Fortunately my wife and I are relatively healthy people who don’t get ill often.  Unfortunately Ellie and Samuel both got colds a few weeks back.  Fortunately I didn’t get it.  Unfortunately I got one a week later.  Fortunately Ellie and Samuel both made steady recovery.  Unfortunately I didn’t.  Fortunately I work from home and run my own business, so I didn’t have to use up any sick leave.  Unfortunately I still had to take a couple of days off work because the cold was that bad.  Fortunately I tend to recover from colds fairly quickly, and without the aid of medication.  Unfortunately on this occasion I was forced to take a barrage of pills to try to combat the symptoms.  Fortunately they have been working and my cold is now nearly gone.  Unfortunately I am still left with a bit of a sniffle and a rather heavy cough.

There, that was fun.

So yes, the cold is now thankfully on its way out, which is good because I really don’t like being ill.  I’m not the sort of person to admit defeat, and I definitely don’t accept the concept of the so-called “Man Flu”.  Still, the pills have been useful, if only to help me sleep.  In fact, during a phone call home my mum recommended that I take some multivitamins, just in case that helped.  So we went to Tesco and had a look at the range.  I was quite surprised at what I found on the shelf.

The last vitamin tablets I had would have been when I was in my early teens.  We had some Vitamin C tablets as a family, which we had with breakfast each day.  They were small round balls that were sugary, tasted of oranges, fizzed satisfyingly on my tongue, and were more akin to sweets than medication.  I also have fond memories of teddy bear shaped Vitamin C tablets, which tasted a bit like Refreshers.  Since then, though, I have shunned tablets in general, not because I’m afraid of them but because I have some strange theory that my body can cope with anything, and that medication is like giving in too easily.  Even if I have a headache, I’m more likely to reach for a glass of water and put up with the discomfort than break out the paracetamol.

Tesco has quite a range of different medicines for all sorts of ailments and discomforts.  It may only be one aisle, but it feels much like wandering through the gift shop of a pharmaceutical wonderland.  Pretty much every common or garden illness is represented on the shelves, from flu to heartburn, from hayfever to sun cream, from Mister Men plasters to do-it-yourself amputation kits.  Okay, maybe not that last one.  But even for just one everyday condition, a common cold, there are a plethora of different options for relief.  The same is true when it comes to vitamin supplements, too.

What surprised me, however, was not the range of different products.  Nor was it the various combinations of vitamins available.  What surprised me was the concentration of vitamins in some of the pills.  We ended up getting a bottle of multivitamins, normal everyday ones that don’t taste of sherbet or liquorice, which proudly tell us that each tablet contains 100% of the RDA (Recommended Daily Amount) of each of the vitamins it contained.  So, of everything I eat during the day, that tablet will give me everything I need, vitamin-wise, and what I get naturally through the food is a bonus.  That just seemed wrong to me.

But not as wrong as some of the other examples on the same shelf.  One bottle of Vitamin C tablets claimed to have 833% of your RDA.  833%.  That’s masses of vitamin.  That’s like eating a whole bush of oranges in one go.  That’s an overdose of Vitamin C, surely?  Apparently not.  In fact, there was another pot of something very similar on the shelf above, which had around 1100% of your RDA.  And no, I’m not making this up.

Now, call me old-fashioned, but I tend to prefer any medication I take to be good for me in some way.  Sure, if I’m not eating any citrus fruit then I might be lacking in Vitamin C, but surely having 11 times the amount you’re supposed to, every day, has got to have some negatives?  Do I really want to be pumping my body full of minerals I don’t need?  And do we really want to be encouraging our supermarkets to be producing such things, with ever-increasing quantities of excessiveness?

My answer was no, unsurprisingly.  We got the multivitamins that provided a measly 100% of everything.  I expect I’ll survive.

Our current election process works on the basis of a ‘first past the post’ process of vote counting, which works best when there are two main parties to choose between.  In the past, it’s been a two-party system, with Labour and Conservative battling against each other for people’s attention.  Sure, there have been other parties in there too, but they’ve gone mostly unnoticed.  Until this year, when Britain took the decision to host distinctly American-style Prime Ministerial Debates, and invited Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg to join in the foray.  Suddenly the Lib-Dems rose to prominence, got people’s attention, and made it look like all three parties were level-pegging.

