Striking out off the path...

This blog has moved to a new host, here:

http://themakingprogressblues.wordpress.com/

It started as a biking blog, then became a kind of biking blog, and then morphed into...well I'm not sure.
I think this place has hit something of an identity crisis. I've decided to try to start somewhere new, and in a slightly different style, although it may well end up as the same thing in a different format.
I very much hope you'll all still feel it's worth reading and I will look forward, genuinely, to your views if you're kind enough to follow me there.
If not, I want to say a heart-felt thank you for your time and your messages.
We know other blogs are available and you have a choice in your reading - thank you for flying Progress Blues and if you're catching another blog from here please remember there's no smoking until you're outside the terminal building.

Each Day A Small Victory

“In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility: but when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage!” 

 The train now approaching Platform…Two is the oh-seven…twenty service to…London Paddington. This train has…seven…coaches. First Class is at the…front…of the train. Platform…Two for the oh-seven…twenty service to…London Paddington.

Men and women pawing at the ground in expectation, nostrils flared, casting fearful glances at their objective, breathing deeply, trying to show no fear as their fellows look on.

And then, suddenly, it dawns: a seven coach train, not an eight! All the careful, innocent “I hope nobody notices what I’m doing and does the same” positioning is thrown to the winds. The buffet car is 30 feet too far down the platform!

The Devil take order now! I’ll to the throng: let life be short else shame will be long! 

Abandon the pretence for the hunt is up! Rush now, in a rapid duck-like waddle so as not to show you care so much you’ll actually run! Block, lean, shove, obstruct! Women and children to the back, the elderly must take their chances amongst the young. Bags swinging to create space, furtive glances at others – none shall pass!

And in, panting, crushed, but surely, surely ten feet nearer a £2.15 cup of watery coffee and some, whisper it, may even have got a seat. A seat. A hallowed seat. Victory! Now may you hold the eye of your fellow, left standing, and in his faltering glance know your might. Quail, serf, for I am a better commuter than thou. Oh yes.

“Comest thou again for ransom?”

No, great king: I come to thee for charitable licence, that we may wander o'er this bloody field to look our dead, and then to bury them; to sort our nobles from our common men. For many of our princes--woe the while!-- lie drown'd and soak'd in mercenary blood; so do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs in blood of princes; and their wounded steeds fret fetlock deep in gore and with wild rage yerk out their armed heels at their dead masters, killing them twice. O, give us leave, great king, to view the field in safety and dispose of their dead bodies!

“I tell thee truly, herald, I know not if the day be ours or no.”

The day is yours.

“Praised be God, and not our strength for it! What call they the castle that stands on yonder hill?”

Didcot Railway Museum, my liege.

“Then call we this the Field of Didcot Railway Museum. Fought on the day of Crispin Crispianus.”

I was there, but I shall not, on the feast of Crispin Crispianus, strip my sleeve and show my scars, for I did not fight with Harry that day. I am always there, but I am not one of them. I shall, God willing, never be one of them.

That's All From Us, Now Over To You

Today I am demanding that we are all excluded.

Shut out.

Ignored.

What do I mean? I am speaking of TV and radio producers’ obsession with “interactive” content. Or, in English, putting the Great British Public on air and asking it to tell itself what it thinks. 

Imagine for a moment you walked into your local bookshop. “I’m looking for a book on the rise of Christian fundamentalism in Republican politics”, you say to the chap at the counter. “Ah, yes Sir,” he says. “We have this, which is by a traffic warden who lives above the chip shop next door or, if you’re looking for a more academic read, there’s this, which is written in the margins of yesterdays Daily Mail in Biro and was dropped in this morning by a bloke who’d spent five hours in the Weatherspoons over the road – it’s got a bit of sick on but you can still read it.”

You’d walk out, of course, but this is effectively what makes up about 50% of BBC Radio 5 Live content. The formula is simple: identify the issue of the day and then open the phone lines to allow “ordinary people” to offer their views on it. TV is exactly the same and whilst all broadcasters are at it, the BBC seems to have caught the bug worse than anyone else.

