The best and worst car in the world

    There is something very satisfying about spending one of the first warm weekends of spring outdoors. Warm enough not to feel chilly, though not yet with that feeling of being in a warm bath from the air temperature one gets in the summer. Green buds showing on all the trees, the crows mobbing the buzzard when it came too close to their nest site, and a bumble bee meandering through the emerging greenery.
    I was outdoors because I was reassembling the Wreck's engine. Nothing too challenging, just a long sequence of parts to put together.
    Well, I say nothing too challenging. But I was struck as I have been before: with my engineer's eye I look at some of the assemblies and wonder why on earth they designed them as they did. The nut at the rear of the carburettor that requires either a 1/2" spanner with a 45 degree bend, or else a 2" long shaft. Or the exhaust manifold, the centre two fixing nuts of which can only be done up slowly by hand with a ring spanner.
    I once saw a documentary about the Wreck and its derivative cars. It had a section on the factory which was newly built for the Wreck's model line. I am guessing my car would have been built in its first few months. The documentary went on at length about how advanced the production line was, and how it was one of the first major factories to use CCTV for inspection. Very impressive, but I can only now think of those manifold nuts. If it's such an efficient factory it's churning out Wrecks at an impressive rate, right up until the point at which they attach the exhaust manifold. At which point there's a bloke with a ring spanner laboriously tightening up those two middle nuts by hand. No super-quick air tools will fit on them. It took me a couple of minutes to do each one, I'm guessing someone practiced could shave 30 seconds from the time. Or more likely not tighten them up properly, which I suspect is why the original manifold gasket had burned away around the two central exhaust ports.
    When Austin unveiled the Mini in 1959, the engineers at Ford famously bought one and dismantled it completely to cost its production. Their concerns that it would affect their Anglia model were muted when they concluded that it cost more to build than its list price. Looking at the Wreck's design, sometimes ingenious yet more often downright baffling, I can only conclude that the disease of poor manufacturing design was not limited to Austin's engineers.
    There are many theories about the decline of the indigenous British motor industry. In the 1950s and 1960s cars like the Wreck, the Mini or the Anglia were ubiquitous here and in many other countries, by the 1980s and 1990s their successors were something of a national embarrassment.  The misty-eyed will cite trade unions, dodgy Russian steel, bad management and disloyal consumers, but they rarely look at the cars and admit that some of them just weren't very well designed. Comparing the 1980s Austin Metro I had in the mid '90s with the 1980s Volkswagen Golf  I had at the end of the '90s was a revelation for me. Instead of a machine that required all sorts of know-how for fixing hard-to-reach parts which kept failing I had a car that just worked. And kept on working, even though it had had a hard life before I owned it and drank cheap oil as a down-and-out drinks Special Brew.
    I love the Wreck, with all its quirks. It's a slow car with major handling flaws and woeful brakes, but it's fun to drive and I like its period styling. But that won't blinker me as to why its successors are no longer in production and the site of the factory where it was built is now a housing estate.

