F is for Fast Ferrari but also for Falsity

It has been said that the internet is one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, having transformed the way we live our lives from communication to business.  It allows us to book train tickets, purchase computers, and communicate with friends and family, all without having to reach across and pick up the phone.  It allows spotty teenagers to express their ill-founded opinions, it enables friendless bedroom-bound loners to socialise in multiplayer online games, and encourages us all to befriend all sorts of people to make our Facebook page look more impressive.

Okay, maybe I’m being a little too negative, but then it is the first paragraph, and it’s always good to grab your audience by the throat from the outset and say something to catch people’s attention.  It’s a well-used PR technique too, which leads me nicely onto the subject matter I’m tiptoeing around in this blog post.  The cat is out of the bag - we know who the Stig is.

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E is for Ejector Seat

I am a firm believer in learning something new every day.  It keeps the mind alert and fresh, and is a constant lesson in humility, reminding me that there is always something I don’t know, eagerly awaiting discovery round the next bend.  Today I managed to exceed my quota, and learned two things, both of them car-related.

Firstly, I sat down in front of my laptop this morning and watched some YouTube clips over breakfast, finally learning what “heel and toe” means.  I’ve heard the phrase bandied around for some time, usually on Top Gear where they’re talking about the position of the pedals.  I’ve always assumed it meant that the pedals were close enough together for you to be able to quickly and easily switch between accelerator and brake by pivotting your foot on your heel.  Makes sense.  But no, apparently it’s more complex than that, and all to do with down-shifting.

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D is for Down South

Well, here I am in sunny Somerset, sitting on the sofa in our new home! Right now I have no internet, so I’m writing this offline and will upload later. It’s quiet, light, homely, and generally makes me smile. We’re back in the countryside! Yay!

This week has been pretty exhausting, preparing for and accomplishing the enormous upheaval of moving across the country. Monday was spent packing. Since Ellie isn’t able to do any heavy lifting at the moment that left me to pick up the slack, which meant I was off to the recycling centre mid-morning with a car chock full of odds and ends that no longer worked and needed chucking out. So it was goodbye to my old bass amp, which hasn’t been working for years (and to be honest it wasn’t a great amp at the best of times), farewell to two CRT monitors (which was a little sad because both of them worked, I just couldn’t find anyone who wanted them), my first Mac went out too (dead motherboard, too old to do anything with anyway), plus a dead printer and a dead microwave. It was heavy work, carting each item to its appropriate recycling container, but in some ways it was quite therapeutic, getting rid of a whole load of ’stuff’ that had been cluttering the house.

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C is for Cars and Carriages

Now, it may appear from this post that I have nothing better to do with my time at the moment than waste countless hours sat in front of a screen twiddling knobs and tapping incessantly on keys without really achieving anything productive.  And they may be a modicum of truth in that hypothesis.  However, I can assure you that the time I have spent playing has been (for the most part) well-chosen and has not adversely interfered with the normal running of my life.  It has of course been lots of fun.

First of all, I recently acquired something I have wanted for years - a steering wheel.  No, not for my car, but for the computer.  And since all my games are now on the PS2, it had to be one that I could plug into that.  An hour or so on eBay and a handful of reviews culminated in a purchase of a Logitech Driving Force EX steering wheel, which was plugged in and tested as soon as I was able (i.e. the evening of the day it arrived - see, I didn’t skip work for this), driving my current favourite game: Gran Turismo 4.

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B is for B-roads and Bye Byes

(Sorry this post is a little belated, I’ve had a lot on and haven’t got round to writing this up).

Ahead of our cross-country migration at the end of this month, I’ve been having to schedule in some goodbyes.  Significant amongst my friendship groups is the Colchester Mini Club, both the cars and their drivers.  I’ve been a member of the club for as long as I’ve owned a Mini, which is several years, and last Wednesday was my last opportunity to go to a club meeting.  It was a night of fun and excitement, even if it was tinged with sadness.

Something else that made that night a little more difficult was that my Mini was going to be there.  I’ve been going to the meetings each month in the Escort for a while now, while Neddy was off the road for the winter, but there was a very different feel on Wednesday evening driving there knowing that I was no longer a Mini owner, especially given that the car was going to be there anyway, belonging to someone else.  Selling a Mini really is like selling a close friend, and there’s a lot of emotion surrounding it.

