mixed messages

Boat Teenager and I lunched out, as it had stopped raining. Large pasties from Joe's Bakery, sitting on a bench on the Downs. "We're causing even more pain for the joggers", she said, "all wishing they had pasties too".

"Maybe they aren't the sort of people who like pasties," I suggested. "Modern people can be pretty strange."

We had a bit of a laugh about quinoa, and went charity shopping. Got some good stuff too, the sort that cheers you up if you ever needed cheering up.

Heading back up the hill, I paused in the right filter lane before turning into Coldharbour Road, to let a hesitant oncoming cyclist, who had right of way, decide whether he was going to go down the hill or turn left. 

He stopped. 

A shiny black BMW was behind us. The driver hooted his horn and, through the dark windows, I saw him gesticulating, apparently at the junction. "F*** OFF", I mouthed at him, and set off. He may be happy to run over a cyclist, I thought, but I'm not.

A little later he tried to overtake us, on a section of road that is really entirely unsuited for overtaking.  An oncoming car stopped him.

We turned left. He followed, honking his horn.

I passed Boat Teenager my phone. "Get ready to call 999 if we need to," I said.

At the next junction, he tried to force his way past us again. I stopped; he got out; "It's all right, I'm not going to rob you just because I'm black," he said, holding out his hands palms outward, with a rueful sort of smile.

"I never thought you were," I said, quite truthfully. 

"....just that your brake lights aren't working," he continued. 

"Oh! Thank you"

We exchanged smiles and he went on his way.

the Tao of Morris

In the pulsing heart of Bristol, I established my very own Island of Unmoving. This was simply attained by the Traveller's clutch rod snapping as I negotiated the St James Barton roundabout. I rearranged some useful traffic cones to reduce the likelihood of a taxi getting all Zen on my rear bumper. Some passing drivers scowled at this imagined impediment to their progress, and others smiled. A familiar-looking bearded chap waved cheerfully, and shortly after I got a text from Matthew, whose beard it was, offering assistance if needed. But I'd already called the recovery service, which duly arrived in the form of a flatbed truck with a winch on it, and a cheerful Geordie driver who was the sensible type of chap who was able to accept immediately that I knew what the problem was, and that here was no place to attempt repairs anyway.

With the car safe in Cotham, I called Mal, who took some time out from her busy day to take me down to the Morris Centre where I bought a new clutch rod.  "Guess how much?" said the chap at the spares counter. 

"Um.... £8?" 

"I'll just change the database... no,  £6.13!"

Bargain. They threw in some washers and a split pin too. And ten minutes after returning to the car, it was ready to go again. It is not the breaking down that is important, Grasshopper, it is the fixing.

Art, gorillas

Saturday saw the street party for the Westbury Park Festival, and I was there with a stall full of pictures and cards. Which was fun, but meant I didn't get to wander around. At least I was next to the band, anyway.

There is always a collection of classic cars at the street party, so since I was going anyway, I added the Trav to the line-up. It looked a bit different to the immaculately-turned-out other cars, not least because mine was the only one with a gorilla in it. Here he is, look. His name's Barry. We adopted him a while back.

It's quite fun having a gorilla as a passenger, so he stayed on board for Sunday, when I went down to the harbour to see the Festival of Nature. If I'm in a hurry, I take the bike down on the roof, and park up in Hotwells, then cycle around the Harbour into town. It avoids the ride up a long, steep hill afterwards.

Taking the bike off the carrier, I noticed that one of the roof bars was sagging; it had rusted right through, in a place where it was damaged a few years back (the time I tried to drive into a multistorey car park with the bike on the car roof.... v dramatic it was too, let me tell you). I gave it an exploratory jiggle, and... it gave way. So I had to make a splint to get me home again, using the handle from the hydraulic jack.

And then it was down to Easton, for the Arts Trail; or at least, to Hazel Hammond's house, where Alison Wills' paintings were on display, and Hazel read her poetry. Alison has a striking way of portraiture, using tones and sparse lines to capture much more of the subject than you'd think possible . I wish I could do that. My drawings are nothing if not solid....

