the tulip tree had flowered.

About 10 years ago, during the summer, the leaves on the tree started to get brown spots, turn yellow, die and drop off. They have always started off green and healthy and the tree continued to grow, but the new leaves that came out in May had all gone by late August and the tree looked decidedly shabby every summer. It must have some kind of fungal or viral infection and I might have tried to spray it, but spraying a 30-feet tree is not easy (or practical) so this year I took a look at it and decided it was best to go (there hasn’t been even a hint of a flower to compensate for the shabby leaves). To make matters worse, the Knights have bought a tulip tree of their own and despite being in their garden for just a few years, it flowered for the first time this year. Margaret went to see it, but I was at work and unable to, so I still haven’t seen a tulip tree in flower.

Well, my own tulip tree certainly won’t be flowering now. It was some 30 feet high, so we took it down in sections, lopping off as many lower branches as possible, putting a rope on the top section to pull it into our garden and then cutting the trunk halfway up. Once that was on the lawn, I took the bottom section down in the same way and then dug around the stump and cut that off as close to the ground as I could. The wood was very soft and wet compared to something like oak, so the chain saw went through it very easily. I split the bigger logs and we’ve laid them out to dry. They can go in the chiminea next summer.

Before chopping it up into chiminea-sized chunks, I noticed that the growth rings on the tree were very distinct and quite wide. I thought they might be good for Max to use in the classroom to illustrate tree growth and how the tree grows more one year than another. I cut two sections and stood them on their side on the table in the summerhouse for safe keeping. When we retired for “goutier” Margaret remarked what nice ornaments they made and they did look very nice. I should have cut a few more in hindsight, but they might split and crack as they dry out - like I said, tulip tree wood is quite soft and wet.

We got the chipper on the lawn and while I was getting through the big logs, Margaret chipped all the smaller branches and spread the chippings in the compost bin and around the garden. It was as if the tree had never been there, we’d been industrial in our destruction and processing. I’m always sorry to see a tree go, but the garden does look better without it; it was not an attractive tree and the bottom of the garden is a lot more light. I now have to think of what we’ll do with that border.

Pruned leylandii

After the tulip tree and after lunch, we turned our attention to the conifers by the patio. I’d planted three leylandii in a triangle about 25 years ago and they’d grown very quickly into substantial trees, as leylandii do. We had them topped around 10 years ago and when we made the new patio, I took off the lower branches to let more light through. It made them into quite attractive trees, but they still shaded the patio a bit too much so two years ago, I took more branches off the bottom and cleaned the trunks of ivy. They are quite nice trees, but I’m worried they’re a bit heavy at the top and, as they’re quite close to the house, I don’t want one crashing through the roof one winter night.

The problem with topping a leylandii is that you think you’ve stopped it growing any taller. What actually happens is the main shoot is stopped, but a dozen side branches grow and take up the race for the sky. My plan was to get a ladder up to the original cut-off point and then prune (cut off) all the second branches. Margaret was deeply unhappy with this plan, mainly concerned about my safety but also a bit worried that the trees would look as if they’d been given a flat-top haircut. My reassurances that they would grow again and look fine in a year or two were not helping.

I put a ladder up and climbed to the first cut. It was a lot higher than I thought and the prospect of climbing into the tree, with a chainsaw and stretching to lop branches was not inviting. Health & Safety would have had kittens. I decided on a different approach. After quite some time spent walking around the trees and staring up into the tops, we decided that removing a few more lower branches would do the trick. Margaret was not convinced and argued for every branch’s life until it was cut away and then agreed that it did look better without it. We removed about 10 branches and by then Margaret had the tree chopper’s equivalent of blood lust - I’ll call it sap-lust - and wanted more pruning. She had her eye on two odd branches sticking out at right angles, but they were quite small and difficult to reach so their lives were spared.