Reliability

    We forget, in these days of ten thousand mile service intervals, what cars used to be like. My modern, the Turbocharged Rollerskate, is now a high mileage car. Yet it is as much an appliance as it is a car, given a bit of maintenance it's functionally exactly as it was when I first drove it off a dealer forecourt eleven years ago. Advanced metallurgy, synthetic oils and modern coatings have given it a nearly wear-free engine and a complete absence of rust.
    The Wreck by comparison needs constant attention. Oil top-ups, ignition adjustments, coolant checks, and battery charging. And it's not just the Wreck, I was thinking about the Mini I drove twenty years ago, that was the same. Not a problem for a much younger and spottier instance of me, but how easily I have forgotten the joys of standing in the rain pouring oil.
    A couple of weeks ago I took the Wreck on a Grand Tour of the West. The original plan was to visit my friends Nikki and Dru on my way to Bristol, before swinging north to Herefordshire to see my cousin, and dropping on my friend Ian in Gloucestershire on my way back to the Bright Lights. Sadly though that weekend saw the heaviest rain of the autumn, so instead I abandoned my plans after Bristol and headed east through the downpour.
    All non-vintage cars have a battery. The Wreck is no exception, it powers everything electrical on the car. The starter, the ignition, the lights, the wipers. On a modern car the battery will be charged by an alternator with a modern electronic regulator, but cars the Wreck's age instead have a dynamo and an electromechanical regulator. A big black box full of electromagnets and switches.
    The trouble with dynamos is that they're not very good at what they do. A nice long drive on a sunny day and your battery arrives in tip-top condition, but run the lights and the wipers as I had to and there won't be quite enough power to charge the battery. So when you stop, you won't be able to start the car again.
    I've always resisted an upgrade to an alternator, it's a little more hassle than just plugging and playing. On that particular front though I have to admit I'm starting to weaken.

Blistering performance

   For someone as motor-afflicted as I am, I find myself in an odd position. Completely without wheels. The Rollerskate is briefly off the road as it waits for an MOT test due to the mechanic having to postpone its original appointment, the bike needs a new battery and the Wreck? Well, the Wreck, always my backup vehicle in these situations, has burst its radiator.
    To be fair, the rad was in a bit of a state. Its predecessor sprang a leak years ago when I was an impecunious youth, so instead of a new item it's a part from a later Wreck that came from a friend's stock of second-hand parts. In other words, it probably sported more than its fair share of limescale and other assorted crud accumulation which has never made it the most reliable cooling device. At various times I've used Magic Bottles of Stuff from Halfords to flush it, but the car has always been a little prone to overheating.
    So earlier in the week I was driving across town and heard that chilling steam-whistle sound of high-pressure coolant escaping. Opening the bonnet, there was a split at the side of the rad. Damn.
    The best thing to do if you want to get home in these situations is to let the pressure out of the system so your precious coolant doesn't all spray away. Now that's pretty dangerous, you can't just open the radiator cap because boiling water will spray everywhere. The technique is to use a rag, and to gently turn the cap while pressing down hard on it, letting the pressure off without the drama.
    I didn't do too badly. No drama, no spray of boiling coolant. But I didn't reckon for a jet of superheated steam when the pressure first let off. The rag is supposed to protect you by absorbing the steam, but mine didn't quite manage it and I thus now sport an impressive blister on my middle finger.

    Painful business, this old car lark.

    The World Expert on Rusty Old Wrecks was sympathetic. He has a couple of radiators appropriate for my model of Wreck in stock, each reconditioned with brand new cores. And best of all, they're affordable, cheaper than the cost of reconditioning my original Wreck rad. The world of old cars is a funny one, these rads are cheaper than you'd expect because their new cores follow a slightly more modern pattern than the originals, therefore originality enthusiasts won't use them. Me, all I care about is an efficient cooling device that won't leave me by the road.
    So thanks to an extremely obliging friend picking the part up for me, I should have the Wreck back on the road tomorrow morning. My finger however, will remind me of the event for a week or so to come.

