mike morley

No! No!  It's only 12.30 now.  When you made that declaration, an hour ago, it was still AM.

A few minutes ago a brief deluge was preceded by a flurry of sleet here in Milton Keynes.

Never mind.  Only seven weeks to Midsummer's Day!

A slightly worrying variation on the theme that I've noticed is sudden gluts of adverts for things friends or relatives have just bought.  For instance, last year my brother bought a Porsche(!) and the internet spent the next six weeks deluging me with adverts for them.  At the other extreme, next door has recently made use of a Hippo bag and suddenly everyone wants me to have one.

Big Brother is quite definitely watching us, and making notes.

Following on from the point Dungrange made, I once worked with  fella who was middle-aged at 22, right down to having his retirement plans in place.  One Christmas, his Secret Santa bought him a pair of beige trousers and he didnt realise he was having the piss taken out of him.

I stopped reading the comments on YouTube a while ago, having decided far to many people on there had views that were so extreme they made Tronald Dump look like a moderate.

I spent the weekend discovering that most of my supposedly matt paints were drying glossy.  Try that.

Another highly recommended book is CS Foresters auto/biography(?)  I thought it was the former but not even Wikipedia, that ultra-reliable source of fact (stop sniggering at the back) seems to be too sure if it even exists, even though I've read it.

Particularly entertaining is his account of experimenting with gunpowder in a back yard in the slums of south east London and being sufficiently au fait with naval strategy to dispute the official account of the Battle of Jutland with his masters at school.

Right up Mikkel's street!

I've read Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books too and enjoyed them.  I haven't read them all but I enjoyed those I have.  I was aware of quite a difference between those written pre TV series and those written later and felt the earlier one's were much better.

Strange how your tastes evolve over the years.

When I was in my 20's I read all of CS Forester's Hornblower books and loved them.  Having finished the series I went on to Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books but they never grabbed me.  There was, I felt, something a bit too 20th Century about some aspects of them that seemed slightly incongruous and I gave up after a book or two.

Last year I tried re-reading the Hornblower books and very quickly found myself wondering how I could ever have enjoyed a series with such a depressing central character.  I think I gave up half way through chapter two.

Perhaps now it's time to try Patrick O'Brian again to see if my feelings have changed about his work.

The modelling circle of which I am part resumed its regular Tuesday night meetings down the pub as soon as they re-opened.  We downed our last pint and went home at 9.30 last night; the latest since we resumed.

Quote from Nearholmer

"Oh, and I don't much like the car! Its a 4x4 shaped one,  although actually 2WD"

A Skoda Yeti? 

They were near the top of my list of "Likes", until the wife of a friend of mine declared it the most uncomfortable car she'd ever been in.

P.S.

My brother has just bought himself a Porsche.

A few years ago I bought my brother's Focus (9 years old but only 40,000 miles on the clock for just £1750. Too good a bargain to miss)  I'm a motorcyclist so don't look for thrills in a car but, even so, I found it a bit "beige".  It also had a hopelessly inaccurate speedo that I always suspected masked fairly poor fuel consumption. Then my daughter became pregnant and realised she was never going to fit herself, her husband, their baby and all the paraphernalia associated with parenthood in her beloved Kia Picanto, so we swapped cars. 

The Picanto expired just before last Xmas (The mechanic who replaced the cam belt should have re-tightened the crankshaft pulley bolt to 120 newton metres.  Instead, he only did it finger-tight)

Then, just a month later, to round off a perfect Xmas, my daughter wrote the Focus off. (Switching from main to dip, she managed to turn the lights off and collided with a parked car)

She had a 120 mile round trip to work every day so needed a replacement car in a hurry and as she'd long yearned for one I bought her a Kia Sportage.  It was a year older and had 10,000 more miles on the clock than I felt it was worth, but she was thrilled to bits and hers was the only opinion that matters in such circumstances.  What got me about it though was, considering what it cost and the market it's aimed at (what is the current term for what used to be Yuppies?) how unsophisticated it was.  I think the technology in the by-then scrapped Focus was more advanced!

Don't get me wrong.  I don't like a lot of the technology that comes with the latest cars.  I've test-driven my ex's Peugeot 3008 and now loath electric handbrakes.  After the Picanto went bang I hired a BMW X1 to visit my brother for Xmas and not once did its automatic windscreen wipers share my opinion as to what they ought to be doing.  I have several friends whose cars have automatic headlights and needed only very brief demonstrations to understand why they keep them permanently over-ridden.

I recently looked at a Citroen C4 Picasso and felt it ticked a lot of boxes.  I asked my brother (until he retired, an extremely senior traffic policeman) for his opinion and he admitted he had a poor opinion of French cars in general.  It was a couple of days before I recalled that he once owned a Citroen 2CV, long after they had ceased to be current models, and used to sing their praises from the rooftops.

You see why I'm confused?

Only five episodes?  I thought it was worth more than that!

Of all the revues of her career, one I've not seen mentioned was something from the 90's.

Set in the 1920's and very Sherlock Holmes/Agatha Christie-ish in nature, with her as a well-to-do Lady of a Certain Age in the Holmes role and Neil Dudgeon as her chauffeur in the Watson role.  Anyone else remember it?

PMP.  I used a Mashima 1628 (discontinued long before Mashima ceased trading) and a gearbox that High Level designed specifically to go with that motor but was very similar in appearance to a Roadrunner+.

There are so many issues with the DJM chassis you risk putting a lot of time and effort into something that still doesnt run properly (As someone I once worked with used to say, you can't polish a turd)

Why not do what I did with my Hornby Austerity and treat it to an RT Models chassis and High Level gearbox?