:: Diary - September 2015 ::

:: Saturday, September 5, 2015 ::

Away back in March, the Porsche club started to organise their stand for a Concours of Elegance (their words not mine) at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. At that time, with my Porsche due for delivery, all freshly-restored and shiny, I spoke to our club organiser who agreed that because he wanted a display of white cars, mine would be perfect. Asked him again in May - yes, still on...

The event is today. last week, when I hadn't heard anything about tickets, passes or arrangements, I asked him, and do you know what he said? Well, obviously not, so I'll tell you.

He said "Oh I found a better car than yours, so he's going now and you're not. Sorry, I should have told you, eh?"

That's what he said. I managed to restrain myself and didn't reply with a stream of invective including the words "cheeky" or "twat". In fact I didn't bother to reply at all...

Then I saw him at a Porsche event last weekend. He didn't even mention it. Again, I managed to avoid the words above, plus "useless" and "prick".

So anyway, as a result, I've got today off. I've spent the week cleaning up the engine bay though, in preparation for a Sporting Bears event tomorrow, and while it's not "concours" it's pretty tidy.

It's also got its MOT next week so I have carried out my normal pre-MOT routine of checking absolutely nothing.

:: Wednesday, September 9, 2015 ::

Porsche MOT today at local Porsche independent. Pass. No advisories. Lovely!

While I am driving home, all happy and content, I find myself at a set of temporary traffic light behind about 6 cars. Lights go green. Everybody moves off except the car in front of me. Quick glance in its door mirror, it's a girl, texting. Quick toot, car lurches forward, stalls, starts, stops at red light.

Wait a bit. Wait a lot. Light goes green. Car doesn't move. Slightly longer toot. Car lurches forward but manages to keep going...

Then 5 minutes later as I am turning into my street I nearly get wiped out by a bunt in a Peugeot trying to steer with one hand and microwave her ear with the other.

What is so fucking important that you can't put your bleeding phone down and concentrate on what you are doing? You see this all the time, and usually by a particular social demographic. By that I mean young-ish females, and some who are not as young as they like to think they are. Of course, they can multitask, right? Not on the available evidence, they can't.

Step away from the phone! Or the car, I don't care which. But choose one or the other.

This has been written while sitting on a train wearing a suit on the way home from a meeting. Everybody around probably thinks I'm a sad workaholic. If only they knew I am engaging in my passion for random ranting...

:: Saturday, September 12, 2015 ::

Today I was thinking of going to the Ingliston Revival. There used to be a racetrack around the perimeter of the Royal Highland Showground, and I can remember going there in the late 1970s to watch various racing formula. It was a tight twisty wee track though, so overtaking was difficult, and it was kind of usurped by ongoing improvements to the new upstart purpose-built track at Knockhill, and eventually closed in 1996.

Anyway, last week, the TVR Club newsgroup asked if anybody wanted to go - although it was left to individuals to contact the show to make the arrangements. It turned out that, if you wanted to show your car, you had to register by July or something, and our group hadn't booked a stand. Our esteemed club regional organiser said this isn't a problem - you can still enter and get 10% off. No, the deal was that IF you had registered, you got up to 10% off other stuff, not the actual entry (for which we are now 2 months too late") Basic comprehension fail.

Dave fired off an email to the show organisers explaining all of this, and asking if we could still display our cars. Their answer was "have you booked"? That was it. Another basic comprehension fail.

Apparently the TVR Club Northern England have organised a stand at the same show, and they are coming from 120 miles away. It's on our fucking doorstep (almost literally in Dave's case) and our region can't organise to go.

Next year, we'll book it ourselves... It's the only way.

:: Monday, September 21, 2015 ::

Look at what my spies found at a car show in Whitby yesterday:

It’s nice to see that somebody has spent a bit of time and money getting it looking good. Nice black refurbished wheels instead of anthracite, front end resprayed, number plate mounted to look a lot better (although there might be questions about how legal that is, since it’s invisible to a camera-operating obsessive sandwich-eater in a white van with a specially-strengthened operator chair).

It looks amazing though!

How do I feel seeing it again? Well, I don’t have a real term of reference, but imagine that you once dated one of the world’s most beautiful women - a real stunner who turned heads wherever she went. Not only was she beautiful, but she was also an insatiable nymphomaniac. Sounds perfect? Hang on a minute…

Imagine that, in private, she was also a psychotic crack whore, with a compulsive obsession with blowing not only her own money, but yours too, at unpredictable intervals, and was also prone to completely random arguments and storming off in the huff - and you ended up paying for that too..

Right, so now imagine that you broke up, and she disappeared from your life - but you knew she had found a new lover, but well, you know, out of sight, out of mind, and all that.

But then one day, you see her with her new lover, looking happy in public. For a moment you feel a pang of envy - jealousy, even. But then you realise that the poor bugger that’s she’s now shacked up with, is also having to put up with “the mental” on a regular basis… so you look, you admire, you might even smile… and then you turn away, without a look back.