Excitement in a car

    Every now and then I see a car review, either on TV or in print, and I get rather annoyed. You see, the journalist has to find something to say about the machine and if it hasn't immediately impressed them they start finding the most ludicrous faults. Disliking the black plastic interior, some minor niggle in the handling under extreme pressure, or some little noise that sometimes penetrates their self-absorbed halo.
    I wish I was In Charge, I really do. When I am dictator, such journalists will be required to undergo a punishment regime involving being made to drive nothing but everyday cars made in the 1950s. The aim of this exercise will be to forcibly remind them that all modern cars are pretty damn amazing.
   They stick to the road in corners like glue in all weathers, they're quiet and spacious to drive, they've got bucket loads of power and the brakes stop them almost instantly and without drama. Even the cheapest modern car made by the direst Pacific-rim carmaker from a cast-off 20-year-old Japanese design has these features, in short motoring journalists these days are so lucky they don't know they've been born!
    You can probably guess I've been pursuing my personal automotive folly again. The Wreck has an MOT this week and I took it out to ensure all was in order. I was caught in an intense April shower, suddenly the car was being assaulted by huge drops of mixed rain and hail, the road covered in a sheet of water as it was coming down too fast to drain away.
    I pulled the knob marked "wiper". No fancy stalks on the column for multi-speed clearance in those days! The little archaic chromed wipers wheezed into life, sweeping the water from side to side. Couldn't really see much, but it was better than nothing.
    A corner complex I breeze through in the Rollerskate could have been made to show up the Wreck's handling flaws in the wet. Wahey, we're all over the place!! The phrase 'Dab of oppo' springs to mind, but let's just say when it happens to a Wreck it's not as predictable as with some cars.
    Then the window started steaming up. No problem, throw the toggle switch marked "Fan". Not a lot happens. OK, warm air was coming into the cabin. It blew out a sleepy queen wasp who'd obviously been hibernating there. Great, I'm in a car with hardly any visibility on a slippery road, and I'm in a confined space with a disoriented wasp. I pulled into a gateway to shoo the unfortunate wasp out of the car and to wait for the window to clear.
    The shower passed, ushering in bright sunlight on the freshly-washed countryside. I made my way home deafened and smelling of hot multigrade oil, cursing the wet that would have spread mud everywhere underneath the car just before its MOT.
    Any journalist who dares to criticise a modern car whose only fault is to be merely unexciting should drive a Wreck in an April shower. That should educate them as to what 'excitement' in a car *really* is!

Happy 52nd, Wreck!

    It's a bit of a milestone tomorrow. On the 1st of March 1960, a couple down in Devon bought a new car. 35 years later they sold it to my mate B who is the World Expert on Rusty Old Wrecks, and since he had no space for an extra Wreck but had to save it from the crusher, he sold it to me.
    And though my stewardship hasn't been perfect it's still in one piece, more importantly it's on the road. It starts on the button, its engine has a reliable cooling system, and thanks to the Magic Can Of Stuff it doesn't drink oil any more. What more could you wish for from a car!
    Winter is fading away from Southern England. The roads are dry, they are no longer salting them and it's just about safe do take the Wreck out without harming it. I have a road trip to make on Saturday as it happens, off to sunny Berkshire.
    Now here's my quandary. I'd like to ditch the scruffy bloke for the day, because in the case of the people I'm meeting I can do that. I have no worries doing stuff as girl or driving anywhere, but I've always done so in the Rollerskate. It's modern and anonymous, I can trust it not to break down. The Wreck by comparison is an unknown quantity. And a conspicuous choice at that, people look at you when you drive a Wreck. It should make a couple of hours drive each way with no worries, but there is always that frisson of doubt. What if it suffers a terminal mishap, would I want to be stranded as girl? I guess it's something of a Real Life Test, as if I were full-time I'd have no choice.
    In reality there's not much I can't fix on a Wreck by the roadside. And the differences between boy and girl in jeans and a jumper are fairly minor, a makeup wipe, a surreptitious removal of a little padding, and perhaps a quick-change to a scruffier jumper. So whatever happens I'll deal with it.
    But it is another confidence test, and whether it's one I have the courage to take I guess I'll be able to tell you on Saturday.

