OLD 2

Why is it that when you are young, you can set off for Vladivostok with a box of Jaffa cakes and a can of sprite.
Now I walk around the car checking tyres, lights and whatever, prior to a trip to Tesco for a carton of almond milk.

Hmm.

I just drove Berlin - Calais - Hemel-Hempstead - Cambridge - Upton-under-water - Barnsley - Ose (Isle of Skye) - Stirling - Birmingham - Folkstone - Berlin in ten days. A mere 5,000km.

All I did was top up the windscreen washer to make sure it wasn't going to freeze - it was -5C when I started.

Admittedly, not in the coupe, which is in dry storage at present. But I've done similar trips in the coupe regularly over the years - Hemel to Berlin and back or Hemel to Skye and back were at least twice a year, and with no more preparation than that. The very first long trip I did when the coupe was still shiny new was to Skye in temperatures that hit -20C, and the sea froze...

On one memorable occasion, Joe and I rebuilt the bottom end of the engine and replaced the cams (the head didn't need anything since the compression was still over 220psi at 175k miles). I drove home - a hundred miles - and immediately set off on a 4,500 mile road trip around Norway with zero issues beyond a single dead headlight bulb.

Um. Possibly what I'm trying to say here is: these are not fragile cars. Checking tyre condition and fluids is something you should be doing regularly anyway but the main thing that keeps an old car in generally good condition is using the damn thing. Fail to use it and watch the pipes and belts harden, corrosion get in unnoticed, bushes break up... as long as your coupe is regularly and correctly serviced, you should have no more worries about getting in to drive to the shops or to drive to Cairo as you would in any new vehicle - perhaps less, given how much less there is to go wrong.

Neil (the eternal optimist!)

(Hmm again... /me is now wondering if the belt on a 16 could be replaced with a chain?)

Thanks for the advice Barnacle.

I'm buying the Jaffa cakes and sprite now !

Jaffa Cakes - In the supermarket I bought a tin of SPAM the other day!

What the heck was that all about? It's now sat in the cupboard and I have absolutely no idea what to do with it.

Eeehh spam !

I remember sitting in the air raid shelter, knitting a balaclava, while frying spam in whale fat and listening to Alvar Liddell read the news in the wireless.

Spam Bob…

I once drove from Sutton (which was in Surrey at the time, but is now, apparently, London), to Saint Tropez in a day, in a Triumph Spitfire.
The laughably small fuel tank on the car meant I stopped for super about as often as these days I have to stop for a wee.
I set off at 6am and arrived at about midnight, fuelled entirely by pork pies, Badoit and about 5 packs of Benson and Hedges.
The other notable thing about the Spitfire was that every time I stopped, the silver-painted hardboard heat shield between the carbs and the manifold would catch fire, so I had to douse it before approaching the petrol pumps.

But you tell that to the youth of today and they won't believe you...

My biggest bugbear nowadays for me getting older is speech/talking on the television, the way people play with the English language, aye not in a good way, accents are acceptable, but the likes of fiddling with words and talking in gobbledygook just pisses me off. Possibly the worst irritating thing for me is vocal fry……aaaaaah!!!!!!!! I have to switch off when I no longer can abide such torture to my ears. There are other things that pop up now and again that can irritate me more often than not, but most of the time I really have to laugh off the stupidity of it all. Then again catching me at the wrong time can raise the blood pressure.

This place is so educational, I had to look up vocal fry

Jargon is what gets my goat, especially the meaningless string of it that politicians use when they are "not' answering a question.

Is this an "old" thing? Am I getting picky on the road to threescore years and ten that I seem to find descriptions of purchasable items less accurate than desirable?

Or that apparently I need an app for almost anything, from tying my shoelaces to looking up a word in a dictionary (you know, that big heavy book with a lot of words in alphabetical order )

Back in 1970 my future wife and I decided that a week over Easter in the south of France would be a good idea.

I then owned a Spitfire4 and as it was snowing in Paris on good Friday we decided to use the Auto-Jour car train service down to Lyon. It is bloody cold waiting for the 7 am train in a Spitfire in the snow No Hotels, Good Friday D'oh. I should have stayed with my friend in Meaux. I had to load the car on the train myself as their staff were unsure of driving a low ground clearance right hooker. Also had to drive it off the train in Lyon.

