With a very good turnout in last week's Fun Online Poll (thanks to everyone who took part), the results were as follows:
Have you completed your Census form yet?
Yes - 36%
No, I'll do it this week sometime - 22%
No, and I don't intend to - 34%
Other, please specify - 7%
Best of luck to those who say they don't intend to: I doubt whether the government can be arsed to aggressively go after a third of the population. I just hope that the resulting statistics are still reasonably reliable, i.e. if mainly smokers and atheists refuse to reply, then the number of non-smokers and religious people will be overstated in future.
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Now, I am not in any way, shape or form a car nut, and I don't wish to bore people with tales of 'cars I have owned and their little quirks', but I genuinely believe that some cars seem to have a soul somehow - some benevolent and some malevolent - and by simply sitting in it, whether as driver or passenger they can change your mood. My current little car (for example) is quite cool and rock'n'roll somehow; it seems to feel apologetic when it breaks down; and when I'm driving it, I get the opposite of road rage, I get 'road calm'.
Her Indoors traded in her old car at the weekend at Car Giant in west London, which involved two visits of several hours each (they love their paperwork), and even she admitted that it had been an emotional wrench finally handing in the keys to the old one (our little girl, who posts her pictures here, actually cried real tears when she said good bye to the old one) and that she felt no 'personal attachment' to the new one* at all. 'It's just a box which goes forward' was her unsolicited remark just now.
Having taken it for a spin, I have to concur. The old one, by contrast, was quite a malevolent beast, viewed objectively - but driving it was like being on cocaine; whoever drove the car was an arsehole, so he still felt in tune with it. I once drove convoy behind Her Indoors in that car on the motorway and she did bumper-to-bumper stuff all the way like a complete idiot, to her that must have seemed like normal behaviour.
Having now inevitably bored you silly with 'tales of cars I have owned...' I announce this week's Fun Online Poll: "Do some cars have a soul?"
Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.
* Rather bizarrely, she chose a VW Golf, a much newer model (diesel, automatic 4-dr) of what I have got. As I may have mentioned before, my ex-wife, unbeknown to me bought a VW Golf more or less identical to the one I bought at the same time as I did (although hers is red and a LHD model, obviously). But y'see, my ex-wife and I both used to drive my granddad's VW Golf back in the 1980s, so maybe we are both harking back to that.
Plod and Mental Health
1 hour ago
7 comments:
Beware the modern diesel engine if you do lots of short trips. (Source: Honest John of the Telegraph.)
D, thanks, that's her new car f-ed then :-(
Cars may not have a soul, but they certainly know when they are about to be sold.
Over the past 20 years I have had three cars (2 upper-range Fords and a built to order Mercedes) which, on the eve of their departure, deliberately flattened their hitherto faultless batteries so as not to be able to start on their final morning with me.
They know, you know...
MW, regarding prosecution for non-compliance, I read an article recently which cited a pathetically low number of people 'done' for not returning their 2001 census (perhaps double or triple digits, I forget).
SBC
AD, that is spiteful of them. A bit like a tooth that stops hurting once you're at the dentist.
SBC, ta, I thought so.
"AD, that is spiteful of them. A bit like a tooth that stops hurting once you're at the dentist."
Or any car problem that vanishes once the car is at the garage. My father had a car, which he passed on to me, that noone except for a garage mechanic could ever get to start in the rain.
B, I had a Roland sequencer like that. I was the only person who could turn the switch to the "on" position without it crashing.
It was just a normal, black plastic power switch and there was no trick to it at all - it's just that the machine didn't like anybody but me to turn it on.
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