Do as I say and not................

A chap who's opinions on all sorts of things often hit the mark with me advised a while back that doing less was a good thing when one felt a little overwhelmed. I have found this to be good advice but recently have been studiously ignoring it. Busier than a one armed paper hanger and it is mostly of my own making. There is very little that really has to be done now; like this minute, hour or even day. Getting off the train tracks as the 0814 bears down on you would qualify but most of the 'really important' stuff we surround ourselves with is no such thing and can wait. And wait with advantage as I am finding that doing things after a bit more thought generally ends up with a job done better. This doing less has to be tempered by the temptation to drift into doing absolutely nothing mode but there in lies another truth of life; balance.

Well I have been particularly remiss on this front over the last month and I will try and make September better. Going from Point A to Point B in a completely straight line is as dull as ditchwater but the amplitude of the sine wave that describes from absolutely nothing to far too much must be damped down to just enough to stay awake to pleasantly busy. Note to self.

What has been happening whilst I have been consuming myself with things that don't matter nearly as much as I can make them appear? What has been going on whilst I worry unnecessarily about things I can do nothing about?

Absolutely the last application of digits to keys concerning the blasted penguin. A pox on the bird. Now he has been at last unceremoniously biffed off the back of a ship in a suitable cold place may he be eaten by a pelagic animal forthwith. May the GPS superglued to his feathers stop bleeping within the day indicating his totally ridiculous profile has at last been snuffed out. I cannot get my head around the world wide (no less) fawning and cooing this stupid orthine animal has generated. When he eventually left the land of the Long White Saccharine it was in a specially constructed 'enclosure' (read cage) on the back of a NIWA research vessel accompanied by a farewell card signed by hundreds of people (read idiots). Did the damned bird put down his collected works of Voltaire to peruse his greetings card? Nero fiddles? Deck chairs on the Titanic?

In a few (four if the 'Countdown Clock' before the 6 o'clock News is to be believed) days a sporting tourney will kick off (literally) here in NZ. We are told that the country is in the grip of 'World Cup fever'. Really? I am looking forward to six or seven weeks of good rugby, but fever?. Well I am not looking forward to six or seven weeks of it and am not going to regard Georgia vs Russia as 'good rugby'. In truth there are going to be a handful of matches I'll watch and that will not be Scotland vs Canada. There are 48 games (as the drill sergeant on the Sky ads has been barking at us for months) and about eight of those will be worth watching. What to do with forty games of dross? The organisers have lots of cunning (sic) plans. They get small towns to 'adopt' teams of no hopers. So we will have something like Paeroa adopting the USA. No idea what this means. The good ole boys get invited around for a cup of tea and a home made slice behind the net curtains? But they have to do this or an ersatz 'World Cup' will fall flat. This is a World Cup much like the Cricket World Cup represents the world. Go look for wall to wall (or even any) TV coverage of this in the US (even thought hey are competing) or in China or India. I'll not be holding my breath as you'll be gone a long time. This is a World Cup just as much as the World Series in Baseball represents the World.

Still it is the best we can do with the resources available and despite all of the above I am looking forward to it. As a country we have prostituted ourselves to the IRB and will run this at a loss. We knew this when we signed up for it but I still don't understand how it all works. I do know that for a month the stadiums have to be 'clean'. Not litter free, you understand, but advertising free in a regard that does not offend the official sponsors. Thus the Westpac Stadium in Wellington is no such thing for a couple of months but is the Wellington Regional Stadium. Buy your hot chips there with Mastercard or cash only. No Visa, Amex or even EFTPOS cos they are not kosher brands. Even the Ambulances that transport Heineken altered punters to the cooler have had to have their ACC sponsored minute logos painted out. All this advertising cleanliness apparently has a geographical fallout zone around the stadiums as well much like that accompanying a thermonuclear device; within x metres of the stadium no Steinlager. Daft - but then I don't work for Heineken.

iPad update. This is an intrusive device and my opinion that I will still be buying a MacBook Air next year may well be revised down. The iPad is by far the best way I have come across for browsing the web. I now even prefer it to having a wander around on a 27" screen. Flipboard is the best way to base one's web wanderings and has to be the best value for money (read free) software about. I would even pay money for it. StumbleOn is not bad either but is a real time waster. I have frittered away hours (literally) reading the stories behind seventies hit singles, watching videos of 1950's Austin Healeys, trying to learn the real names of heroes of my youth (I really didn't know until yesterday that the totally gorgeous Grace Slick was born Grace Wing) and confirming that perpetual motion machines don't work (and haven't done since the thirteenth century). I Have made a presentation from the iPad both round a table to two people (good) and to a room full of people via a projector (so so). I am a convert to eBooks. Reading in seat 1C is a positive delight when one doesn't have to carry a separate book for the purpose. Kicking off with Stephen Fry's autobiography. A little surpised by this; a fairly dark read and self flagellatory almost to excess.

If the iPad is fast becoming my favourite device for getting information out of the world it falls well short on the getting information back in the other direction. Fine for a one paragraph email but I would not be writing a doctorate on it; nor for that matter composing this blog post. Proper typing (if what I do can be described as that) is impossible and I am not going to buy a keyboard with blue teeth; I already have a laptop. You can make presentation slides in Keynote in the iPad (and a fully fledged presentation program at NZ$15 is a snip) but you wouldn't want to. Make the slides on the iMac or MacBook Pro and then flick 'em over to Dropbox (or the Cloud next month) is the way to do this.

We'll make an assault on September, armed with an iPad, a healthy regard for sorting the good rugby from the crap and no bloody penguins.

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Some things I do not understand

These could be the first few of a very long list.

How does the United States owe $14 trillion?

Who do they owe it to?

Who lends anyone anything approaching that amount of money?

Where can I find him?

How do you imagine having to paying $38,000,000,000 interest a month?

What REALLY happens on Tuesday if they don't pay it back?

Is paying it back what they have to do on Tuesday - seems an awful lot to find over the weekend?

I went to this site to make it more understandable but it served only to confuse further. Good fun though.

I really never have understood money. This means I am no good at it. Mr McCawber is my style of an economist.

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Odds and ends from around NZ this week

Saturday morning pre dawn Stygian gloom and its pissing with rain. Therefore golf is right up there with sticking pins in one's eyes, there can be no agricultural work around Obald Acres and I'm at the beck and call of the damned telephone for forty eight hours. Enforced indoorsness means one of two things; do some preparatory work for next Monday and Tuesday (has to be done and a bit dull) or repair to the barn and apply the HSS to free machining steel (infinitely preferable but should really wait). The next two days do not fill me with much enthusiasm.