About 20 miles south of Lyon it stopped snowing and the hood came off and stayed off for the next eight days.

We took a leisurely drive down to Montpelier, Sete and Perpignon by which time it was Saturday so set off Sunday really early as we were due at work on Monday- me in Guildford and Mill in Coventry.

We stopped to put the roof up as it started snowing a bit going up to Clerment Ferrand and just kept pointing north to Dieppe for the ferry to Newhaven

I saw Mill onto the Coventry train at Euston? about 7 am then drove straight into work.

A good car that old Spit, In July that year it did duty as our wedding wheels Still got the wife, but the car is long gone.

Sounds like a great trip Pete. Amazing some of the stunts we got up to

Lovely story, Pete. I'm sure I must be wearing very rose-tinted spectacles, but the Spitfire was actually not such a bad car (by the standard of the day). Ours was a 1980 1500 model with overdrive, but I always coveted the earlier ones.

Ah, memories Pete, where do the years go

I loved that first one, later I had a Mark 3 as a second car which I never got along with even though pundits say it was the best version. I moved it on to my late friend's wife and she loved it and kept it for years. RYP777E which is still on the DVLA database although last taxed in 1991and last V5C issued in June 2004.

I much preferred my left hooker GS estate which I brought back when we moved from France. Kept it 8 years and 200k kilometers.

Things that drive you mad.

Sounds of the young couple in the hotel room above ours having sex.

It's spoiling News at Ten.

Other things

Beergate / Partygate

Lewis Hamilton jewelry

The use of the word awesome

Beardy men with shiny white teeth selling cars

Needing a squiggly thing to order a cup of coffee

'stars' being people with no particular skill or talent

Lewis Hamilton vegetarian dog

Worrying whether it's worth putting E10 in every so often to save a fiver.

Being told by the BBC that being British is wrong.

Having a 35" waist, so that 34 is too tight and 36 too baggy

Running out of hair to make a comb over

Prince Harry

In fact the only thing that makes me happy these days is watching the TV advert for Sun Life.

^^^Richard Wilson eat your heart out


Btw what is "Needing a squiggly thing to order a cup of coffee" lol

Little square box on corner of table with black squiggles in it.

Erm, still no clue what that is!!!

Think this is what is meant

Still non the wiser.

I am indeed losing the plot slowly to getting older…….I have a Marantz music centre along with expensive speakers, great sound and the Internet radio can pick up practically any type of music you could ever want. Now, lately I could not select anything on the internet stations. After digging about on my iPad, I eventually worked out on vtuner you have to pay five dollars for the year to access. I’m learning all the time, but I had to retrieve my address code from my unit, what a fanny about that was for myself, practically clueless, my computer knowledge is limited to say the least. Back on vtuner code in, PayPal paid five dollars, and all is well, I’m listening to some smooth jazz now to help me cool down……..

You had a bomb shelter? You lucky sod! When I w'lad we only dreamed about having a bomb shelter! We had to make do with a hole in the ground. No roof, no walls. And you had t'dig the thing with your bare hands. Talk about lucky!

:-)

MM

They seem to hate so much of the country they live in.

I learnt some time ago- switch them off and leave them to it. MUCH happier without being preached at!

;-)

MM

Somewhere around I have the recording of the time in WW2 when Broadcasting House was bombed adjacent to the announcer...

Neil

p.s. what's all this about being British is wrong?

Master Mariner needed my bunker that day.

My IT manager, age 9, tells me that the little box full of squiggles is a QR code.

I was sitting in a bar with friends last night after a play and noticed this squiggly thing on a little stand upon the table and thought - that's it!

Wagatha Christie.

Don't you think that Miss could have sorted this after school.

You must be referring to the waste of space that is the court case between two footballers' wives

Why the hell was she wearing sunglasses???? That’s what I want to know.

Yes - sat in the cupboard - no idea what to do with it!

Not Spam Bob!