Gate valve

    Salt is the enemy of old cars, it makes them rust in all sorts of exciting ways. The council spread it on main roads in winter to allow idiots in modern cars not to have to drive carefully on frosty mornings, so at this time of year a drive of more than a few miles will expose your ride to more of the stuff than is healthy for it.
    So people like me, custodians of Rusty Old Wrecks and their ilk, are faced with a challenge in the winter months. Cars need to be driven, if you don't use a car for a few months you'll find that bits of it no longer work when you return to it. But driving it on main roads brings salt, and that's bad. So we pick dry and fine winter days like yesterday, and venture forth on the most salt-free roads we can find. For me yesterday that was a well-worn run round a couple of the villages near where I grew up, the council never salt minor roads.
    January days can be beautiful. Yesterday saw the sun poking under patchy grey cloud with a bit of haze, lighting up the countryside in rays like the Promised Land. The muted greens of winter roadside verges and fields of winter wheat seedlings were briefly rendered emerald, and the browns and greys of the dormant hedges and trees gained flecks of gold and red.
    The car didn't show its five decades as it started almost on the button. Coolant and oil as they should be, all hydraulic systems responding well to a repeated cycling. The charging was a bit lacklustre, but what do you expect from Lucas, Prince of Insufficient Light.
    Not everyone will understand this, but it's fun piloting a geriatric car through country lanes in January.
    I was assaulted by one thing though. Back in the summer, the Wreck's heater valve started leaking. Car heaters run on engine coolant, so leaks are generally a Bad Thing. New heater valves for a Wreck are only available as reproduction units, and at eye-watering prices, so I simply piped the entire heater out of the system and kept driving. Really, I've paid more for entire Wrecks than what they want for a new heater valve!
    I meant to fix it, I was going to ask a heating engineer friend to source me a microbore gate valve as a substitute. But somehow I never got round to it, so the car still doesn't have a heater.
    Rather cold, bimbling through the British countryside in January in a five-decade-old car with no heater.

When you can't do something, it's all you want to do

    The weirdest of things can make you want what you can't have. A few streets away from where I sit as I write this there is a most unglamourous car parked up amid the Euroboxes, and it's exerting a pull on me that only the similarly afflicted will understand.
    You see, as regular readers of this blog will have gathered, I have a liking for dodgy old cars. A twisty British B road on a summer morning is my Nürburgring, and an underpowered and basic family saloon from decades past is my Formula One car.
    Unfortunately in a British December the opportunities are limited for doing silly things in cars, the roads are covered in corrosive salt and basic motoring loses its appeal when the air temperature slips towards zero. So I sit cooped up in town, my desire for driving on the edge whetted by my near-neighbour's choice of wheels.
    I should give C a ring, plan some crazy road trip in the Wreck for summer.
    The unglamourous car? An AvtoVAZ 2107, otherwise known as a Lada Riva. That's right, a Russian made derivative of a 50-year-old FIAT. Basic as it gets, rear wheel drive, and incredible fun to drive on damp roads if fitted with hard-as-glass Eastern European (Chinese I guess nowadays) tyres.
    Truly I am smitten.

Roadworthy old wreck

    This morning a bloke in a tin shed on the edge of an English village spent half an hour poring over the Rusty Old Wreck before pronouncing it roadworthy and issuing it with an MOT test certificate. It is now legal to drive on the Queen's highway for the next year, given a quick trip with the certificate and its insurance details to the village post office for a tax disc which was free on account of the Wreck's historic vehicle status.
    Such are the minor annoyances of British automotive bureaucracy.
    It would have been the perfect start to the day, except that the Wreck's clutch is slipping. Fifty year old springs are not doing a very good job of keeping the plate pressed against the flywheel and it is very difficult to make the car go any faster than thirty miles per hour without a sudden burst of revs as it loses adhesion.
     How unfortunate. Luckily I know another bloke in a tin shed who can help, sometime soon I'll be off to the lair of someone who is a World Expert on Wrecks and who I am sure will be able to sort me out with the parts I need.
    Every branch of motor enthusiasm has a bloke in a tin shed somewhere catering for its adherents. Everyone I know with a Wreck has the World Expert on speed-dial, and similarly my motorcycles and the Turbocharged Rollerskate are tended by equivalent experts in their own fields working out of anonymous industrial units.
    There is a cosy certainty to a conversation within the fold of similarly afflicted petrolheads. In the world of the true enthusiast there is no room for hierarchy or snobbery, from the rustiest Wreck to the shiniest concours d'elegance winner they are all machines and thus fascinating to the born fettler. I can no more explain the attractions of a detailed conversation about the different clutch parts fitted to pre- and post-1963 cars as I can the attraction of a Little Black Dress to someone who looks like me, but strangely they both fulfill the same function: that of keeping the brain occupied. Which is important when you are trying to stop yourself going potty.
     It's been too long since I last drove the Wreck. I was worried I'd not rediscover the spark, but today has been a good one and the girl has not intruded too much. Something which given the experience of my last few weeks can only be a positive thing.