Random thoughts on the week. Rotorua really is very smelly and I can't imagine why anyone would live there for that and a few other reasons. The sulphurous nature of the atmosphere has other downsides in addition to the assaults on the olfactory apparatus. I had to stay in Rydges Rotorua which is the most bizarre hotel in the southern hemisphere. The first peculiarly Rotorua affliction is that all the bright ware (taps, towel rails etc) are so tarnished by the aforementioned air that one is afraid to touch them in fear of getting contact dermatitis. The rooms are inappropriately vast with a five minute trek from wardrobe to chaise longue. The furniture looks to have come from a second hand store in Ngaruwahia and the atrium restaurant is crap. Stay there in the winter and you have to tape up the door to the spa room to stop all heat from the puny in room heater disappearing into the sulphurous outdoors and stay in the summer and you are told to tape up the windows to stop flies getting in. No, a nasty hotel in every way. Mercifully staying somewhere else in a couple of weeks which cannot be worse - I hope.

Then when the time comes to mercifully exit Rotorua you go to Rotorua International (sic) Airport. I think it gets the flash International appellation courtesy of a flight a week to Sydney. Didn't see the duty free shopping mall that International Airports pride themselves on in order to fleece the punters. In lieu of this Rotorua has joined the other nasty New Zealand Airports (I'm looking at you Hamilton and Palmerston North) in charging a development tax before you are allowed to escape over the perimeter fence. This really pisses me off as I can't see it ever being used to develop a really poor airport. The biggest downside of this transport hub though is not the airport's fault. I have a lot of time for Air New Zealand (good grief I spend enough time with them every week) but the lack of a Koru Lounge in Rotovegas is a national disgrace; get it sorted. I am back in three weeks and I expect, nay demand, Kapiti smelly cheese and Kaitaia Fire for my tomato juice to be in place by then.

Christchurch and Wellington next week. Both are prone to more seismic activity than I would like. Had a palpable tremor in Wellington a couple of weeks back but was ensconced in a suitable earthquake proofed building and all we got was a rather diverting swaying of the leaves on the office pot plants for fifteen seconds or so. As nothing compared to the ongoing disruption in Christchurch where the number of quakes since September 4th last year is now well over seven thousand. One night for me and when I requested a single storey hotel next to the airport the predictable response from my travel agent was 'That is what everyone wants'. Still, the denizens of Christchurch want in for what I am up to despite being given several opportunities to back out, so the least I can do is front up. Thoughts on the shaky city later in the week.

Back in Auckland and we find that after two days of clear skies in my absence normal service has been resumed and its raining. I know one shouldn't complain about things about which one can do nothing but it really does rain an awful lot in Auckland in the winter. I would not like to be one of my sheep having to spend the weekend in my bottom paddock where the ovine residents have just now been joined by a flock of ducks. The birds would be more at home than the woolly ones at present. My mowers (all four of them) will think I have found a new object of weekend affection and ones whole life takes on a seasonal dampness.

The enforced time indoors for the weekend means I can indulge in playing with Apple's new operating system as an ersatz excuse for not doing any real work. It was revealed this week that Apple has more cash than the GDP of 126 of the world's countries. Not really comparing like with like, I know, but it doesn't disguise the fact that they have serious amounts of dosh. A portion of this which probably equates in percentage terms to the sort of money you and I wouldn't mind losing down the back of the sofa has been spent on OS X Lion. They are getting a bit short of large feline animals for the next one. We've had, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and now Lion. What is next? Ocelot? Cheetah? - not a good commercial name, I would suggest. Cougar? - vide supra. Bornean Clouded Leopard? - that one really trips off the tongue.

I quite like Lion, but then it is only a computer operating system and not the meaning of life. For openers the price was right - free. I timed the purchase of the 27" iMac with this in mind but for $0.00 I got a new shiny operating system on all three of my Macs. The only downside was the 4Gig download throttled my broadband back to dial up speed for 24 hours as it exceeded Vodafone's 2Gig per day cap. Now what is that about? They should reward you not penalise you for big downloads as it means you are using their service more and potentially giving them more dosh. Non comprende.

This minor irritation turned into a major one, however, when I lost all phone line (hence Internet) connectivity to the rest of the planet during a storm. This occasioned a call to Vodafone's Help (sic) Line. Now these are an easy target for opprobrium but all of it is deserved. I am unsure whether the female at the other end was physically in New Zealand but she certainly was not a native of Te Kuiti. Call VF on the shoephone (obviously) and we get past the mother's maiden name stuff. 'How can I help you?'. I laudably refrain from 'I suspect not all' and tell her my land line is down. 'If the problem is inside your house it will cost you money'. 'I know, but the problem isn't inside my house as next door has no land line either' 'Are you in Auckland'. Again, supreme self restraint stopped me from asking her the same question. 'Can you disconnect your phone from the wall socket?' 'Well of course I can, it is a very easy technical manoeuvre, but why would I want to do that?' 'I need to see if the problem is in your home'. Deep breath. 'I believe I told you about next door'. 'But I need you to disconnect the handset' A bit of cruelty now - why not? 'But all my handsets are connected to the land line through a PABX'. This did not go down well. My new friend had to contact her supervisor as to the next move which I suspect was finding out what a PABX was. 'You have to get your telephone engineer (hang on, I thought that was your mob) to check your PABX before we can troubleshoot'. 'Stormy weather, next door - any pennies dropping yet?' And so it goes on for three quarters of an hour. Eventually this automaton agrees to log a fault only after I have agreed to sell my first born if the problem is not outside the confines of Obald Acres. And we pay an arm and a leg for them to do this to us. All's well that ends well as service was reconnected in about eight hours (although Miss Te Kuiti would only commit to 'between 24 and 72 hours') and the engineers sent me a couple of texts to say the deed was done. A minor irritation in an otherwise entirely agreeable rural existence.

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Weeks End

Friday night and what to report?

A few amusing occurrences over the last couple of days mostly in the world has gone nuts category. Internationally the choosing of North Korea to Chair a UN Committee on nuclear disarmament is right up there with putting Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank. Only a dysfunctional mob like the UN could have their 'have to be fair to everybody' method of selection throw up one of the world's pariahs and not turn a hair. What is wrong with saying 'We can't have North Korea as they are both a bad bunch of ratbags and as mad as a box of frogs'. Selection is apparently done alphabetically and it obviously matters not whether the country after Switzerland for chairmanship of the United Nations Alpine Mountain Rescue Committee is Syria. Antigua and Barbuda taking over from Antarctica as Chairman of the United Nations Committee on Ice Bergs will raise not a single eyebrow in New York. Pack of Monkeys the lot of them.