When I want to listen to analysis of an issue or news story, I generally have one major requirement: that the analyst knows more about than I do. That he or she can explain it to me clearly, accurately, and, in an ideal world, help me understand it better. I don’t even need impartiality, a searingly one-sided analysis is fine, so long as the person making it is trying to argue their case openly.

What I don’t need on, say, a discussion about whether a second term Obama  administration would be more or less radical, is: “Er...hello? Right. Erm. Yeah. Coz it’s like, you know....” et cetera ad infinitum ad nauseum.

Am I being a snob? Do  I only wish to hear from “educated” people about affairs of the day? Categorically not. The key word is not “educated” but “informed”.

Part of the problem here is the BBC’s (very genuine) terror of being accused (mostly by itself) of “elitism”. This stems from the fact that it’s run by a cabal of expensively educated Oxbridge graduates who are, absolutely, an elite, but whose liberal politics reject the concept. The poor things are so conflicted but bless them for trying to ensure the debate happens at your level, not theirs which, clearly, they think you wouldn’t understand – an ironically elitist stance if ever there was one.

Consequently we see this determined attempt to talk like “the man in the street” everywhere, including in sport, where the likes of Alan Shearer are paid £500,000 of your money to explain to you that a centre forward will have been “disappointed” to have missed an open goal. Laughably simplistic? Yes. On a level your five-year-old could manage? Yes. But elitist? Clearly not.

 Of course the second reason BBC programmes are packed with Shirley from Daventry and Mike from Swansea is that the producers hope they’ll say something Pete from Glasgow and Jane from Winchester will violently disagree with, causing them to phone up themselves to say so in the hope of ensuring that Dave from Truro and Anne from Norwich aren’t persuaded of the formers’ original points.

And they do, of course, because they’re stupid, or bored, or perhaps bored and stupid.

I have a solution, though. Every Head of Department at the BBC should, when holding dinner or lunch parties at their houses in N1, be forced to invite six random people plucked from the streets. They and their friends can then enjoy the opinions of “orninary people” in the same way as the rest of us who pay their wages do every time we click the “on” button on the car radio. I suspect that would resolve the problem fairly quickly.

Loyalty Is As Loyalty Does

Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old US Army private charged with passing 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables to the Wikileaks organisation, has become something of a cause celebre amongst “transparency” campaigners.

Quite what a transparency campaign is I’m not clear – but so far as I can tell these are people who think nothing should be secret, no view shrouded, no information kept from anyone. Presumably many have time to devote to this since being divorced by the partner they regularly told was fat/bald/ugly/stupid in the interests of complete disclosure.

So, the stage has been set. For Manning’s supporters it is a classic David v Goliath scenario, with Iraq veteran Manning, a slight, softly-spoken army intelligence analyst, versus the evils of the industrial-military complex. One man and his principles against the System.

So far as can be ascertained, Manning is not claiming any kind of mental deficiency. Prosecutors have alleged that he did what he did on a point of principle, and thus far Manning’s defence team have not disputed that (although he is yet to enter a plea to the 22 charges ranged against him, stringing the trial process out even further). He has also, it is said, been “confused” about his sexuality and gender – thus making him the perfect standard bearer for many on the Left in their crusade against the forces of darkness.

Moreover, they point out, these were not deadly intelligence secrets that Manning leaked but diplomatic tittle-tattle which, whilst deeply embarrassing for the US Government (and others, including the Saudis, it turns out), never harmed anyone.

The problem with all this talk of principles and the intelligence value of the data Manning leaked, though, is it doesn’t matter. Manning’s supporters are wrong and he should, if there is any justice, go to prison for a very long time. The reason why is very simple.

Bright as he is, Manning was a lowly private soldier. He had no concept of or access to major strategic or tactical intelligence. Whilst it’s disturbing that he should have been in a position to see the scale of information he did each day, he wasn’t seeing agent reports, he wasn’t seeing agency analysis from the CIA or NSA, he wasn’t seeing operational intelligence. He may have been better informed than the average soldier, but he most certainly didn’t know what was going on in terms of the wider intelligence picture.