At that point, a hung parliament was almost guaranteed.  With three parties equally popular, no one party can have a majority, and the ‘first past the post’ election system fails.

Of course, when it came down to it, the Lib-Dems didn’t get anywhere near the proportion of votes they were hoping for.  But the damage had already been done.  Neither Labour or Conservatives got a majority, leaving our government in limbo.  Nothing was sure any more, nothing guaranteed.  All that voting had been in vain, and no decision had been made.

So it fell to the three parties to work out a solution for us.  Yes, that’s right, the country couldn’t decide which party to elect, so the parties took it upon themselves to choose for us.  The result?  The Lib-Dems sided with the Conservatives.  Now, to make that coalition work both parties have had to make some major compromises to their policies, apparently in the national interest.  Individual party lines are not important, they tell us.  Which basically means they can do whatever they want, break as many of their pre-election promises as they like, and get away with it with the excuse that they’re in a coalition.

Let’s recap.  The Conservatives, contrary to their name, offered change.  The Lib-Dems offered real change.  And Labour said they’d carry on as they had been.  A comparatively small party broke the election system.  None of the parties won the election, making them all losers.  The only way either Conservatives or Labour could form a majority coalition was to get Lib-Dems on side, putting the entire outcome of the election not in the hands of the voters but with the Lib-Dems.  So the Lib-Dems, who no one voted for, got to decide what government we ended up with, and were guaranteed to get into parliament despite losing catastrophically.

Now, I’m no expert on politics, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the way the election process is meant to work.  Let’s see how long it lasts…

And then there are those of us who tear the rule books into pieces and feed the bits to the next door neighbour’s dog.

Now, I’m not saying I’m a revolutionary, nor even that I’m particularly independent.  I just don’t feel like I fit everyone else’s mould all the time.  Right now I’m 27 years old, I’m married, I have a child, I run my own business.  You’d think I was pretty mature, right?  So why is it that I still take delight in eating Fruit Gums?  Why do I still think it hilarious to poke my friends for no reason?  Why is cheese the cause of so much hilarity?

In fact, I’m not alone in this state of perpetual childhood.  My wife is just as silly as me, if not more so.  Our friends are not much better.  My wife is actually reading a book at the moment called “Confessions of a failed grown-up”.  Apparently there are huge swathes of people across the country (if not the world) who just never got round to growing up.  People who still think it incredibly scary that they’re let loose in the world.  People who still get a thrill out of being allowed to buy what they want at Tesco.  People who can’t quite fathom how they’re already paying into a pension or life insurance scheme.  People who see faces in their dinner while out at a restaurant, and have to stifle a giggle in case anyone notices.

Of course, it works the other way round, too.  Our little baby boy is, by all accounts, taking after both his parents and completely ignoring what ‘the book’ says he should be doing.  He has always been far more inquisitive than any baby should be – when he was born he spent the first three hours looking around at everything, rather than sleeping as most babies do.  Samuel feeds well, but has chosen not to put that energy into putting on fat, as is the norm, but decided instead to focus on growing ever taller.  He’s currently sitting happily on the 2nd percentile for his weight, which for the uninitiated means that only 2% of babies are likely to be skinnier than him.  On the other hand, he was growing out of his clothes weeks ago, not by them being too tight but that he’s just too long for them all.

And now we’ve reached another milestone, another stage in his development.  He’s started eating solid food.  When I say ‘solid’, actually perhaps that’s giving him a tad too much credit.  He’s sucked the life out of a chunk or two of banana, and begun to enjoy the delights of licking baby rice off a small spoon.  I wouldn’t call it eating, exactly, not yet anyway, but it’s a start.  It’s the beginning of a phase of life where food gets flung through the air in excitement, finding its way onto walls, into hair, up noses, into ears, down trousers, between the keys on the laptop, smeared across the TV screen, stored in pockets for later, handed back to Mummy as a peace offering.  Oh what joy.

Is 4 months too early to start giving a baby real food?  Well, that really depends on the baby.  If Samuel has decided he’s ready for that stage of life, who are we to argue?  If I feel like getting down on my hands and knees and playing with toy cars, complete with vocal sound effects, without the excuse of playing with a child, who’s to stop me?