That New Zealand can show nutty tendencies is part of the charm of the place. A bit of book banning over the last couple of days. Never a good thing. The book in question is apparently about some waste of space of a woman who has a degree of probably justified notoriety. I couldn't care less and won't buy the book. And there is the rub - if I don't want it I won't hand over the Ed Hilarys. No need to ban the damned book - if you don't want it, don't buy it. There is certainly no need to get all nasally dislocated as to whether a shop will sell it or not. There is even a Facebook page with in excess of ten thousand 'friends' (sic) calling for the book's author to be burnt at the stake.

Which brings us nicely to the Reserve Bank, they who issue the Eds. Not a place that interests me much except that its building is opposite my Wellington place of employment and is next to the emporium of the Coffee Nazi (who bye the bye I reckon is a good bloke). Well the afore mentioned Coffee Nazi must have been slipping something a little extra into the espressos bound for No 2 The Terrace as they are considering redesigning the bank notes. Ed and Kate Sheppard are to be traded in for other worthies. I never see bank notes of denominations greater than a $10 so I have no idea who adorns the rest. Maybe a bird of some ornithological sort on the green one - that's a $20 isn't it? Can't imagine who they have in mind as replacements. The Mad Butcher? Richie McCaw? But why change them at all? I can't imagine it would be a cheap exercise with all the designing, new flash plasticky paper stuff etc all for something that really doesn't need doing as the country isn't exactly flush at the moment is it? Silly.

As a bank note aside, I won one hundred trillion dollars a couple of weeks back in a Pub Quiz. That's $100,000,000,000,000. Gave up work on the spot, bought a different coloured DB9 for every day of the week and moved to Hawaii - which I had just bought. Only slight problem was that the note was issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and is apparently worth about 35c. Looks kosher enough though as I gaze at it on my desk. Oh, and it has a picture of three rocks, a buffalo and a waterfall on it. I'll stick with Sir Ed, thanks.

A dilemma. I missed Pink Floyd performing the Wall when it was being toured properly back in the eighties. I was in Singapore and it never came there. Never saw the Gerald Scarfe cartoons or the Wall being built. Missed the only proper reunion when they did four songs at Live 8 in 2005 and obviously Dave Gilmour, Roger Waters, Rick Wright and Nick Mason will never play together again because Rick Wright has joined Syd Barrett in being dead. When the band imploded in the mid eighties I was always on the side that Roger Waters was not supporting. I obviously don't know the bloke from a bar of soap but I don't like him. He just seems to be not a very nice bloke. On the other hand Dave Gilmour has long ago had a decent haircut and put on the amount of weight commensurate with his eye watering wealth and advancing years. In the same totally irrational way I have written Waters off, Gilmour appears to me to be alright; the sort of bloke you would have along to win squillions of dollars in a Pub Quiz (except he doesn't need the money and probably doesn't do Pub Quizzes). So here is the dilemma. Roger Waters is bringing The Wall to Auckland next summer. Toad or not Waters wrote a good deal of The Wall and it is bloody excellent. Do I buy a ticket and put my probably ill founded dislike of its main performer behind me? It won't be the Floyd but will it be close enough? Or do I just go and put Pulse on the home theatre, turn it up to warp factor twelve, frighten the sheep, be glad Waters ain't there and do without Gerald Scarfe again? Decisions, decisions.

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We shall see, shall we?

The stirrings to resurrect this blog have been nagging at me for a couple of months now and I think I may just do it. Winter is upon us (not that current ambient temperatures would tell you that) and lots of changes have occurred since I last put finger to keyboard on a regular basis. I have done the unthinkable and bought a diesel car; that will get its own post in a wee while. I am comfortable that my weekly trips to the Nation's capital and being a blogger don't have to be mutually exclusive. I have become an airline snob. I have tired of Top Gear. I have been back to the UK and found it still hideous but the origin of QI. I still hate left wing politicians and followers of that ilk continue to attract my utmost contempt. However the urge to just hurl opprobrium at anything on the lefthand side of life's road has waned a little and I really want to avoid this blog returning to its political roots. Having said that though there is a general election in the offing and the temptation to point the borax will I'm sure prove too much on occasion.

We shall see where my new found urge to scribble may take me, shall we? If the urgings to blog again have been bubbling under for a while the catalyst to actually breaking out the keyboard has come from a most unexpected quarter. I was perusing a few old posts and looked at the counter thingy at the bottom of the page. Just over 16,000 page views in just over three years. Now this is not world shattering stuff is it? Many reasons for this of course; the principal of which is probably that the content is drivel and no one would want to read it.

So I thought I'd try a little experiment. A spot of Twittering. Resurrect the Blog on the back of a brand spanking new Twitter account and see what all this social media nonsense is all about.

Just over a year ago I opened a Facebook page just so I could get one for my lure selling business. The medium appeals to me not at all. I found (and, indeed, still find) the whole Facebook thing horrible. I don't like 'friend' concept at all. I have shut down the personal side of the Facebook thing in as much as I never go there and just try and keep the 'Business' side of things ticking over; put 'Marine Surprises' in the Facebook search bizzo if you are remotely interested. The idea of course is that the game fishing world will beat a path to my virtual door and I will receive an avalanche of orders. Well, it doesn't work. Maybe I am not doing it right, but all I get is requests to be friends from people who I have never met and am never likely to. Granted all these people have pictures of beeeg fish or flash looking game boats as their avatars and I have a couple of hundred of these new close mates now but none of them buy any sodding lures.

After reflecting on this failure of an idea that has made a bloke a billionaire I have been mulling oveer the Twitter idea for a while. I think I find it a little more appealing. The idea of just announcing things sounds quite good and I think (hope?) I will have a bit more control with what I want to do with it. I am a bit scared that I might turn into a Premier League footballer and the havoc that could wreak on my life but I am reassured that I have an IQ greater than 13 and I don't drink.

So obald@home is going to be linked into Twitter. Should be good for a lark for a wee while n'est ce pas?

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A perennial seasonal annoyance

Thursday December 30th and thus this year has but a day and a bit to run. And then it will be the New Year. Not going too fast for you I trust?

However in New Zealand we are at the cusp of the season of New Years - plural. What are you doing for New Years? I am going to Whangamata for New Years (I will therefore get a hangover/be arrested/feature on the six o'clock News/all of the above) etc. This is New Years without the apostrophe which would be acceptable as a shortened form of New Year's Eve; the Eve of New Year. Or, I suppose, a shortened form of New Year's frog or New Year's plate galss bicycle.

