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Archive for July, 2008
Someone bumped into me the other day. She was drunk. I called the police. She got arrested. Good.
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Why did Suzuki call its new car something which no native Japanese speaker can pronounce? If we’d not had a written invitation to the press launch earlier this year, I’d have been convinced that the new mini-MPV was called a Sprash.
It’s cruel. A bit like a manufacturer employing an MD with a name like Bernd Pischetsrieder, a let’s-put-British-motoring-journalists-in-their-place-so-they-daren’t-ask-for-an-interview sort of name. At least he’s now firmly out of the pichsture.
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In the Moto service area on the M23 at Pease Pottage, I recently paid £2.35 for a very ordinary cup of coffee. Just black: beans and water, nothing else.
Never mind, I would add one of those little pots of creamers. “We don’t do no creamers”, explained a bored assistant. Instead she pointed me to a skip of half-fat white stuff, which to milk is what a burger is to fillet steak.
I rang the police and asked if I could report a case of daylight robbery but apparently there’s no law against it.
I should like to know if any readers can top £2.35 for a plain coffee at a service area or any other roadside facility outside metropolitan London.
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I am reliably informed by the latest issue of the British Postmark Society Journal that around 600 post offices closed in the first quarter of 2008. Throughout the length and breadth of the country, hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people no longer have a post office within walking distance.
The implication, therefore, is that most of the people affected will probably drive to their next nearest post office, which in rural areas could be many miles away.
If the post office in my village closed, I should have to drive to the nearest town, some five miles distant, probably at least twice a week: that means 20 additional road miles, or 32 kilometres, which is equivalent (at 200g/km) to some 6.4 kilos of CO2 added to the atmosphere.
If that figure is used as an average, and, say, 100 people a week make the same journey by car, our village alone would contribute, in the course of one week, around 6.4 tonnes of CO2 to climate change, or in 50 weeks, 320 tonnes. Multiply that by 600 and you get 192,000 tonnes. And, of course, a lot more than 600 local post offices will eventually have been closed.
Add to that all the local shops closing down under the onslaught of out-of-town supermarkets and it becomes obvious that it is not the hapless motorist who should be taxed on CO2 emissions, but the organisations that increasingly make driving an absolute necessity.
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| Picturesque West Drayton. You would miss this on the M25. |
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I live in Surrey, a few miles south of Junction 9 of the M25. From time-to-time, I visit our production studios in Kentish Town, and since part of my usual back-doubles route via Hammersmith, Lissom Grove and Elgin Avenue has been absorbed into the London congestion zone, I thought I would try a couple of alternatives.
So when I set off yesterday I headed for the M25, which I followed, via the Dartford Crossing, to Junction 24, and from there, straight down the A1000 to Highgate, where I branched off to Kentish Town. Total journey time: 2 hours, 15 minutes – most of which was spent on the motorway.
For the return leg, I went north to Finchley then west via Wealdstone, Mill Hill, Stanmore, and Northwood to Uxbridge. From there the route home was almost due south via West Drayton, Hatton Cross, Hampton, Sunbury, Walton-on-Thames and Cobham. Total journey time: 1 hour 45 minutes. The route was free-moving with only occasional delays, even though I set off from Kentish Town at 6pm, in what might be called the height of the rush hour.
I am not sure what the latter route proved, other than the fact that satellite navigation is no substitute for knowing your way about. And that switching off your sat-nav and using the stress-free roads of leafy suburbia doesn’t necessarily mean that you will fall off the edge of the earth; although West Drayton…..
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