So how could he know – that’s know, not presume – that he huge amount of data he leaked wouldn’t be dangerous? Not only could he not possibly have read it all, much of it  was leaked “blind”, but even if he did he wouldn’t have known its value. Allow me to explain with a fictitious example...

Let’s presume cable number 204,241 came from the US embassy in Kiev. Let’s presume, like thousands of the real cables Manning leaked, it contained a US Diplomat’s recollection of a conversation she had recently had with a senior official of the government of her host country, in this case The Ukraine. The cable relates how this civil servant joked that his boss, in the department of energy, had been so furious at losing his scientific advisor, who’d resigned that day to join a rich Russian oil exploration firm, that he broke his office door by slamming it; further evidence that his drinking is getting out of control.


Ha ha. Just one of a quarter of a million pieces of useless information.

Unless you’re the Iranian foreign intelligence service, of course.

You have an interest in this scientist, as your own department of energy had been trying to recruit him and you had to check him out in the usual way. You’d given him a clean bill of health, spookery-wise. But something nags. You check the date on the cable, and then make a phone call. An hour later you’ve established that your own country’s approach to this individual came in Berlin, six months after the date on the cable. You also check back and discover that he was still employed by the Ukrainian department of energy – who had themselves confirmed that to their Iranian opposite numbers, and you’d verified it – at the time your colleagues approached him.

So how could he have resigned six months earlier and where had he been for that time? 


Two weeks hard work later you’ve also established he never did go to work for that Russian oil company either. Your boss goes to see his friend, a senior figure at the energy department. Where does the recruitment of this guy sit, he asks? We’re still talking, he tells your boss, but it looks quite promising.

And now, you suspect, you’ve found somebody’s agent – soon to be an agent in place.

I have made this scenario up, and kept it simple, but what is absolutely true is that every intelligence service on the planet will have gone through those leaks with a fine tooth comb. They will have diverted teams to do so. They may even still be doing it.
Why? Because the value of a piece of information is not constant – it fluctuates depending on what the reader already knows. Cross-checking, taking back-bearings, comparing dates, times, places, names set against an intelligence picture vastly superior to anything Bradley Manning had, and vastly superior to that which the rest of us had when we read cable after cable after cable for weeks on end in our newspapers.

I have no idea what damage Manning’s leaks did. I have no idea whether they cost anyone their life. Perhaps they didn’t, but the point is we don’t know and, more importantly, neither does Bradley Manning. Nor did he when he handed over vast swathes of classified data, whilst wearing the uniform of his country’s army.

Manning’s principles matter not a jot – if he is acquitted then the message to others is clear: you are free to take deadly risks with  people you do not know, and have never met, on the basis that your principles are more important than their work, or their very lives.

Manning made his choice, with a flagrant disregard for the safety of others. He must now pay the price.

Desperately Seeking Offence.

I’ve been trying to recall the last time I was offended. You know, the last time somebody said something to me which was so designed to hurt that I was genuinely upset and taken aback.

Pleasingly, I can’t remember. The reason this is pleasing is that I do at least remember that I don’t like being hurt or upset. I don’t like being offended. In fact I hope I’m never offended again.

However, it would appear that in this I may be behind the zeitgeist. The evidence for this is that 31,000 people complained to the BBC about Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson’s comments on public sector strikers (and another 736 complained to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom). 

In world where twisted extremists on left and right regularly spout pseudo-murderous bile, the fact that tens of thousands more people felt moved to complain about Mr Clarkson than ever pick up the phone about the BNP or extreme Islamists must mean that he said something almost beyond belief when he appeared on the BBC’s One Show in November last year. Let’s have a look.

The exchange came as Mr Clarkson was asked his opinion of the people engaged in a day-long industrial action over pensions.

His initial response was: "I think they have been fantastic. Absolutely. London today has just been empty. Everybody stayed at home, you can whizz about, restaurants are empty."

However, he then added: "We have to balance this though, because this is the BBC. Frankly, I'd have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families."

Well that can’t be right can it? That’s clearly nothing more than a fairly poor joke about the need for the BBC to show balance in all its commentary on current affairs. Poor, certainly, but very clearly a joke.