This abuse of the English language is one that really gets up my nose on an annual basis. It is so unnecessary but I doubt it can be eradicated without a change in statute; people up against a wall for misuse of the English language style of a thing. At the end of December we look forward to a New Year - singular. On Saturday 2011 will start; we do not get the commencement of two (or more) New Years. It is not January 1st 2011 and 1947 however much fun that may be. Would be rather amusing to be given the option of any other year to start at the same time as the real New Year, would it not? I think I would go for 2011 and 1969. Good year 1969. Long fine UK summer, rock climbing, start of medical school, dreadful haircut and good music. Perhaps I could have 2012 and 1976 with a bit of 2031 as a side order. Big fish in Papua New Guinea, a Mr McCawber financial strategy, carefree and a glimpse of life at eighty.

I am looking forward to the New Year (singular) which will start with a week in Penang and Singapore - never a hardship.

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Well, what's all this then?

First post on this blog for about six months. The first scribblings are dated 2006. A year of a post every other day, a bit less the next year, even less to follow that and then it all stopped in April this year.

I have written before that I don't need a reason for this. I write here when I feel like it for my own amusement. I am the sort of a cove whose interests vary as time go along. Blogging was getting boring. It all started as a commentary on New Zealand's apology for a leading newspaper. This was a thinly veiled excuse to provide a vehicle for me to vent my spleen on the then sitting Labour Government. I don't do hatred - it is bad for my mental well being - but Clark and Cullen are the nearest I get to hating anything. They are truly the nauseating embodiment of a philosophy I cannot abide. A philosophy built on envy, lack of principal and, in those two wastrels, a lust for power at any price. Fighting for equal rights for the ordinary New Zealander? Yeah right; I did not come down with the last shower of rain - and it is raining now. As is typical of despotic powerful leaders they departed leaving absolutely nothing to fill the void. You don't encourage a strong succession stream; construct a vacuum behind you. There is nothing in a vacuum, especially a threat to one's power, as the Goof and Co. amply illustrate. That very simple principle is in the first lecture of Despot 101. But I'm in a good mood and they are long gone; no point in getting myself nasally dislocated for no reason.

I also stopped penning bits and pieces as I had (still have) a change in employment circumstances which make it prudent for me to be a little circumspect as to what I put into the public domain. I am not a scaredy cat but, to extend the feline analogy, I see no point in pulling the tiger's whiskers. So there will be nothing from me about the entirely delightful demise of that useless wretch, Chris Carter. Oops, there I go I've called him a useless wretch. I can't get into too much strife telling the truth, can I? I see I called him as a waste of space in 2006; what a prescient beast I am. No comment from here on the shameful way in which the only reason to watch Breakfast TV in a Wellington hotel once a week was given the bum's rush. No comment here lambasting those who see offence in telling the truth. No, none of that.

This blog will undergo a phoenix like, and maybe ephemeral, rise from the ashes for about a month - for starters. Reason? I'm off on me travels again and the most pleasure I've got from this blog over the years has been chronicling my overseas trips. These have usually been fairly short forays to septic land to attend conferences. It has amused to jot down musings concerning America (which I think I dislike) and the denizens of big airports and aeroplanes (both of which I like enormously).

Tomorrow at seriously dark o'clock (0320) I will drive the Jag out of Obald Acres to catch the tin budgie to Brisbane. To follow will be the best part of a month away from home with the most western port of call being Dublin. I am giving the land of Uncle Sam the swerve and most of the time will be in the UK. This whole extravaganza is not a jaunt, I can assure you, but definitely in the putting food on the table department. I travel with some very cool transcription software for the iPhone and MacBook Pro a myriad of reports to write. I travel with what passes as a brain in sponge mode during the daylight hours and analytical mode after dark and in those seemingly unending hours spent in a pressurised tube over unpronounceable parts of the globe.

I travel with a sense of foreboding at the magnitude of the piece of work in front of me. There are a few bright spots on the horizon. The tingling anticipation as to which sectors my upgrade request will be fulfilled. Wet'n'Wild on the Gold Coast (if they haven't got one I want my money back), watching the AB's dick England on a mate's telly in Cirencester. But mainly I am a little apprehensive as to whether I can make a good fist of the huge task that lies before me.

A few minutes a few times a week taking the piss out of fat ladies, stupid regulations, too many people, security cameras, Uncle Tm Cobly and all won't go amiss.

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Decade's end

New Year's Eve and I sit down feeling obliged to pen some words of wisdom and/or wit to mark the passing of the noughties. Have to be in the fields today for any emergency hay cutting that is required ( routine paddock topping or RoundUp application canned until after the silly season) and as there is none in the offing I have the morning stretching in front of me in a sea of potential boredom waiting for something to happen at the same time hoping it doesn't.

A paragraph on the woes of the world? Can't be bothered. The only thing of recent note that struck a chord is that the wallies in the US Transport Safety Authority have made my mind up for me as to whether I go to New Orleans in May for my annual trip to Septic Land. Forget it. Their knee jerk closing the dunnie door after the explosive hasn't bolted reaction to Underpants Bomber has made my mind up for me. If you think I am going to go to the airport even earlier for the privilege of being body searched just to go to the States you have another think coming. Not allowed to leave your seat during the last hour of all flights to the States? Seas of urine in the aisles. No blankets on your knee? We won't go there. No access to your hand luggage? What they really want is for the whole world to travel to the USA (if they have to do this at all) naked with no carry on bags at all. No, I think I'll go to Belgium in June instead. There's a logical non sequitor if ever there was.

Helen Clark getting a New year's honour? No, I'm in a good mood and I don't want to dwell on that. Hearing the dreaded voice on the electric wireless just now almost had me choking on my toothpaste.

The Aussies thrashing the Pakis? As predictable as the sun rising in the East which is in stark contrast to England giving SA a six of the best, trousers down in Durban. And we have no international cricket here at all. A diet of domestic one day drivel to get us into the right frame of mind for .............Bangladesh. Spare me.

Marlin being caught in small numbers at the end of December? And not just in Mercury Bay. Also a few (a very few) decent sized yellowfin tuna appearing. Nothing to get excited about just yet as my first piscatorial trip is still probably five weeks away. Still it tells you summer really is here. But I knew that anyway as my big lawn inexorably turns itself from pristine manicured greenness to scruffy looking unwatered brownness, my water tanks equally inexorably empty and the arrival of the water truck gets ever closer.

Enough of this. I think we will end with some very amusing silliness. These are a bunch of adverts that didn't make it to press for a beer in the UK called Spitfire, the 'Bottle of Britain'. Not used because of likelihood to cause offence or some other such tosh. Perhaps it is relevant to the past decade after all - this is the sort of very clever amusing stuff we should be having more of and the touchy feely tossers that rule our lives these days can sod off.