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A is for Alphabet

Bank holidays always seem to creep up on me and take me by surprise.  I can’t quite put my finger on why, but where most people live for their days off and eagerly anticipate any excuse not to go into work, the novelty has never really hit home for me.  As such the day never really gets noticed in my diary, and it usually takes someone to remind me that it’s happening for me to realise that I don’t have to do any work that day.  Maybe it’s because I work from home.  Maybe it’s because I’m just not very observant.  Maybe it’s because I don’t do enough with bank holidays for it to be special enough to look forward to.  Maybe.

Anyway, on Monday it was a bank holiday, and since Ellie had reminded me of that fact I just about remembered not to do any work.  Which was a good thing, because we’d arranged to go round to Anne-Marie’s house to watch Takin’ over the Asylum, a BBC series from a couple of decades ago starring a very young David Tennant, set in a loony bin mental health hospital with a would-be DJ trying to get a hospital radio station up and running.  It wouldn’t work today, of course, which explains why it was never repeated, but now that’s it’s on DVD (mainly due to David’s popularity, no doubt) it’s become a quick favourite among Tennant fans.  So Anne-Marie made us invited us to watch it with her on Monday.  All of it.  All 6 episodes of it.  And it was hilarious.

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Eight years.  That’s how long I’ve been living in the wrong end of England.  I say “wrong”, but perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration.  I came here to study for a degree, and when it was over I just never got round to leaving and going somewhere nicer.  I’ve never been much of a city boy, and before any of you starts yelling about Colchester not being a city, it’s all comparative - when you’ve come from the countryside, a dual-carriageway is a big scary road, and if you can’t get from one end of the town to the other in ten minutes then something is very wrong.

So it comes as an enormous sigh of relief that Ellie and I have found a lovely new house to move into in a few weeks time!  This week we travelled down to Bristol to stay with my grandparents for a couple of days while we scoured the locality for potential places to set up residence.  We’d spent a fair amount of time reading through the results on RightMove.co.uk, and found a few we thought looked promising, and when we arrived in Bristol on Tuesday evening we had three houses we particularly wanted to look at: one in Peasedown St John, one in Evercrecch, and one in Bedminster.  Grandma quickly told us that Bedminster wasn’t a great area, so we weren’t too disappointed when the estate agents never got back to us about getting us a viewing.

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I know it’s Easter Sunday, and I really am excited and thrilled to know that Jesus rose from the dead, but there’s more - Neddy lives too!  It’s clearly the day for resurrections.  After several months of being garaged, my lovely Mini is now back on the road, healthy and alive and really loving it!

I was actually hoping to sell Neddy way back in November, when we bought our Ford Escort Ghia X, which was intended to replace our little Mini.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find a buyer at the time, what with the credit crunch driving car prices down, so Neddy sat almost completely forgotten in the garage, not seeing the light of day or feeling the tarmac under his tyres.  I did make sure the car was MOTed before Christmas, but due to lack of buyers I opted to SORN the car rather than renewing the tax disc, with the intention of getting the ball rolling again in the spring, by which time hopefully the car market would have improved.

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My wife likes dogs.  Probably heavily influenced by her childhood, which was somewhat dominated by two Golden Retrievers which whom she shared the house.  No surprise then that for my birthday treat we went to the cinema to see a film about a dog.  At least, that’s what the title and the trailer would like you think.  It turned out to be less about the dog and more about the relationships that developed around the dog.

For those who haven’t yet seen Marley and Me, feel free to either keep on reading or read something else, depending on whether you’re the type to get offended by spoilers.  I’m still not sure what spoilers I’ll actually use here, we’ll see during the course of writing, but needless to say it’s about the contents of the film, and I may well end up mentioning some important plot devices.  Just so you’re warned.

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Just look at its beady, shifty eyes.  What secrets does it hide?  What is it plotting?  I daren’t turn my back on it, just in case.

This is no irrational fear.  We have a penguin in the bathroom, who tries to charge me rent.  Honest.  Penguins cannot be trusted, I tell you.

There is overwhelming evidence supporting my claim, too.  Just look at such documentaries as The Wrong Trousers and The Simpsons.  Proof positive that penguins are up to no good.  Don’t be fooled by their black-and-white appearance, or taken in by their oh-so-cute fluffy chicks - give them an inch and they’ll swim all over you.

You have been warned.