Not according to the Assistant General Secretary of the union UNISON, Bronwyn McKenna, who declared that many of those intending to strike would be scared to do so in case Mr Clarkson’s comments were taken seriously and they were shot (presumably in front of their families but, in fairness to Ms McKenna, she didn’t specify). 

Now only two possibilities exist here.

One – Ms McKenna is suffering from serious and debilitating issues of delusion and paranoia which have left her unable to function as an adult in the real world, in which case we must hope she gets the treatment she so clearly needs and makes a full recovery, or…

Two – She’s being a tit.

In its judgment this week, clearing Mr Clarkson of breaching broadcasting rules, Ofcom said (with a commendably straight face): “It would have been clear to most viewers that his comments were not an expression of seriously held beliefs or views that would be literally interpreted.”

Not, apparently, to almost 32,000 people though; and this brings me back to where I started about being offended. Their interpretation of the word is clearly different to mine. I think it means being shocked by something somebody says, which you perceive them to mean, and to be left upset by it. To them it appears to mean “Here’s a chance for me to be centre stage – I will howl with outrage about this offence until I’m listened to and told my views are important and, whilst I’m at it, attempt to get all my Twitter followers to do the same.”

Unlike me, thousands of people seem to suddenly have taken a perverse delight in being “offended”. They would appear to be sitting through television programmes they loath with gritted teeth, remote in one hand, phone in the other with the BBC’s complaints department on speed dial.

I’m lost as to why. If I find something disagreeable, I avoid watching it. Not a day goes by without comedians on radio and TV saying brutal things about politicians or personalities they don’t like. But because I’m a functioning adult I recognise these are jokes, not a call to arms for the populous to rise up and lynch the subject of the gag.

Mr Clarkson, for whom I carry no particular torch, apologised for any offence he had caused; rightly, I think, as his joke was pretty crass and, more importantly, not very funny.

But to the millions out there who read the initial stories, saw the lunacy of the responses and have now seen the Ofcom judgment, all this does is reinforce a nagging suspicion that not only is the Left institutionally humorless and self-regarding, but also has its priorities all wrong.

I’m reminded of the late, and much missed, Humphrey Lyttelton, who signed off one episode of BBC Radio 4’s “I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue” with the line: “If you’ve been affected by any of the issues raised in tonight’s show, please write to the BBC Helpdesk, Wood Lane, London, clearly marking your envelope ‘lunatic’".

I don’t believe anybody complained.

Know Your Enemy

I remember walking into a military field hospital in Iraq a few years ago and noticing, above a door, a hand-carved sign that read “If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn't have joined”.

Staggering advances in battlefield medicine meant that, within that hospital, were young men with injuries so unimaginably appalling that just five years earlier they’d have been dead before they got near a casualty evacuation.

And yet there was that sign, a uniquely British way of dealing with hideous mental and physical trauma, and often death....cock a snoop at it.

I was gently reminded of that sign when I saw a document recently about how London is going to operate for those of us who live and/or work there during the Olympics. There was much to it but here are the highlights:

• 35 miles of London’s already crushingly congested roads will be shut to us mere workers, reserved instead for athletes, sponsors and VIPs.
• A number of Tube trains at peak times will be closed to we normal folk, reserved for VIPs, Olympic officials and sponsors (so they don’t have to get squished in like we do, poor things).
• Businesses in London, especially in the City and the east side of the capital, will be advised to close their doors and have staff work from home.

So, to summarise: if those of us who work in London try to come to work as usual and, er, work, the entire thing will grind to a halt. Despite their own private lanes to drive on and their own private Tubes to ride on, fat executives from MacDonalds will have to get stuck too, VIP sponsors or not. In other words, the success of the infrastructure element of the Games relies not on the razor-sharp organising skills of those in charge, but the goodwill of Londoners.

And here, I fear, the planners may have over-looked something.

I remember the day the 7/7 bombs went off in London. I remember, in the early evening, standing outside a bar near my north London flat and watching thousands of men and women walking, slowly, past me. Some had probably already done four or five miles. It was the only way to get home. Most were smiling, despite the horrors of that day. Local people were ferrying trays of cold drinks out to them from their houses, and the landlord of the pub kept a steady flow of free half-pints of lager appearing on the table outside, paid for by all of us having stuck money behind the bar.