I guess my point is this: no one follows the book to the letter.  Someone once said that if the ‘average’ person actually existed, leading a completely average life, achieving the average milestones to an average degree, he would be such an improbable anomaly that he would cease to be average, and thus become a somewhat confusion paradox.  He would also be one of the dullest people you could hope to meet.  Instead, a truly average person would be exceptional.  They would break the mould every now and then.  They would grow up at their own pace.  They would be… well, like you and me, actually.  We are all unique, and in that we are therefore all ‘normal’, all ‘average’.  And I take some comfort in that.  It’s nice not to be alone.

Unfortunately I just can’t justify buying myself a new phone, since my Motorola L6 does actually work fine.  So rather than get depressed about the situation I decided to have another go at revitalising my phone and getting the most out of it.  A little research got me Opera Mini 4.2, which is a sleek and feature-filled web browser for my phone.  Not only is it infinitely nicer to look at and use than the built-in one, it’s also miles faster thanks to a proxy compression that Opera provides – basically every web page my phone requests is sent via the Opear server, compressed until it’s tiny and then sent to my phone, which speeds up download times considerably.  The result is that my phone is now capable of checking e-mails and looking at web pages without a century passing between pages.

Then I started downloading yet more stuff.  I came across some cool Java games, which were promptly uploaded to my phone and installed.  Not all of them work, and those that do have to be very lightweight ones because my phone doesn’t exactly have much processing power – animation is debatable really, and 3D stuff is complete out.  But I’ve found a few really addictive games in there, including one with a grid of various shaped pipe pieces that have to be rotated so that they all connect up – simple, but I just can’t put it down.

During my surfing around looking for further ways to enhance my mobile experience I stumbled across ModMyMoto, a web site dedicated to Motorola users who want to make their handsets do more than they were originally designed to.  There are games and software that can be downloaded, but then there are more in-depth mods like changing the skins and core functionality of the phone.  I decided I’d have a go at installing a skin, as there were a couple of tutorials on the forum that made it all look very simple.  They had comments like “it’s as easy as that!!!”, “and that’s it!!”, “and you’re done!!!”.  I should have paid more attention.  Superfluous and over-zealous use of exclamation marks in a technical document can only be there to cover up how potentially difficult it actually is.

So I downloaded a piece of software onto my PC, which would be what I’d use to ‘mod’ the phone.  Then I needed to install the drivers for the phone so that it could find it.  One of the drivers Windows managed to find all on its own, which was nice, but baulked at the others.  That meant registering on a Motorola developers’ forum and downloading yet more software, pretending that I was a software developer.  That came with the drivers I needed, and once that was all set up I could run the modding program to start applying the skin I’d downloaded.  First of all I had to copy a whole load of files across (gif images, to be used by the skin).  No problem.  Then I had to go to the “seam editor” part of the program and set a particular ‘bit’ in the phone’s internal coding to allow it to use custom themes.  Again, no problem there.  I turned the phone off and on again, and hey presto! the skin was installed.

And my goodness was it awful.  It did look vaguely like the screenshot, but it wasn’t anywhere near as satisfying as I was expecting, it flickered annoyingly, and was impossible to read.  That was when I read the line at the very bottom of the tutorial I’d been following, saying that if I’d backed up a particular file from the phone then I could re-upload that to set it back to its default skin.  That would have been fine if the tutorial had told me that the file needed backing up before I overwrote it.   Not good.  A little further searching around showed that the only safe way to get the original theme back was to do a master reset.  Which I did.  And lost all my phone numbers, ringtones, photos and settings in the process.

Fortunately, getting the phone back to normal has been fairly straightforward, thanks to a quick iSync to transfer my calendar and most of my address book across (though, curiously, some phone numbers were not transferred across, for no apparent reason and with no pattern to explain it).  I’ve still lost the photos I took on the phone, though that it’s a huge loss as I didn’t use it very often anyway.  Still, it’s been several hours that I would have been able to use elsewhere, all thanks to a tutorial not telling me some key information until right at the end, almost as an aside.