That’s how I feel.

In other news, I had a trip up the A9 today, through the average speed cameras - 110 miles of the bloody things. As a result, everybody is tooling along at 50 behind the lorries, afraid to overtake. It’s so boring, at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from “driving alert”. Still, the journey seems to pass quickly while you’re playing with the trip computer to calculate “average speeds”, resetting it between cameras. My closest was 60.1 miles per hour, the slowest was 34 mph (yes, about 1/2 of the speed limit). Might have crashed a couple of times but I didn’t speed - priorities and all that.

I had better not start about A-feckin-9-feckin-speed-feckin-cameras. A knee-jerk reaction to “do something - anything” regardless of whether it works or not. After the first 8 months, Transport Scotland said that they have been a success because speeds are lower than before. Forgive me for stating the bleeding obvious, but I thought their objective was to reduce accidents. Let’s have a look at the accident record. In the previous 5 years, there had been an average of 8 accidents a year. In the 6 months since the cameras went live, there have been 4 accidents. Now, I’m pretty thick, but even my limited knowledge of statistics suggests that 4 accidents in 6 months is the same as 8 in a year. In other words, the success of the cameras in reducing accidents can be summed up succinctly, thus: “fuck all”. I hope that’s not too technical…

I despair…

:: Saturday, September 26, 2015 ::

I have spent the last 2 or 3 days cleaning the car to within an inch of its life. Not full-time cleaning, you understand (in case any clients are reading this), but here and there between more urgent business.

Why? Well, I agreed away back in March or something, to join with Jim and Dave to provide a “wedding fleet” for one of Claire’s pals who did’t want conventional hire cars. Well, you can’t turn up to somebody’s wedding with your car looking like it’s just completed the Paris-Dakar ally in a monsoon, can you? (Do you get monsoons between Paris and Dakar? Don’t think so - but you get the point, eh?)

So not only have I cleaned it, I’ve hoovered it inside, cleaned all the interior, polished the wheels, dressed the tyres and even buffed up the wee bumper rubber inserts etc. I can’t remember the last time it looked like this!

So this morning, it’s off to Dave’s to meet Jim, then we head off into the city to the bride’s flat. We park up, and fix ribbons from the number plates up to the windscreen, and also little white rosettes on the wing mirrors. When the taxi turns up for the bride (voluminous dresses don’t fit in tiny sports cars), nobody has told him he’s doing a wedding, so we persuade him to apply some spare ribbon so that at least she feels a wee bit specialer.

So we set off in convoy through the city centre, the taxi with the bride and her dad, Jim with the bride’s mother, and then me with the lovely Nicola (bridesmaid and the bride’s sister), then Dave with Claire (bridesmaid and the bride’s best pal). Nicola says “everybody is looking at us”, and I’m not surprised - so I tell her to smile and wave royally and enjoy the attention that a bridal party of noisy sports cars and pretty ladies is guaranteed to bring.

We park up at the venue for the official photos, where the bride wants the cars to be featured.

This is my passenger, the beautiful and utterly charming Nicola.

And this is a photo of the cars on their own, before we leave.

Then we all head off - Jim has to go home, but Dave and his wife invite me to join them for a wee spot of lunch at a pub/restaurant near the Forth Bridge - very nice it is too!

I have really enjoyed today - you forget how lucky you are, sometimes, and it’s great to see other people enjoy looking at your car. It’s even better to bring a little bit of extra pleasure to somebody’s special day. I think I could get used to this!

:: Sunday, September 27, 2015 ::

A little note for regular readers:

I have had to change my email address. If you use my “tvrgit” email address, or have previously used the “email me” link on the left, then that old email address no longer exists. Don’t use it if you are replying to previous stuff etc - I won’t get it.

Also - if you have sent me an email in the last 2 or 3 weeks, chances are that I haven’t seen it, so if I haven’t replied to you, don’t take the huff. I have just found two among the mass of rubbish - from James and Dave (different Dave), and I will reply to you asap. Anybody else, I’m sorry but I don’t have yours.

Reason? Somebody somewhere has “harvested” my email address, and is using it to send out “spam” - and my mailbox fills up with “undelivered email” messages. I got 80 different versions of this shite in an hour this morning (while I was writing yesterday’s blog bit above), so I finally cracked. I am pretty sure that the email address hasn’t been lifted from this site (it’s in a javascript that mailboxes won’t (or at least shouldn’t) recognise) so it’s been poached from elsewhere - possibly pistonheads, possibly twitter) so there’s nothing I can do about that.

So the old email address is gone, gone, gone.

I will set up a new email address, but in the meantime, I have removed the link on the left. If you wish to contact me and do not have my personal email, then send to :
tvrgit2 at tvrgit dot com

I’ve had 12 years out of that email address, so I can’t complain - - it’s always bound to happen sooner or later - all it takes is for even one of your past “correspondents” to have a less-than-secure pc, and your address is “out there”.

It’s still a pain in the backside though.