When it matters Londoners can be absolutely relied upon to display incredible camaraderie, compassion, selflessness and grit (as the deeply moving stories of ordinary people’s heroics that day came to demonstrate). However, when they feel they are being put upon, taken for granted or mistreated I would contend that there are, in this entire world, no buggers more awkward.

“Bollocks”, is what Londoners will say when asked to queue for an hour to get a Tube their taxes pay for because the chaps from Sony don’t want to be late for their Champagne breakfast.

“Sod it”, they’ll probably exclaim, after 45 minutes in stationary traffic watching rotund American Nike executives swan past in chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benzs.

I’ve seen it happen. Crossing Leicester Square last year I heard a commotion. It turned out a number of security personnel, replete in black jeans, black t-shirts (bearing the word “SECURITY”, in case one wasn't sure) and radio earpieces, turning away crowds of commuters trying to get to the Tube station. Why? A film premier. The red carpet was laid in their path. “Go round” was the simple, rude, instruction (that’s round as in three streets round, by the way). Tempers were becoming frayed. Finally, as we arrived, a harmless looking chap in a Macintosh simply said, loudly, “You are a security guard for a film event. You have no legal right to bar my way. You have no more powers than I do. This is a public right of way, and, before you think about it, you have no right to lay hands on me for walking over your red carpet either. You shouldn’t have left it there. I’m getting the Tube. If you choose to assault me for doing so, so be it.”

And off he went. Four security guards leapt in like Ninjas, furious, but, as if he radiated static, none quite felt able to be the first to physically restrain him, or his little briefcase. And the floodgates opened, and through we all went.

Whilst they’re spending millions on air-to-ground anti-aircraft missile installations and retina scanners, I think the Olympic organisers are likely to be derailed not by the terrorists they fear, but by Mr Jones, on his way to the office, to do some important filing.

This lovely British trait, the refusal to conform to silly, bumptious or petty rules, has been under threat since 9/11. Every petty unofficial official in the country now considers themselves on the front line against terror and able to call for police support if so much as questioned (my favorite being the under-cover Westminster Council warden who threatened to call for police back-up when he tried to fine me for dropping a cigarette butt). It is exemplified by Chesterton’s poem “The Rolling English Road”:

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode, 
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. 
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire, 
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire; 
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire, 
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire; 
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed 
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands, 
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run 
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun? 
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch. 
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear 
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage, 
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth, 
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death; 
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, 
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

Quite. And it is the spirit of Chesterton, not Osama bin Laden, I suspect, which will pervade when the bloated, arrogant, get-rich-quick leviathan which is the modern Olympiad arrives in London.

A Man Needs A Thing, Not A Task.

At first glance today’s post should only appeal to petrol-heads and even then just a small proportion of those (if your idea of fun in cars is reading about the latest nickel-plated Bugatti in Top Gear you may wish to look away now).

I contend, though, that there is more to this post than some guff about the rebuilding of a Land Rover, although that’s what it amounts to really. Bear with me, at least for a moment eh?

Most people work in jobs that, given the financial choice, they wouldn’t do. Of those, the majority work behind a desk, staring at a flickering monitor, sat on a chair. Whatever they do, however much they change by doing their job, when they leave at the end of the day the desk looks much as it did when they arrived. I can’t speak for you, but I always find this a little sad. I feel there’s something primeval about creating something physical, looking upon something that wasn’t there when you started and thinking “I made that – I put it there – a small part of this world is down to me”.

I feel that when I cut a huge pile of logs and look at them, hours later, stacked against the wall. I think people, particularly but not exclusively men, need to feel this.

The only people I know who would continue to work at what they do if their Euro-Millions ticket came up make things (and I include tending the countryside in that).

Well, here’s what, for me, is going to slate that thirst.

She's a Land Rover 90 convertible from a year or two before they started using the "Defender" tag. She started life as a County (which is why there are what are now somewhat redundant switches for things like rear washers and heaters in there.)