Can't escape the girl, even in a fast car

    A 1968 Dodge Monaco is a little large to go sideways round a sprint track designed for little European cars. My weekend went as expected, hanging out in a field drinking beer and looking at crazy machinery. Watching Luc Besson's original Taxi, fun and games coaxing a little Chinese generator into life, sitting on top of the race transporter to view the drift nutters going sideways. The perfect weekend for blokes,  grease-fest sausages and all!
     I kinda hoped a couple of days of gratuitous mucking-about and excess would occupy my mind and provide a respite from the GD-fest that's characterised the last few weeks, but sadly it didn't work that way. There is a constant noise floor of girl fog that won't go away, and trying to keep the resulting mood dips hidden from my wife for fear of upsetting her didn't make it any easier. This isn't to say that I didn't have a good time, just that the fog was always there waiting to pounce on any moment of inattention.
    Driving the race transporter made me think about the differences between C's and my driving styles. It's rather an unwieldy machine based on a large 1980s Peugeot van with about eighty Gallic horses waiting on the command of your right foot. It's by no means slow, but its sheer size and weight mean that in getting there it can sometimes be a little stately in its progress. I've owned a van before and driven thousands of miles in machines like this one so my strategy is to find a speed not too different to that the trucks are doing and sit there in the slow lane letting everything faster wash past. Vans tend to have a comfortable seating position so in my experience I can sit there all day if I have to with minimum stress except when circumstances demand quick action.
    C by comparison drives the transporter on the edge. He's always hanging on the mirror and looking for gaps, frustrated that he doesn't have lightening-fast acceleration to seize every opportunity. He was bemoaning the lack of power and wishing for a much bigger engine, as a result becoming burned out after not much time in the driving seat.
    I'm not a speed demon. Sure I have the Turbocharged Rollerskate and the bike, but unlike C it's not been so much the speed itself aside from early forays into motorcycling so 0 to 60 times mean little to me. My interest in the weekend's festivities stems from a love of fettling old machinery rather than of moving quickly in it, these days the attraction of the bike for me lies in its ability to deliver bucketloads of fun without risking my licence. I can talk the talk, but can't say I really get into that side of it all. Can I credit a brain from the girl parts bin with this? Can't really say, but compared to most of my petrolhead friends I do seem to be the one without the points on my licence. (Slightly unfair to C, despite taking his fair share of chances his licence is miraculously clean)
    I'll be back again next year. With luck I'll be in the Rusty Old Wreck by then. I may not be able to escape the girl completely but at least in that car there's no chance of worrying her with undue velocity. I hope C is free to come along again, but I suspect he may wish to pass on a lift from me. I must bear in mind, when racing the hare the tortoise won, didn't it?