And my favourite

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One trick ponies

Why is Dire Straits not regarded as one of the best rock bands ever? I reckon it is because Mark Knopfler is a one trick pony. Once you've heard 'Sultans of Swing' you've heard 'Tunnel of Love' and also 'Brothers in Arms' which has the same guitar solos as 'Romeo and Juliet'. Eric Clapton or David Gilmour could do many fings with a guitar and thus Pink Floyd, Cream, Derek and the Dominoes, Blind Faith still have 5 star ratings in the iTunes Playlists whereas poor old Mark never climbs out of the 4 star morass. It is very easy to be good at one thing but to have lasting impact in more than, say, being able to fit four golf balls in your mouth you have to be good at lots of things. The world long driving champion ain't never going to make it on the PGA tour. Nor for that matter is the World Putting Champion (there is such a beast). In fact in the latter tourney there is a bloke who consistently finishes in the top ten who putts in bare feet - with his feet. Woods T. however is the all round package. He is O for awesome at everything wot a round of golf throws at you including, and indeed especially, thinking.

I have recognised before that when this blog was spitting out five posts a week that it was a one trick pony. Poor scorn and vitriol on anything left wing, touchy feely (politically correct if you must) and the bollocks that is anthropogenic global warming and there you go, another five hundred words. I bored of it and I reached that point bout a year ago. This coincided with the change in government so all was good. The wastrels that were wrecking our country didn't need daily outpourings of my opprobrium any more. I was happy to retreat into occasional comments on large fish, lawn mowers and the decline of country that coloured the global map pink.

It therefore gave me great pleasure to read in yesterday's Sunday paper that I am not alone in thinking that one of the global success stories of TV is a one trick pony. I watch Top Gear every week but I am tiring of it. I have bought two of Jeremy Clarkson's books. Both at airports (I mean where else would you do this - hardly the stuff to read anywhere else but on a long plane journey) and I didn't finish the second. Read Clarkson on anything and you've read him on everything. Don't get me wrong he is amusing and some of his lines are very funny. The idea of a Roller having a wood burning stove and a chimney as a heater is droll in the extreme. But that is about it. Thus it is with his TV show. The challenges are getting more contrived and are boring. I am fed up with watching Clarkson putting three years tyre wear on Italian sports cars in ten minutes. The Hamster is a (small) meaningless distraction. James May can still amuse but even he is getting a bit ho hum.

It was therefore with a sense of duty that I sat down to watch Top Gear last night. A sense of relief, perhaps that this was to be the last of the series. I can do something more productive with my Sunday evenings for the rest of the summer (if it ever arrives). Same old, same old. Jay Leno was a bit different from a lead singer in a boy band I suppose and I knew he owned loadsa cars, but 150?

Oh well another series of Top Gear over. And then the last five minutes. Disregard all the above. I can forgive Clarkson's bullying of everyone around him. I can forgive his belittling James May at every turn. All his oafishness is nothing if he can give me the last five minutes of last night's show. Him driving the V12 Vantage around Scotland with virtually no commentary was just sensational. 'You put 510hp in Aston Martin's smallest body shell. Well what do you expect'. The softly delivered (for a change) lament on the predicted demise of automotive excess was right on the money. Absolutely fabulous.

However even if similarly engined and equipped with ceramic brakes as standard it is still not as pretty as a proper Aston

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Lets get serious with the power tools, shall we?

I'm not talking cordless drills here. Nor yet are we going to be looking at bench grinders or lathes. Regular visitors to these ramblings will be well aware that we relocated to the country eighteen months ago and this opened many new areas where I could use the internal combustion engine to look after the property and wreck the planet all in one go.

I have written before about the joys of lawn mowing and the various beasts I had assembled around me for this very pleasurable pastime. Cutting the lawn is a pain in the bum with one of these:

I really cannot imagine why anyone would part with money to buy such a stupid bit of kit to even mow a lawn the size of a snooker table. But if you get some serious power assist things are really quite fun. My lawn mowing has changed a bit recently. Until a couple of weeks back my high end machine was this:

Shibaura SE4000 orchadised tractor running a three rotor 500 series Fieldmaster park mower. All very nice in a 42 horsepower sort of a way. But not really ideal for my property. On reflection I only cut grass like this because I had a tractor. It was beautifully noisy, very slow and had a turning circle of about a hundred yards. For reasons we needn't go into but involve inappropriate metal fatigue I decided to get rid of this and get something much more fun.

I now mow with one of these:

A Walker Super Bee with a 27 HP Kohler motor running a 60" deck. Faster than the tractor and parkmower, gives a better finish than the park mower and really is a 'zero turn ' machine. You can mow around a matchstick. It's not very noisy though.

However mowing is not the point of this post. If you glance back at the picture of the tractor you will see a very ragged and somewhat thinning shelterbelt in the background. Our property was once an orchard (kiwifruit) and although the vines were ripped out about four years ago we are left with the shleterbelts. And very nice they are as well. They really do shelter and give us a lot of privacy. However these things grow (trees do that, I read it in a book) and they need trimming as is evident from the picture above - and that was taken three months ago. I reckon I have about a kilometre of shelter belt that needs trimming (both sides and top) and I was not about to do that with a standard hedge trimmer was I? In fact I wasn't going to do it at all. After a lot of searching I found the shelterbelt trimmer man. He came and gave a quote and said he would arrive on Wednesday and he did.

Now I knew these blokes had cool bits of kit, but not this cool. He fronts up with one of these:

Four sodding great circular saws on a stick. In fact my bloke had five. 200HP tractor, clutch in the PTO and its all on for young and old. Noisy as all hell and and he's driving around with about thirty feet of mobile whirring death and destruction at his beck and call. I was scared fifty metres away from it. Once it gets up to its target it is just controlled arboreal mayhem. Fan-bloody-tastic. Branches the size of your thigh scythed off like bum fluff on a fifteen year old's chin. Branches and leaves flying through the air but mainly just lying compliantly on the ground at the foot of the hedge. Bits of conifer lying all over the shop - I've found trimmings thirty metres from the hedge. This wondrous Israeli bit of genius had all my trimming done in four hours. I have never seen anything like it. Trimming man then takes the cutting head off the tractor and puts a huge mulching mower on and reduces that which was hedge but half an hour ago into so much compost. At day's end he gives you an invoice and then drives off taking all his tree murdering kit with him with a cheery wave of the hand and 'I'll see you in two years'. Most fun couple of grand I've spent in ages.