She's seen better days, poor thing. Have a look.




















I'd been hunting for the right Landy for six months, with no luck. I looked at a host of 110 Station Wagons to use as our second car. So, how did I come to take a 90 rag-top?

Well, generosity, actually. This 90 belonged to a friend who works abroad, these days in private security since leaving the army. He hadn't seen her in three years and has no plans to return to the UK for some time. So, when his brother, another friend, suggested I go up to Nene Overland near Peterborough, where she was being stored after the previous storage company went bust, I thought "why not?".

Sadly, the condition we found her in was, as you can see, not what any of us expected. The previous storage lot had obviously left her outside and this was the result. It's a crime, really, as she'd once been a wonderful truck.

He and I spoke and he took the view that whilst financially he could have her rebuilt by Overfinch, in Platinum, without noticing the expense (he's well paid, and rightly so bearing in mind what he does), he wouldn't be here to drive her. He wanted to see her not only returned to her former glory, but also loved again; used, enjoyed. He's a top chap, although he could probably kill you in 78 different ways.

So now she's mine. A project, certainly, but a lot more than that. She's my link with that physical thing I mentioned at the beginning. I'm going to make her right.

Initial expenses ran into a few hundred pounds to have her inspected, and then low-loaded down to me, but the bills are really flowing in now. She's at the local one-man-show mechanic's I use (he's that rarest of things, a brilliant but honest car technician, and also a Landy enthusiast). He also lets me work on her there and he does the stuff I can't do (which is lots).

When she arrived I went to see her. I spoke quietly to her, reassuring her about what would happen, and how she was going to be a family vehicle again. The car-whisperer. It's something I have always done with motorbikes - somehow makes me feel better.



Since these photos were taken she's changed a bit. We've cleaned her up underneath and although she looked terrible, actually the rust was mostly surface deep only. She needs a couple of very small welds, which will get done when the wings come off to weld up the bulkhead (which will last about a year - needs a new one really but the plan is to get her MOTed first, so she can be used).

She's got a new rear exhaust section in stainless steel, and today she'll get a new universal joint on the rear prop shaft. The door bottoms are going, we discovered when I replaced the handles last week, but they'll last a short while. Two new doors will be needed by the end of the year though.

Once all that welding's done a new hood will go on. The excellent Exmoor Trim supplied a sand-coloured canvas effort which I think will look great.

She also runs now, thanks to a new battery, and the engine's pretty strong, although it needs a service and O&F changes et cetera. The electrics need a total overhaul where the water's come in through the lack of a roof and a broken dash and wiped out all the connections too.

There have been some pleasant surprises. She's poly-bushed all round and has a later Defender rear axle with disc brakes and the four folding seats in the rear tub include two seat belts secured on the half roll-cage (will add a back half to that and two extra belts when funds allow).

There's a huge amount to do, and it won't be cheap, but when it's done she'll be a great truck, and a lot of fun. My wife doesn't seem to think the nipper (who's four) should be allowed anywhere near it but I suspect he's going to remember this vehicle with great affection in the years ahead. The dog will also almost certainly fall out of it, owing to a mix of dim-wittedness, inexperience with open vehicles and discovering what the wind does to Labrador ears when you lean out.

Security will be a big issue. Old Land Rovers are amongst the most stolen cars int he UK, with most being shipped to the former Yugoslavia and other central European states. I've taken care of that by spending a lot of money on physical security (Clutch-Claw, Disklok) and ordering a tracker.

She'll get a new coat of paint too, when the new bulkhead goes in later this year. Not sure which colour yet, but thinking a nice grey might work. Let me know your thoughts.

I also need to find somewhere to keep her in the village. The garage I rent for my (now sold) motorcycle isn't tall enough and I need somewhere I can work on her in the long evenings after a hard day bashing computer keys and having meetings.

And when she's up and running she'll replace the A8 as the second car, and my station run car. It's a practical choice: the Landy will be slow, noisy, uncomfortable, cold, bumpy and, of course, damp.

I'm going to love her very much.