We had done quite a good job, but there was a pile of branches on the lawn for processing. Whenever I prune the leylandii, I’m staggered by how much foliage there is. The size and weight of some of the higher branches was really surprising, we’ve probably taken down around 250kg from the tops and there’s more light coming through without spoiling the overall shape. There was only a couple of hours left in the day, so we made a start on clearing the branches. The smaller pieces would be chipped, the bigger ones saved for firewood and the green leaves spread around the garden by the summerhouse to die down and mulch. Margaret was in charge of chipping and spreading, I was the sorter and processor. Actually by 4.30pm, we were both pretty weary and decided to clear up and get some fish and chips from Eye.

Friday was supposed to be rain in the morning but bright in the afternoon so we thought we’d get finished then. Actually, it rained all night and the following day was quite cold and grey, so that the lawn remained sodden. If we’d worked on that we’d have really chewed up the turf, so best to stay off it. We went to Whittlesey, I made a loaf of bread, some flapjack and a parkin loaf. It rained again in the evening.

Saturday was bright and clear however, although the lawn was still very wet in the morning. I took the dogs for a long walk across the fen and it was very pleasant - one of those clear, crisp autumn days. Holly had a good sweep of the fields that have been left fallow and the walk turned out to be longer than expected while Gravel and I had to wait for her to show up. She did, in the end, like she always does but when I’d walked another quarter of a mile, I realised I’d lost her again. She’d obviously scented something interesting and had doubled back for another session. I called her - nothing; waited, then called again - nothing. So Gravel and I retraced our steps for a few hundred yards then Holly could be seen in the distance heading towards us on the path. I turned round and walked towards home pretty briskly to give her a challenge to overtake. She wasn’t done then, there was still time to shoot off down another track/dyke this time with Gravel leading the way. Springers can’t resist a scent and if their nose is working their ears stop completely. Gravel is now much better at staying close, but even he disappears quite often. You just have to trust them; they always come back and they can’t get up to too much trouble surrounded by miles of arable land!

We have a pre-arranged point where their leads go back on and they always get a biscuit, so recall suddenly becomes very good. In fact, Holly is often sat waiting near the leads-on point. There wasn’t much wildlife to see today, but I did see one lone house martin skimming the fields. He was flying south and I guess he was going a bit further than Whittlesey.

My growing woodpile - got enough for next summer

By afternoon the lawn was dry and we managed to get the remaining conifer cleared within a couple of hours. We’ve got a pile of wood for the chiminea next year and it also makes a good place for various creatures to overwinter - part of my help the local wildlife efforts. My compost bins have certainly been utilised, although the hedgehog house under the decking is (to my knowledge) unused.

A wheelbarrow full of twisted logs and
sticks from the corkscrew hazel

When I cleared the last compost bin, it had been sitting for six months with a covering of old plastic sacks and when I lifted them off there was a little mouse staring at me. He hesitated for a second or two while we both contemplated each other and then dived down a hole into the compost. I’d normally dig it out in big chunks, but this time I had to rake it off carefully for fear of chopping a mouse in two. The mouse colony was actually confined to the top foot of compost and as I drew it off panicked mice ran off in all directions around the other bins and into the wood pile. They probably thought they had a nice house for the winter, but the best-laid plans of mice ... etc.

On Saturday evening, we celebrated with a couple of G&Ts on the patio while the sun went down. I lit the chiminea and we sat out until dark. It was a lovely evening, with no wind and a clear night. The bat was still hunting for insects, hopefully getting enough to hibernate successfully.

Today was another lovely day. Margaret and I walked the dogs and had breakfast when we got home. Today’s job was more pruning - this time it was the corkscrew hazel. We’ve transformed it this year - Margaret spent some time getting all the ivy off it about a month ago and today we removed all the suckers and various crossing branches so we could open up the inside of the tree. The chainsaw is a wonderful tool, it makes lopping and cutting so easy.

We took loads of wood out and it was really hard work. There was so much wood to process that we didn’t quite get it finished and the wood store will be overflowing with logs and sticks for next year. The big border is now quite open all the way down - I’m going to have to give some serious thought to what we do next year.

Well and truly pruned - the corkscrew hazel

Footnote: Margaret managed to clear the last bits of hazel during the week and this weekend, we moved the woodpile (so the oldest was at the front) and I took the chainsaw to the rest. We now have a very respectable pile of wood for next year's chiminea burning.