Hazel and Alison, with one of Alison's portraits

Fallen Women, by Andi Langford-Woods

barefoot

I thought it would be a Good Thing for Katie to have a go at camping in an adult-free environment. Or something approximating to that. So we bundled into the car with three of her friends and went to somewhere in the Wye Valley area that I'd heard good things about. I dumped the children and their gear on a nice spot on a hillside, and looked around for a place for me. Katie made it clear that she wanted me out of sight...

...so I settled in, and then after a while I got a visit asking for help in putting the tents up... and then later in the evening another request for help in lighting a fire. It was a bit of a jolt, and I had to recall that knowing how to do these things doesn't happen on its own. It has to be learned. And a modern childhood is a lot less wild and free than mine was.

So we got the fire going, and it got dark, and they got the marshmallows out. I toasted one myself. It tasted smoky and burnt-sugar-y, and not entirely nice. But it was hot and gloopy and burned my tongue, and it was all part of the fun. I left them to it. I felt a bit left out of it, but that's just one of the penalties of being ancient.

I woke thinking it was day again, and opened the tent flap. There was the full moon, about to pass behind the huge beech tree I'd pitched my tent close to. There was a lot of twittering of house martins. It was 4:00. I wondered if the brightness of the moonlight had stirred the birds and the insects into action.

Later, after the proper day had broken, I was brewing my hot choc and watching the martins swooping around the beech tree, very close in and mostly to leeward. They were being very acrobatic. It was still too early for the insects to be venturing further afield than the close environs of the tree. A swallow swished by at grass-top height.

I walked in the woods, over to the Devil's Pulpit, a stone pillar rising out of the side of the valley overlooking Tintern Abbey. I took my sandals off to see how quietly I could walk. I could walk almost silently, as it turned out. But I didn't see or hear any deer. Lots of nuthatches. A great tussling of dead leaves that resolved itself into a blackbird. A young buzzard, and a family of ravens, all heard through the dense trees. A flash of swooping bird through a beam of sunlight, accompanied by alarm calls from all around; was it a sparrowhawk? So much of what happens in woods is heard rather than seen. A fresh badger scrape at the side of the path. A hazel nut falling by my feet; I wait, and a squirrel saunters out of the tree heading upwards.



Flickr album

plenty of Morris

a motorway wonderland

I drove up to the Midlands with Katie yesterday; she is away for the weekend. We were asked to give a lift to The Finest Swordsman In France, so we arrived punctually outside his house and rang the bell. And waited.

And waited.

He finally appeared with his guitars, which we stowed in the boot, and I raised the driver's seat and ushered him into the back seat.

As far as Katie and I are concerned, the Trav is our car, and she belongs in the front seat. There seems to be an expectation that when an adult joins us, they should take the front seat and she go into the back. We agree that this is not fair to Katies, and have adopted a 'guests in the back' policy. Although, when they are her friends, she prefers to be in the back with them. You know how it is.

We stopped at a Tesco filling station and, after I'd put the petrol in, got some sweets for the trip. Finest Swordsman picked up a six-pack of Becks Alkoholfrei beer. "Gosh!" I thought. "Finest Swordsman is a changed man."

As we rumbled along the motorway, Finest Swordsman offered helpful advice about the car; "I think there's an exhaust leak," he said; "I can smell fumes."

Finest Swordsman is a bit of an expert about cars, as you may have gathered already. I filed the information about the exhaust leak in the appropriate folder in my head. F for forget.

I tried to make conversation. "How do you think Becks Alkoholfrei compares with other non-alcoholic beer, Finest Swordsman?" I asked. I am genuinely curious, because I have tried it and thought, "Yuk".

Finest Swordsman was horribly alarmed. "Shit! I didn't notice the label!"

I wonder what he's going to do with the beer. For Finest Swordsman, a non-alcoholic drink is a drink wasted.