In which I nearly take out a cyclist

    The UK road casualty statistics nearly jumped a little this morning, a girl on a bike decided the safest way to move to the middle of the road for a right turn was to attempt without looking to merge into a stream of moving traffic. Right in front of me as I drove in to work. It worked, I guess, the Turbocharged Rollerskate's servo-assisted brakes and my panic-fast reaction meant the car stood on its nose and she passed unscathed millimetres from my front bumper. Outside the city centre 20mph speed limit she might not have been quite so fortunate, and I would certainly not have come away unscathed had the car behind me not left a decent gap and had similar quick reactions.
    I could at this point launch into a rant about cyclists, denounce them as the vermin of the streets and call for a cull enforced by Robocop-style special attack squads with lethal force. After all, that seems to be the usual level of debate when cyclists and motorists meet. Unfortunately though here I hit a snag. I'm a cyclist too. I no longer commute to work by bike because work is too far from home, but for years I too pedalled my way across my city morning and evening and I too cursed the apparent blindness of motorists.
    So I'll save my ire. I think the girl in question is damned lucky not to be in casualty or even a morgue today and I think she needs to learn pretty quickly what a shoulder check is, but her ineptitude is not the fault of cyclists as a whole. Instead I'd like to question what she was doing there in the first place.
    That part of my city is well served by designated cycle routes. Special coloured lanes on the road, albeit rather narrow ones. In the orgy of greenwash from Government, cycling has been decreed as a Good Thing, and councils everywhere have scrambled to show how cycle-friendly they are. Unfortunately though in my city they seem not to have engaged the services of a cyclist when it came to planning their cycle routes. The girl this morning was not in her own lane because the designated cycle route takes a detour a block over. No problem if you have a motor, but who in their right mind is going to waste energy pedalling further than they need to? My council has ticked the "cycle-friendly" box but has in reality done nothing to separate cyclists - inept or otherwise - from the rush-hour traffic.
     So that's enough ranting for the morning. Please excuse me, my heart rate will eventually return to normal and the steam coming from my ears will reduce in due course. One dubious benefit though - there's nothing like a panic-driven adrenaline rush to dispel those early morning girl-fog blues!