So, let that be a lesson to you (and me).  If you’re ever tempted to ‘mod’ your phone, make sure you’ve got everything backed up, even if they don’t tell you explicitly that you’ll need to.  And don’t trust any article that says “it’s as simple as that!!”.  Trust me, the exclamation marks are a bad omen.

I have been interested to note a certain level of bias in our news.  Now, I know politically-minded critics will say that no media is totally unbiased, but some are more likely to express opinions than others.  For instance, I am not at all surprised when Channel 4 or even ITV shows a report that is clearly in favour of one candidate over the other, but I was more surprised when the mighty BBC fell into the same trap.  I’m not at all interested in politics, and yet the media reports were such that I know plenty about Obama and next to nothing about McCain.  It’s as if this country has been told that Obama was the right person to win, and we’ve all just accepted it without realising it.  Everyone’s really pleased that Obama won, implying that we wouldn’t have been quite so overjoyed with the alternative outcome.

But what has intrigued me most is the different approach the Americans have in their elections. They vote for people, not parties.  Personality over policy.  Sure, there are those who take an interest and pay attention to what the politicians are promising, but we all know that there are only so many ways to run a country effectively.  Things have to be done in the right way, regardless of what you promise in your manifesto.  And to make this point a little clearer, I’m going to compare it to our own system of government and the way we vote (or not, as the case may be) for our Prime Minister.

And that’s just it – we don’t vote for our PM.  We vote for a party, who elects people to vote for our PM on our behalf.  I certainly don’t remember voting in Gordon Whatsisname.  Brown.  That’s the one.  The country as ruled by the Labour party hasn’t really been noticeably different from when the Conservatives were in power.  Sure, they’ve done things differently, but the country has still ticked over and kept running, just as it had been before.  All the problems Tony Blair had to contend with would have been exactly the same problems anyone else would have had to contend with.  And most would have overcome the problems in much the same way, I suspect.

Take the war with Iraq as an example.  I’m pretty sure ‘going to war with Iraq’ wasn’t on the Labour manifesto when Tony was voted in.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that Tony as a person would have been against the idea right from the start.  But the fact of the matter is that something had to be done, and we trusted our government to take action on our behalf.  And we trusted the government because we trusted Tony.  Tony was, after all, one of us.  He smiled, he had a family, he enjoyed watching football, he came up from the gutters like the rest of us.  When we voted him in it was largely because we knew this was someone who knew what the country needed, not just how to listen to advisers and make pompous speeches.  In that sense, it’s much the same with the American elections – Barack is one of us, while John is just another old man.

While Tony B was in the hotseat everyone knew where they stood.  Even while going to war and going through trouble after trouble, Tony was still there, smiling to reassure us.  Gordon can’t do that.  If Gordon Brown had told us that we were going to war with a country we’d hardly heard of for a cause none of us really knew existed, we probably wouldn’t quite so readily get behind him.  He’s not a motivational speaker, after all.  He’s not one of us.  He’s not ‘my friend in Downing Street’.  He’s just another man.  In fact, so unimpressive is Gordon that the media still has to refer to him as ‘Prime Minister Gordon Brown’, just to remind us of who he is.  And for that reason, Brits are less likely to vote him back in.

But what to put in his place?  That was the problem last time round when we ended up voting Tony back in – there was no alternative.  The other candidates were less impressive than what we already had.  So unimpressive in fact that John McCain would have wiped the floor with them.

But, as I stated right at the beginning, part of the problem we have is that we don’t vote for people, we vote for their party.  We supposedly vote for our government based on their policies and their promises, and how they’re going to make the country better.  In practise, however, only a small percentage of any party’s manifesto makes it into reality, because of the nature of governing a country.  Everything has to be done in the right way at the right time at the right pace.  The Monster Raving Loony Party had some fantastic policies in the past, but if they’d actually got into power the country would have collapsed.  In fits of laughter perhaps, but collapsed nonetheless.