After the handover of passengers at Checkpoint Chav, just south of Birmingham, I returned to Bristol by way of the Wye valley, as it was a nice day and I am thinking about Wordsworth, and was seeking inspiration. I stopped at Redbrook, and walked over the old railway bridge to the Boat Inn. It's a good place to sit watching the river, and think, and drink. In this case, I was drinking a bottle of perry made by a local farmer, who calls it Capsy Wennet. The woman who served me told me that he calls her 'capsy wennet' too. You may recognise the name from Cold Comfort Farm. The perry was quite earthy and yeasty, but certainly interesting, though my stomach started making complaining noises later in the day



The pub was full of morris men. They were the Bathampton Morris Men, on a weekend tour.



John joined me, and told me about it. They had already danced that morning in Chepstow and Monmouth, and were carrying on to Grosmont, where they would spend the night in the village hall, and basically dance and drink their way around Monmouthshire. A bunch of Will Kempes with a minibus. "A weekend without the wives and girlfriends," said John, cheerfully...

Tin whistles and accordions struck up inside the pub. The morris men were settling in and making themselves at home while waiting for their lunch.


John and I talked about travelling across the Severn. He remembered going on the ferry when he was a boy, lumbering along in the family Morris 8 hoping to catch the ferry before the tide fell, and the alarming descent of the slipway and across the boat's ramp onto the ferry deck, where the car would be swung on the turntable and moved back into position for the crossing.

A kingfisher flew low across the river, which was brown and in spate; there's been heavy rain in Mid-Wales, evidently, and the Wye can rise very rapidly indeed. The pink flowers of overhanging Himalayan balsam dipped down towards the floodwaters.

John also remembered the building of the Severn bridge; the box sections, built in the shipyard at Chepstow, floated out and raised up onto the supporting cables. He described how the big towers at first leaned outwards, and as the cables took the weight of the box sections, the towers leaned further and further inwards until they were vertical.

Then one of his comrades called across; "Bill! The food's ready!"

"It's John, not Bill," said John.

"I didn't know how you were getting on with the lady; I thought you might want to be Bill", said the other chap.

We smiled.

And so we parted. I liked John. Or Bill.

watery

I was out doing stuff yesterday, and when I parked up outside the office I was visiting, I switched off the engine and heard a hissing from under the bonnet.

"Uh -oh..." I thought, pulling the bonnet release toggle.

Indeed, steam was hissing out from the little bit of tube that connects the water pump to the cylinder head.

Nothing to be done until it was cool, so I completed my business and then drove the very short distance to a branch of ALDI, where I bought loads of their sparkling spring water.

I poured a bottleful into the radiator and drove home. And removed the offending pipe. It has a split along the seam, as you can perhaps see here. And it's less than a year old.



So I replaced it with a thick piece of hose.

The positive side of this is that I've discovered that ALDI's spring water is at least as cheap as LIDL's, and it comes from Wales rather than Germany. So I'll be going back there.

Later, I sat on the top deck of the Grain Barge in the harbour, drinking cider with Brendagh and watching the Sea Cadets keeping warm with their rowing and shouting at each other. It's a shouty business, being military.

It was a bit chilly, as the sun sets in Hotwells in the middle of the afternoon, what with the great mass of Clifton looming over it. Me, I just put a coat on. But whatever floats your boat.

floating

another in my occasional series: Useful Guides To Fixing Things On Moggies, And With Pictures Too, What's More



After I changed the Trav's rear axle hub bearing and oil seal back in May , I've been intending to take the wheel off and check that everything was OK. I finally got round to it, and found that everything was pretty good, but there was a bit of float on the hub- that is to say, it could slide inward and outward rather a lot. The Workshop Manual says that the bearing should protrude beyond the face of the hub; in fact, it was about 1mm below the face, which felt like quite a lot when I rocked it to and fro.

So I dismantled it again.


I got some heavy cartridge paper and measured the combined thickness of ten sheets. This gave me 3.5mm. So I reckoned that three thicknesses would be about right. I drew around the bearing and cut out three paper shims, like this





...and then reassembled the hub.



According to my calculations, the bearing face is about 0.5 mm proud of the hub face, and the book says it should be 0.025 to 0.102 mm. I'm hoping that the fudge factor will take the discrepancy on board. And I'll check it again next week or so, to make sure that it isn't leaking.