Now he's gone it looks as though a marauding horde of Visigoths have been here for the afternoon - the place is a mess. But no matter, I reckon half a day wandering round with my weedy 6HP chipper and an air broom will have the place looking all ship shape again.

The Lotto people have an advert running along the lines of 'What would you do if you won this weekend?' Trips to Disney Land, buy a house for mum, leave work - all the usual suspects. Forget it, I know what I would do. I would have my shelterbets trimmed every week.

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Slack blogger - enforced (sort of)

I spoke to friend of mine yesterday on the electric telephone concerning matters of rural machinery. This subject may yet merit a post by itself. He mentioned that he had just checked this blog to look for updates over the last couple of weeks to find there were none. I don't associate with dullards.

Do I make excuses for this? Of course not. I will write as and when I see fit and as well as being very busy on returning from the Northern Hemisphere both at work and at home I have for the first time in my life suffered from an acute back strain.

Have there been things that have stirred the interest? Well sort of. The ACC business. I know what I would do and it is basically make ACC live up to its name and no more. This is the problem. It would appear to have morphed from being an insurance scheme into an arm of the welfare system - as if that hydra needed any more tentacles. A nonagenarian who apparently was the principal author of the scheme in the dim mists of time stuck his head above the parapet and said that when he was doing a spot of chin stroking an arm of the welfare state was what he intended. If this is so (and he didn't appear to have the memory loss people of his age are sometimes afflicted with) he needs a good old fashioned six of the best, trousers down. The changes being proposed are bad in only one regard in that they don't seem to go far enough. An excess to stop trivial claims should be instigated tomorrow. And sod the whining from the victims of society - their time expired a year ago. Screening rights for the Rugby World Cup.? Who gives a rat's arse. It is all going to be on Sky anyway. I can't wait to see an increase in the car crushers traffic - Nissan Skylines are a blot on the landscape. Not much else amuses.

Backache. My attitude to people with acute back ache had been for years that there was nothing going on that couldn't be treated with a couple of harden up pills and a cup of tea. Well, I have to say that this stance has softened a little - but I fully expect it to return when I am completely symptom free which I have pencilled in for tomorrow afternoon. My acute discomfort was bought about not by a sudden catastrophic episode but by an afternoon of tree felling and lifting of resulting lumber into a trailer. After this not world shattering exertion the evening found me a little uncomfortable. I came to leap out of bed full of the joys of spring (sic) the following morning and I couldn't. Never known anything like it. I could not sit up in bed. Really very unpleasant pain In the corset region precluded bending at the waist at all. I rolled onto the floor and struggled to an upright posture with the aid of the nightstand and things got a bit better.

I soon found that any activity that could be accomplished lying flat or standing upright was easy. But anything that involved even five degrees of flexion at the waist was impossible. The pain from para vertebral spasm is bloody awful. I struggle through work taking harden up pills (they don't work) and COX2 inhibitors (about as much use as a chocolate teapot). I get Mrs O to apply Votaren Emugel as advertised in those dreadful infomercials that screen between Andrew Saville and Jim Hickey. This muck is also as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike. I struggle through a day off just lying in bed feeling useless - which I was - but had to return for a day's toil in the fields the next day. Here things started getting a whole better when one of my minders suggested I get serious with the analgesia. I knew she was right. My views on painkillers are that if the proffered pill didn't start its life as a poppy I'm not interested. So a few days on a chemically unrelated but equally efficacious mate to morphine saw me turn the corner.

You know things are getting a whole lot better when you don't wish for velcro on your shoes and are reaching for the tramadol for its buzz as opposed to its analgesia. We are over all this now and golf looms for the weekend - as long as it doesn't rain.

So as I am feeling better and the agony of this time last week fades into the mists of time I have only one thing to say to anyone who comes up to me and says 'I can't do that 'cos me back hurts'.

Harden the f*** up.

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Off to Europe

First decent overseas trip for a couple of years as I decided against my annual time with Uncle Sam in May. Off to Europe; which is not a thing I would have written when the event that prompts the trip occurred in 1969. The United Kingdom was certainly not Europe at that time. Wogs started at Dover and Grocer Heath was still years away from leading Blighty into the Common Market as it was then . General DeGaulle, owner of the biggest nose in history, was still saying 'Non' at every opportunity. A trip to France in the late 1960s was proper going overseas and not the trip to the hypermarket in Calais to stock upon Stella Artois it has now become.

In September 1969 word was just beginning to filter into the UK via the pages of the New Musical Express that a fairly big popular music concert had been a greater success than envisaged in upstate New York. There was no other way of finding out about Woodstock. I watched a few minutes news footage on the black and white telly at home prior to taking the District Line to Paddington station. I and seventy three like minded pimply youths (including, I think, fourteen youthettes) walked up Praed Street to start Medical School.

There followed four and a half years (we were considered cooked in that time in the seventies) of various things that culminated in 1974 with possession of medical qualification at the age of twenty two. Why did I chose St Mary's Hospital Medical School out of the thirteen similar establishments available in London at that time? They had a swimming pool under the library. I could discern no other difference between the various establishments offering the same degrees on the basis of a cursory two hour sixth form visit. Thus in September 1969 I received a library card which said it expired in May 1974. It might as well have said expires in 2074. 1974 was beyond my comprehension.

It soon became apparent that completing the course with the required qualification was pretty much guaranteed and that the rigours of study would not be overburdening. It was thus easy to live in the middle of London, enjoy all the delights it offered in the late 1960s/early 1970s and get a degree thrown in at the end. It was even free. Local council paid all the fess and even gave a living allowance. Four hundred and fifty quid per annum as I recall which was ample.

So what followed? Four and a half years of Mickeys, the Taqdir, the Dilshad, the Founts, the Little Western, Santinis, water polo, ULU tours to Germany and Holland (proper abroad remember), Wilson House, Stealing street furniture, beer, the key to the nurses home, afternoons at Lords instead of ophthalmology, rugby, Crystal Palace, summer afternoons at Teddington, car pooling in mini utes, Golf at Moor Park, summer evenings at the City Barge, the Darts Club, Minfordd, Green Line buses to psychiatry residence, obstetrics at Welwyn Garden City and a realisation that life out of school was better than life in school. But over and above all that was the lasting friendship of the best bunch of mates a bloke could have. Mates that would, and have done, last a lifetime.

Thus forty years after entering University a dozen of us are going on a golf tour of Lancashire. God knows why Lancashire but it does include rounds at Royal Lytham & St Annes. It also includes staying in Blackpool so there are ups and downs to the deal. Some of the twelve I have seen as recently as two years ago.The Best Man at my wedding I have not seen for over twenty years. There are a couple I haven't clapped eyes on since 1974.