While America has similar issues of having to deal with the everyday running of the country, they have voted in a leader, someone to take the initiative and take action.  In that sense it doesn’t matter quite so much what the party as a whole stands for, because they trust that Obama will push through the important stuff and make things happen.  If change is what that country needs, they don’t want a leader who takes action by forming sub-committees.  That’s the sort of thing I would expect from Gordon Brown.  Barack Obama strikes me as the sort of person who, if a national crisis took hold on a Hollywood movie scale, would be out there with the people, rallying support, giving powerful speeches to motivate people to action.  McCain strikes me as the sort who would sit in his office writing letters to people asking them to sort everything out.  It’s not their policies that make the difference, it’s the way they make things happen.

And possibly for that reason alone, the Americans got out there and voted.  Regardless of who they voted for, they voted.  They were passionate and fired up, excited about the future of their country.  They were voting for a person, a real person with real values and real emotions.  They were both, in their way, people to get excited about.  Here in England, passion and politics only go hand in hand where a bottle of sherry and oak-panelled walls are the background for a group of old men wishing they could smoke indoors again like they used to.  Brits don’t vote because there doesn’t seem much to vote for.  What’s one old man got that another old man hasn’t?  If we vote for one party instead of another, will it actually make any difference?  That’s the mindset of the people, and if we carry on voting for abstract concepts instead of tangible people I doubt that’s going to change.

It’s a sobering thought that all the environmentalists’ warnings are finally coming true. I remember being told in a Biology lesson once that we would run out of fossil fuels by 2040, and I can remember thinking “ah well, that’s years off, someone will find a solution by then.” So far, no one has. If things progress in the same direction, we’re in for a tough time of it over the next few years. Oil is becoming increasingly hard to find, putting prices up both for businesses and individuals. 2040 may seem like a long way off, but the effects of the fuel crisis are beginning to be felt now.

Of all the conceivable effects, I want to focus for a moment on petrol (and diesel, by proxy). At the moment people are still buying fuel for their cars, still forking out increasingly high prices, and not really cutting back on the amount they’re using. Our usage hasn’t decreased (in fact we’re arguably using more now than ever), we’re just spending more for it. In that sense, putting the prices up isn’t saving the environment, because people are still using the fuel, they’re just paying more for it than they used to. In that sense, fuel tax has nothing to do with helping the environment, only helping the government’s pocket money fund. But the time will come when fuel prices reach an unstable amount, at which point things are going to get very scary.

At the basic level, I won’t be able to afford to drive any long distances any more. I’ll even have to think twice about driving to the shops, aiming to use the car less so that I don’t need to fill up as often. But take that a stage further and we’ll be in a situation where I won’t be able to afford to fill up unless I save up for it. Driving will become a luxury, a weekend sport. At this point, cars effectively become disposable. No one’s going to buy a car if they can’t afford to pay for the petrol. The result will be an unprecedented number of abandoned cars rusting in people’s driveways, obsolete, unused, dead.

There are other consequences too, of course, that affect not just me in my own little world but everyone in the country, our way of life. If we can’t afford to run our cars, then businesses similarly won’t be able to run their lorries transporting food, clothes, oil, books, and whatever else lorries carry today. Local shops will shut from lack of products being delivered to them. Farms will suffer from not being able to have their produce transported away, and no one will be able to afford to pay the farmers anyway.

We will essentially be looking at a period of time where travel is no longer a part of life, but a luxury for the few who can still afford it. We will no longer have the assurance of 24-7 electricity, and gas prices will be prohibitively high too. That poses problems with heating, and will affect pensioners and young adults alike. I wouldn’t call it the Dark Ages exactly, more like the Grey Ages.

Contrasting against that is the height of technology we have achieved in recent years. Computers have got faster and cleverer and smaller, but they only work if they have electricity to power them. Again, who’s going to buy a new laptop if they can’t afford the electricity to power it?

It’s a pretty grim outlook, and not one I’m looking forward to. Is there any way of avoiding it? I’m not sure that there is. There are small things we can do to help, but at the moment there is nothing on the horizon that will solve all our problems in one fell swoop. And maybe that’s a good thing. We’ve got used to using energy freely and carelessly, maybe we need something like this to make us sit up and change the way we live our lives.

On the fuel front, there are no ideal solutions at the moment. Electric cars don’t have a non-existant carbon footprint, because we still have to get the electricity from somewhere, and technology still hasn’t progressed far enough that it can completely replace conventional internal combustion engines. Hybrid cars are all very well in concept, but in practice rarely achieve mpg figures high enough to have a noticeable impact. Then there are hydrogen cells and suchlike, which are clever but complicated, and will have difficulty getting off the ground.