For a given value of Jenny

Busy weekend.
    A perfect start to Saturday, taking my parents dog for a walk through the fields on a beautiful spring morning. The only movement being a startled muntjac deer. Sometimes you need a bit of mild exercise as a relaxation aid and before a long drive that completely hit the spot. Then hit the road north to Leicestershire, beautiful driving weather, yellow oilseed rape(canola) fields against blue skies, roadside trees with shiny new leaves. That motorway is marked off for me by previous automotive dramas, there's the spot the Allegro overheated, the Mini wiper needed fixing, the Panda suffered a blowout, it's as if every gap between a junction saw me on the shoulder at some time during my days of running old wrecks.
    Lisa's general area was easy to find, but Lisa's house might have been created by J.K Rowling, such was it hidden between the houses that surround it. Once you sit down and start talking it's as though time passes unnoticed, a morning coffee turned into a three hour chat. Sorry Lisa! It was good to meet her wife and family, I wish my wife wasn't visiting her mother this week. Being fully settled in the bloke role complete with a couple of days stubble to rest my poor abused face it felt slightly incongruous to be introduced as Jenny, hence the title of this post. It was very good to sit down and talk to a couple in a similar position to us and I am very grateful for the opportunity to drop by. We didn't just talk trans matters, our conversation ranged widely onto other experiences, and the family dog joined in, subjecting me as an interloper to some hefty barking. Oh, and I managed to lock myself in the loo. Yeah, I make the perfect guest, me.
     Back on the road north, I was heading for Yorkshire, to see the same friends whose party I attended back in February. Last time I was on these Yorkshire roads they were under a thick blanket of snow and the car struggled with some of the hills, today they were clogged with weekend drivers and unexpectedly a convoy of Ford Anglias. J.K. Rowling, you can't escape her!
    S and R are a couple I've known since the mid 1990s. S was a colleague at one of my more anarchic former employers in an insanely fun but mentally demanding field of the tech industry. Now he's boss of a small company and father to a young son, but refreshingly neither he nor R have succumbed to the blight of premature middle aged parenthood. My mission for the evening was to come out to them as some of my longer-term and more valued friends.
    Unexpectedly we were invited to a barbecue at R's mother's house. I like R's family, they are no-nonsense Yorkshire women, and great company for a stealth t-girl. R's mother had prepared enough to feed the five thousand, and thus sated and well lubricated by bottled beer we spent a relaxed evening sitting round the barbecue. It's a British thing, it's a fine evening and we've got a barbecue, so we're damn well going to spend the evening outside, damn it! We must have looked very odd, swathed as we were in blankets.
     Back at S and R's house, time for the Long Chat. Not a problem, just as I expected. A bit of a double-take, some slight confusion form S with respect to gender versus sexuality, then a long chat about it all. It turns out that R has a friend with a trans child who's boy at school and girl at home, and who will no doubt transition as a teenager. Lucky kid to have an environment in which she's understood. One can't help being a bit envious, wondering how ones own life might have turned out in that situation. Anyway, now I've got another set of friends I don't have to pretend in front of.
    Having consumed several bottles of beer I was in no condition to take a sleeping pill, so I found myself lying in bed at 2AM texting my wife. It gets a little rough, when she's away the general level of gender dysphoria increases and life becomes a little difficult. As you can imagine, waking up at about half past seven on Sunday wasn't the best thing to do so I felt as rough as a badger's arse on Sunday morning. Time for some serious caffeine abuse.
     On the road again, this time to York. Find the car park, meet Cathy. Annoying ticket machine that didn't like 50p pieces. Wander round the city centre, thronged with tourists. Sit in the park and chat. People watch. Trans-spotting. Only succeed in spotting a Scotsman. Find a pub by the river, discover it doesn't take cards. Damn. I thus owe Cathy somewhere seriously nice for lunch next time I'm in these parts, this having been my turn to cater. Why is there never a damn cash machine handy when you need one? Life obviously wasn't on my side, because then a bird pooped on me. Well, at least it's socially acceptable for a slightly scruffy bloke to look a bit grubby.
     Leaving York, down the A1, head for the Fens. Beautiful Fenland weather for the endless drive past the Wash. Empty roads, wide skies, this is long distance motoring as it should be with no stress. You know you're in the Fens when houses start having tractors parked outside. At this time of year the fields are sporting freshly ploughed laser-GPS guided furrows, it pains me slightly to say this but there is beauty to be found in industrial agriculture. A fitting place for a country and western fan, for an afternoon, at least.
    And so I end up at C's house, under an impressive Fenland cloudscape. Cameras rarely do such skies justice. I'm knackered, girl-fogged and I miss my wife. I try to explain this to C. He suggests curry as an antidote. Like an idiot I forget my sleeping pill.
    So I'm writing this with a Fenland dawn as a backdrop and feeling far too blokey for my liking. Can't do much about that here, so you, dear reader, have become my outlet. Last week's outing in Swindon seems awfully far away.

GALA

Bless those boffins at Blaupunkt with their Teutonic ingenuity!
    The stereo in the turbocharged roller skate I use to terrorise the road users of Southern England has a feature called GALA, no doubt an acronym for whatever the German is to say "Make it louder when the car speeds up". The way I have it set with the likes of James Naughtie and Eddie Mair reading me the notable events of the day it allows me to hear the latest from the Corridors of Power very nicely as I zip along the dual carriageway between the traffic jams. They're fairly quiet.
    Today was different though. My trip into work was later than normal so to avoid the tediom of mid-morning radio I stuck a CD in. The Tea Party's Tangents. I like this CD so I cranked it up as I meandered through the endless twenty zone and the cloud of buses that swarm round my city like flies to a dungheap. Big mistake. Because when I hit the dual carriageway instead of the normal stop-start rush hour I had an empty road and I nailed it. Ouch. GALA kicked in and my poor little car stereo responded with square waves so jagged they'd break an oscilloscope screen. Amazingly this HF distortion seems to have done no harm to my tweeters. Whether my ears have had the same good fortune remains to be seen.