Matthew Dawkins - minipix.co.uk

As many of you will know, I am trying to sell my beloved Mini.  Some may say that this is the wrong time to be selling a classic car, what with the economic state of the country - the credit crunch means people don’t have much spare money, and petrol prices are so high that [...]

Today marked a significant transition into the real world for me.  Today I bought a new car.  Not brand new, but it is a reasonably modern, normal car, unlike my beloved Mini with whom I have enjoyed many happy hours.  It’s been on the cards for some time now, for various reasons, and today finally [...]

It seems only yesterday I bought Neddy, my lovely little Mini Sidewalk, unadulterated and raring to get into the Mini scene.  I’ve since added my own refinements, like 5-spoke alloy wheels and a carbon-fibre dashboard and suchlike, but it’s remained essentially the same car.  Cute, friendly, stubborn at times, but a great friend.
Odd, then, that [...]

Sunday it was supposed to rain.  At least, that’s what the weather report said on Thursday.  By the time it got to Sunday morning the MET office had revised its decision and said that it wasn’t going to rain.  But it was going to be grey and misty and cloudy and miserable.  And it was.  [...]

Work has generally been quite busy recently.  Which is a good thing.  More work means more money.  However, there is more to life than work, and there are a whole load more things I need to squeeze into my week than just work.  I’d like to share just a few of this week’s additional bits [...]

They say time flies when you’re having fun.  My recent absence from this blog is testament to the additional truth that actually time flies regardless.  True, I have had a lot of fun recently, but it has been mixed with periods of busyness too, the combination of which has meant that finding time to sit [...]

This past week has brought some worry and some excitement, mostly in the monetary department.  Running my own business means taking responsibility for dealing with the numbers, and satisfying Mr Tax Man that I’m a good little boy.  It came as something of a surprise, then, when I checked the HMRC web site on Boxing [...]

Christmas came early this year. Though not in the way you might expect. Since Ellie will be working all through the Christmas period we won’t be able to go visiting people then, so we drove down to Torquay to see my parents this weekend, to catch up and see people before things get [...]

For some time now Neddy has been having problems starting.  Despite a longish run the battery would be flat, and the engine would hardly turn over.  Most of the time there has still been just about enough charge to start the engine, if reluctantly, but there have also been a couple of times when it’s [...]

Yesterday evening I went round to my friend Aaron’s house so we could fit new lower ball joints to Neddy, having replaced the upper ones previously. In case I hadn’t already said elsewhere, Neddy has been making a rather disconcerting clunking noise when accelerating, and I had thought it was the upper ball joint, [...]