In the house, we will have to think carefully about what energy we’re using. Using energy saving lightbulbs is a good start, but we also need to think about how we use windows (i.e. closing them to keep warmth in rather than relying on the central heating), how we cook food (putting food together rather than using all the rings on the hob at once), where and how we use electricity (not just the age-old ‘tv on standby’ issue, but things like boiling the kettle, using the microwave, leaving the computer on, charging up all our phones and powering all our electrical devices).

When it comes to life beyond the front door, we’ll need to think about where our food comes from, how far it’s travelled, how far we have to go to get it, how much energy has gone into packaging. An emphasis will need to be put on buying local produce rather than stuff imported from other countries, even other parts of this country.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad thing for us to go back a few decades, live in an era where gardens are for growing our own food, where people meet together to share a TV, where lights go out after 10pm save for a few candles.

I’d like to think that I’m reasonably energy-conscious, but I’ve been thinking today that a 1275cc engine in my Mini is a bit of a waste – a smaller, more efficient 998 would probably be better. At a guess I reckon Neddy runs at about 25mpg, possibly 30 on a good day. Compare that to Lulu, the 998 Mini City I learnt to drive in, which got nearer 55mpg – that’s more than most modern cars can boast.

I hate to be a harbinger of bad news, but life is unlikely to smoothly from here on in. How will we survive? What are we prepared to do to continue living? It’ll be a bumpy ride, that much I’m sure of…

After a few minutes in the queue (incidentally, I was impressed to note that they told me how long I was likely to be in the queue) I was put through to an operator, who was British, and who dealt with the information swiftly and effectively, updating the information on my account there and then.  I then had the option of either paying the bill on the phone, or doing it online immediately.  I chose to pay on the phone, and all was perfectly straightforward.  After the phone call I checked online, and the details had already been updated.

How different this is from BT, who don’t seem able to keep track of any information whatsoever, and whose web site doesn’t necessarily reflect the most up-to-date information.  I have been told by BT themselves that anything I do won’t be reflected online for a couple of days.  How appalling is that?!  In an age of technology, having a web site linked to a database isn’t exactly difficult.  After all, British Gas seems to manage perfectly well.  Well done, British Gas, I like you.  BT on the other hand has a lot of catching up to do, and from past experience I can’t see them doing much to win my favour.

Sorry, rant over.

And it was on this day that I went with Colchester Mini Club to the Manningtree High School Classic Vehicle Show.  Not restricted to just Minis, there were cars of all sorts in attendance, all (or at least most) shined up and tidied to be on show.  Photos of the event are in my new Picasa album.

Vintage Classics

There were the traditional classics – Wolseleys, a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, a lovely Bentley.  Old cars with narrow wheels and wooden brakes, with about as much horse power as… well, a couple of horses really.  These cars show us something of the origins of the motor car, how form followed function and unnecessary styling was mostly left out.  The technical simplicity (relative to today’s modern engines) is punctuated by the sublime beauty of the hand-crafted design, a remnant of the sort of creative engineering that characterised the Victorian era and the industrial revolution.  A glimpse of an old Rolls Royce engine shows it to be full of shining metal, carefully and artistically arranged to produce the desired result – a six cylinder engine made up of two cylinder blocks, each cylinder having two spark plugs.  It was amazing.  Awe-inspiring.  And I’m glad technology has moved on.

Mid-classics

That brings me to the next era of classic cars – the Jaguar E-type, Ford Cortina mk1, Morris Minor, MG Midget, Ford Consul, and of course the Mini.  These cars are not all brilliant, in fact some are downright aweful, yet they reflect the state of society at that time.  Cars were no longer for the rich and famous, but were for everyone.  Your average family could have a car.  And they did.  Function had to work its way around form, engineers having to work double-time to work out how to make the car work despite the crazy ideas the designers were passing them, all striving for cars that looked stylish and modern.