Much looking forward to this. The Ping Rapture V2s are in the care of Malayasian Airlines ('cos they had a very cheap 'up the front of the plane' deal about six months ago) and I am in the newly revamped Koru Lounge at Auckland Airport awaiting the off.

I'll try and be an as regular correspondent as I can but I have golf tournament to win.

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Snow Leopard

I am a tad disappointed I must say. Snow Leopard leaped out of his lair last weekend and I was a little miffed that he was not that easy to trap in The Land of the Long White Tiny Market. Not surprised that the States got their copies before us but a little miffed.

However I tracked a copy down yesterday and installed him on the 24" iMac over the top of Leopard. One false start with the 'gear wheel' spinning for an hour before I gave up on it and hard rebooted with 'C' held down as instructed by several people world wide who had had similar experiences. After that installation was a breeze taking about 45 minutes. The machine certainly boots faster but the speed difference in the rest of the programs is not blowing me away. None of my data was lost right down to bookmarks and song ratings. All good. Stable? Well so far - but Macs aren't bloody PCs and don't crash anyway.

So what is there to moan about in a new operating system that only costs $59? I can't mount one of my USB external hard drives. No idea why not. I've lost a load of old friends as they either aren't 64 bit yet or are never going to be. Cocoa Gestures is gone forever. The Widemail plugin don't work in Mail 4.0 and this really pisses me off as I've lost my three column mail view which works really well on a large monitor. There is hope as I may get this back in a day or two when the idle toad who writes the code that costs me nothing pulls finger and gets it finished. But the worst is the slow demise of Quicksilver. I really have come to rely on this and it is hamstrung big time with most of its plugins buggered and the rumour mill saying that it is never likely to return to its glory days. This on the back of the author eschewing the glory of writing a great program for no money in favour of writing stuff for Google for eye watering amounts of dosh. I'm trying Launchbar at the moment and will give Butler a go as well.

I'm convinced Snow Leopard is a good idea but I think I am being bitten by a classic case of jumping in too early in the first few days of a software upgrade.

I'll be waiting before unleashing SL on my MacBook Pro.

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40 years on the road

I like cars.

I've owned many cars over the years. The first car I really wanted was one of these.

It might even have been this poster that got me started. The open highway, the road already conquered receding at a rate of knots in the rear view mirror, the speed (I mean that looks fast even in a painting), the young lady, (she should be wearing a headscarf of course) - the whole idea of a Jaguar sports car had me in its grasp.

But most seventeen year olds don't start their motoring career in a two seater Jag and I was no different. I did not buy an XK150 as my starter for ten but in 1968 lashed out £25 for an Austin A35

This grey is even the colour of of my first automoblie although mine was never as shiny as the one illustrated. Also the one in the picture seems to be missing the brown trimmed holes in the door sills I thought came as standard on this model. I re-engined this with a BMC GoldSeal engine which cost me £17 15s 0d after I snapped the crankshaft in the original engine. Engine changeover done with washing line over a plum tree - OSH would be pleased. I used to run this car a lot of the time on a paraffin/petrol mix 'cos it was cheaper than all petrol and I had no dosh. Ran like a dog in this mode (but it ran) and needed decoking every four weeks or so. Used to make gaskets out of postcards and candle wax. Happy days - or at least I thought they were then. Looking back on it it now it seems a rather daft way to go motoring.

Had four and a half years at University in the middle of London when I didn't need a car (and couldn't afford one) and it was of no concern to me that the Austin had fallen to bits. Even the GoldSeal engine couldn't get around on four wheels, a hundred weight of bog and nothing else. Don't know which dump it ended up on.

Next car was a Minivan.

Mine was white - well sort of. I can't remember why I bought such a heap of junk (and mine certainly was) but I strongly suspect it was because it was astonishingly cheap. Note the air vent which I used to tell people (especially those of the female persuasion) was a sunroof. I left the UK at about this time; this was not entirely because I owned such a crap car. I thought I had sold the white Mini van before I left. When a year later my Dad was still getting parking tickets for it from all sorts of unlikely locations across London it was obvious that the white rust bucket had joined the realms of the undead. I think Dad killed it with a barrage of letters to Councils - or a stake through the heart or something.

Whilst in Papua New Guinea for a couple of years I owned no cars but had a Honda 125 trail bike.

This rusted away before my very eyes as I lived on the coast and drove it on roads (when there were any) made of crushed coral. Although I didn't own a car during this period I would often requisition a short wheel base Toyota Land Cruiser from the Public Works Department car pool for the weekend - as you do when you have a government driving permit.

I could have equally taken a grader or a road roller but they were a bit hard to parallel park.

Arrived back in London one Saturday morning and by tea time I had bought a Volkswagen Golf from virtually the first car showroom I could find. I needed wheels.

Mine was orange - how 70's is that?. This car was a bit of a landmark for me. It wasn't new (I am only one car away from that automotive nirvana) but was the first car I had owned that looked as though it wouldn't fall to bits before the end of the week. It also had a radio. This was bloody marvellous and I spent most of the late summer of 1977 tooling around the British roads listening to Test cricket. Still not much traffic in the late 70's and '77 was a good summer. An open road with John Arlott, Brian Johnston, The Boil, The Alderman and FS Trueman. It doesn't get much better. Well it could have as I test drove a Porsche 911 about three weeks after buying the Golf. It scared the living daylights out of me and I hung onto the other German car for a few months longer. A decision that probably saved my life.

Time to buy a new car. Not just new to me but new to anybody. What did I chose? A black one of these.

This was great. Me first tasty motor. Looked the business (just look at those twin headlights), quite quick, easy to drive and even smelled new. I loved it and it took me about three months to write it off. Not my fault your honour, honest. I was driving to work in the winter and a tractor couldn't stop as it tried to brake on an ice covered drive coming out of a farm and slipped sideways into a line of rush hour traffic. This was the only time in my life that I have won a lucky draw. Although I say wrote the Alfa off I didn't really as the bloody insurance company refused to declare it a total loss as it was so new and insisted on repairing it. Ratbags. After a long time at the panel beaters the black Italian was returned looking almost as good as before - but not quite. However it never drove at all well again and I wanted it gone. So go it did.

It was at about this time that Mrs Obald came along and she came complete with one of these.

The Citroen Dyane is the upmarket version (sic) of the 2CV. A bit like saying a Swan Vesta box is the upmarket version of a standard matchbox. Enthusiasts for these cars (and there are such permanently chemically altered fools around) laud the praises of these people's cars. They are wrong; they're garbage. This was my first encounter of the folly of buying a car on shape alone. I was to fall for this beguiling ruse myself some ten years later. I was not in the slightest bit disappointed when this bit of froggy junk left our presence to be employed driving a sewing machine - a task it should never have left in the first place.