Modern classics

Finally, there is another class of classic cars, and one that in many ways is controvercial by its mere existence – the modern classics.  The Ford Capri of the 80s only just makes it into this category, being somewhat old now, alongside such cars from the 90s and 00s as the Honda Civic, Ford Sierra Cosworth, Cheverolet Corvette, Ford Mustangs.  There is no doubt that some of these cars are fantastic cars, groundbreaking, historic, gorgeous, technologically astounding.  But are they really classics?  A ‘normal’ Sierra would be more likely classed as ‘old’ rather than ‘classic’, surely?  Then again, maybe it’s the Cosworth name that gives it a reputation that is more deserving of recognition.  The same could be said for various sports cars, each with a heritage and history to back up their place in history.  These are modern classics.  The Honda Civic, as good as it is, arguably isn’t a classic.  Yet.

The Americans

Also in attendance at the show were a good selection of American cars, including several Mustangs, a couple of Corvettes, some Cobras, a Hudson pickup in need of some TLC, and a totally tricked-out Dodge pickup that had hydraulic suspension so extreme that it could sit its bodywork flat on the ground.  There is no doubting the sheer power and presence of some of these cars, exuding an American atmosphere, but in some ways they do seem somewhat out of place here on our winding country roads and miniscule car parks.  I really felt sorry for the owner of one particular car, which was so unbelieveably long that it should really have needed a ‘long vehicle’ sticker on the back – imagine trying to drive that round town, let alone trying to find a parking space for it.  They are classic cars, no doubt, but they belong in their home country where there is actually room for them.

Best of show

The winner of the ‘Best of Show’ competition turned out to be a heavily modified Ford Mustang – not an old 70s ‘Bullitt’ model, but a car that couldn’t have been more than a decade old, and looked like it had been painted last week.  It was pimped to the max, with a massive ICE install, NOS, and doors that opened upwards instead of outwards.  Very nice, and I’m sure a lot of money and effort had gone into its preparation and modification.  On the other hand, I suspect there were many hard-core classic car owners who resented the fact that a modern car won overall instead of a car that actually had a few miles on the clock.

What makes a Mini?

This brings me neatly to a conversation I was having recently about what makes the Mini so special.  It is, after all, a car that wasn’t designed to be anything more than a little runabout, practical and efficient, and in that sense much the same as any other car in production.  The New Mini, developed by BMW, is a modern take on the classic, but hasn’t seen anywhere near the same level of enthusiasm as the original.  The failing of the New Mini is that its designers only took one aspect of the original’s brilliance and replicated that – there is no doubt that BMW know what they’re doing when it comes to performance and engineering precision.  They are German, after all.  But there are several critical components of the classic Mini that are absent, and those will always mark the Mini apart from the crowd.

When the Mini first hit the roads it was revolutionary.  It was the first car to have a transversely mounted engine, saving space and giving more room inside.  In fact the Mini was quite spacious relative to the other cars of the time, and still has more room in the back seats than a New Mini.  But I think what makes the Mini an enduring marvel is that it was never finished.  By that I mean the standard production car never crammed in everything you could possibly want, even at the end of its run in the late 90s.  Sure, there were many technical improvements over the years to both the engine and the interior, eventually adding such luxuries as a multi-point injection engine that didn’t suffer from the rain, a CD player built into a proper dashboard, air bags, nice interior trim.  But there were never any cup holders.  No Minis were ever fitted with air conditioning.  Or a clock.  And most didn’t even have a rev counter.  Any way you look at it, by the time you got hold of your Mini there were already a whole load of extras you really need to add to the car to make it more complete.  And that is the genius of the car’s continual success – owners can add what they like to make it more complete in their own eyes.

Compare that with the New Mini.  The New Mini has pretty much everything you need.  You’re not expected to need anything else.  It’s good as it is.  If it’s not good enough, but something else.  With a classic Mini, if it’s not quite what you want, you can modify it to suit your needs.  Add a CD player if you like.  Add a bodykit if you’re that way inclined.  Put another engine in if you really need more power.  Bolt chromed accessories on if you want to.

The mindset is also quite different to that of other car owners who modify their cars.  Most of the time if there is any modification going on it’s to add a massive stereo system or a monstrous bodykit.  It seems the only way to modify a modern car is to pimp it up, make it into a chavmobile and race people at the traffic lights.  Minis, on the other hand, can take a considerable amount of modifying without going anywhere near the boy-racer style.  And that, ultimately, is what attracts such a diverse group of people to the Mini – we can all appreciate it and make it our own, regardless of what we actually aspire to.

This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, and I don’t expect much to change other than the words on the signage. After all, when ‘one’ took over from Great Eastern very little actually happened – the livery changed on the outside, but the trains were exactly the same on the inside. I think the only thing ‘one’ actually did was put prices up and convince us all that having their trains go slower would speed things up (the idea does work in theory, in that less time is spent sitting in stations, but it does seem a little backwards). However, I think the most frustrating thing about ‘one’ was the name – it’s so pretentious and odd-sounding. “One welcomes you to this train”. Why thank you, good train driver, one is most grateful for the welcome.

National Express are perhaps more well known for their coach services, which are quite reasonable and a good alternative to trains. With train ticket prices ever on the increase, coaches are no doubt getting more business as they take up the angry customers who can no longer afford to travel by train. Of course, that does put more traffic on the roads, and has a larger carbon footprint, but it is easier on the pocket. That said, Megabus also seems to be doing very well, offering dirt-cheap travel between certain routes. It’s a no-frills service, but it works.

The biggest problem with National Express taking over ‘one’ is that they will have a job convincing everyone that it was worth the effort. If no major improvements are seen, we will begin to wonder what all the fuss was about, and ask why we didn’t just stick with what we had. After all, it’s not like we get much choice here – if we’re travelling by train we get on whichever train happens to come in at the right time, regardless of who is operating it. The company name on the side makes little difference. As long as it gets us to our destination quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively, it could just as easily be run by Tesco.

And there’s another thought – considering how suddenly and without warning this takeover happened, should we be expecting such takeovers and rebrandings in other areas too? Virgin Megastores recently vanished and was replaced overnight by Zavvi. Could we wake up one morning to discover that Tesco is now called ‘Wombat’?

* Yes, there are in fact several National Express web sites, we discovered this morning. NationalExpress.co.uk redirects to their coaches portal, and says nothing about them running trains at all. NationalExpress.com takes you to a central hub showing that they run coaches, trains and links between airports. And the old ‘one’ web site redirects to NationalExpressEastAnglia.com, which is an entirely different site again, and which bears little resemblance to the layout of the other National Express sites. Confused? Yes, so was I.

There was nothing on the BT web site when I logged in saying that the line had been stopped, nor that the outstanding balance was a problem.  I nevertheless paid the outstanding £22 immediately, and expected to be reconnected within 24 hours, as per the recorded message we get directed to when trying to dial out.  No such luck.  It’s now the second week in January, and we’re still not connected.  The money has been paid, it’s on my bank statement, and it registers on my BT account too that there is no outstanding balance.  But the line is still blocked.  A strongly worded letter was sent back in December, on the day we were cut off, but I have yet to receive any correspondence from them in return.

So today I phoned them up, hoping to get the problem resolved.  After what seemed like an interminable wait, I finally got through to someone.  Not a native English speaker, by the sounds of it, but still a real person, which is better than the recorded message we had had to put up with telling us there was no fault on the line.  After a short chat we established that indeed there was no outstanding balance, and that he couldn’t see why we couldn’t dial out, and went to find someone else.  At this point I was subjected to Mozart’s ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ on loop.  This would have been fine, had the quality not been appalling and had they actually played the whole of the first movement rather than the first half repeated over and over.  I’m not a great fan of Mozart at the best of times, but when they cut out the fantastic development section and leave only the first page of music, I’m left feeling more than a little short-changed.

At the end of the phone call I’m left with a complaints number, and the reassurance that someone will phone me back tomorrow once they’ve found out what the problem was.  If they don’t phone me, I shall not be pleased, and they can expect a further letter of complaint, and it won’t be as friendly as my first letter.

All in all, I’m left feeling that BT just don’t care.  Their system has made a whole string of mistakes, their call centre is massively under-staffed, and the general impression really isn’t good.  Unless they really pull their finger out and impress me tomorrow, I shall be demanding a considerable compensation from them.

Naughty BT.  Bad BT.  Go and sit in the corner.