Being as I'm a reasonable sort of a bloke I couldn't stand for SWMBO walking to work so a replacement for the French rubbish was required. As I was in my Italian phase we went for one of these.

Fiat X19 with styling (it really did have some) by Bertone. Only four colours available; silver, ice blue, maroon and gold. I chose (?) the gold and was the first car I had owned that had this new fangled metallic paint. This was a great car to drive. Mid engined, weighed about 500 grams and cornered like it was running on railway tracks. It had a targa top that you lifted off and placed in the front where all my cars up to this point had kept their engine. This reduced the luggage carrying capacity of the vehicle from two toothbrushes to one. I was very sorry to see this car go. At about this time I had my first spell of living in the country and first spell of owning a boat and so I had better get one of these as well as the Fiat.

Series III Land Rover 88. This was - well just a Series III Land Rover 88. Looked the part in the country and towed the boat. Practical but no more. But to be fair they were never meant to be anything else. However this was a landmark car for another reason. This was the first time I had owned two cars at the same time. Once you have been to this happy place there is no way back.

Well there is. You move to Singapore and find that cars are so bloody expensive that owning two is the equivalent of owning two super yachts. The burgeoning car pool is reduced quickly to this.

Back to earth with a thump alright. You think you are making progress up the automotive stairway to heaven and you find yourself buying a Mazda 323. Well it was new. And it had a radio. No, you're right, it was horrible. Another child arrives and we move up (sic) to this.

This is as painful to type as it must be to look at. This Nissan Sunny Estate (did I really own a Nissan? I mean the new GTR is technically a great car but that doesn't stop it being a bloody Nissan) although ghastly from an aesthetic and street cred point of view did serve us well. I must say that as it is true, but I hated this car.

Back to being two car family with a big mistake.

I thought the Saab 900i looked really cool. Maybe somewhere in the recesses of what I pass off as a mind I still do - no matter. So I bought a second hand one. There's two mistakes right there. Buy a car on looks alone and buy second hand. My wife told me not to do it and, as usual, she was right. For not the first time I ignored her sage advice and went ahead. The car I bought was a sort of dog vomit brown so I poured good money after bad and had it resprayed a very nice bluey grey. Right, the car now looked OK but it was an electrical disaster. The big heavy metal bits seemed to go round and work alright but all the electrical string just used to smell of burning (because it often was), give off smoke and make strange lights come on (or more usually off) at random times. Be very careful; these people make aeroplanes.

After this experimental dabble in the second hand market I listened to SWMBO and bought new again. Back on track again here with this.

Peugeot 205 GTI. I had the 1.6 litre as they didn't bring the 1.9 into Singapore. Great car - or it was until I forget to get the timing belt routinely changed before it snapped. A couple of bucks if you do it on a regular, change it whatever sort of basis. If you do it my way and change the belt after it snaps it costs thousands of dollars. One disadvantage of running a 16 valve engine is that if all 16 crash into the pistons that is how many you have to replace - 16. Despite this the 205 GTI was one of the best cars I've owned.

The bloody Sunny was ten years old and in Singapore terms that means it is off to the crusher for you. Couldn't happen to a nicer car. SWMBO replaced that with a Mitsubishi Space Wagon which she loved.

I'd had the Peugeot for a while. A while on my automotive timescale is about two and a half years and it was time for a change. I swapped one really fun car for one that was even more fun. I bought two really good cars in a row.

The Mazda Miata as it was called when I bought one (red of course). No one calls them Miata these days and they only answer to MX5. Best handling car I had owned since the Fiat X19 nearly twenty years earlier.

Time to leave Singapore and repair to the Land of the Long White Jap Import. Briefly dallied with my most recent (I'd love to write last but I wouldn't be so presumptious) motoring error.

What ever possessed me to buy a car this large with a 2.4 litre power plant is beyond me. It couldn't tow the skin off a rice pudding let alone a decent sized trailer boat. As boat towing was supposed to be one of its prmary functions it had to go. The Previa was replaced with a proper tow vehicle. In fact it was so proper I've had a couple of them. Not at the same time you understand.

The Toyota Land Cruiser is right up there in the best cars I have owned stakes. Excellent bit of kit. Well that's the boat towing and kid ferrying department sorted. What have I used to get to and from the fields?

Well I've had a couple of these.

A 1.8 litre and then a 2.6 litre. OK I suppose and initially bought becaus the A4 is not a 3 series BMW. The 1.8 was bit gutless and so hence the 2.6. I really quite enjoyed the Audis but there were plans afoot - vide infra.

The kids no longer needed ferrying and wanted to do the driving themselves. I left SWMBO to organise this. You know, Mum would know what sort of cars daughters would like - this sort of thing.

To say I was somewhat surprised when a purple one of these turned up at home would be an understatement. Me 'What size engine does that have in it?'. SWBMO 'Don't know'. Me '4 litres'. SWMBO 'Is that good?'. Me 'Have you tried insuring a four litre car for a sixteen year old?' Its four wheel driving qualities are not over exagerated; you could drive it up the side of a house. However comfortable it is not and frugal on fuel it is not - as if I cared. However it is the car that I have owned the longest ever in my car owning career; I've had it eleven years now and it is still used daily. Practice what I preach; even my wife has a four litre run about.

When it came to second daughter's car I thought I had better get a bit more hands on to head the Hummer off at the pass. Can't complain about the result - it is even quite agreeable to drive

Nearly thirty years after buying a VW Golf I get another one. This car is still around. With the kids now driving themselves and the my trailer boating days over there is no need for a big tow wagon so I no longer own a Land Cruiser and we are back down to three vehicles.

The Audi A4s were OK but remember where all this started?

How could I resist one of these after all those years?

Well I couldn't so I bought one. I've had the XKR since 2000 and apart from the Jeep (and the Sunny if you insist) is the only car I've ever owned for more than a couple of years. I love it and use it as my day to day car. I mean who couldn't enjoy driving to the fields with this lot under the bonnet.

Huge wheels, bigger tyres, f. off brakes, computer aided suspension, leave the traction control on as the 'bigger tyres' aren't given away with a packet of Weetbix, terrific sound system. Turn the Harman Kardon down a bit if you want to hear the whine of the supercharger as you roar past a stock truck. Love it. Nothing you can't overtake. And I've only fallen foul of the speed nazis once in nine years - and that was for 72 kph. What an embarassment.

There is only one place to go from here.

Not this week. I waited thirty five years for the Jag........

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