OK, let's get the advert out of the way first.

( Read more... )

Odd. My last post attracted two spam comments (you can't see them - they're screened and will probably get deleted soon) and neither of them was Japanese. The first one said "Great Post. I add this Post to my bookmarks." and the second one said "Прочитал этот пост. Сильно паригленулся. Добавил этот сайт в закладки! Администратор, продолжай в том ( Read more... )

I've been in Lancashire for the last week, seeing in the new year with my parents and a brother, and staying until a cousin from the US came for a visit, and other brother with his wife and child appeared also ( Read more... )

I am getting an extra £450 off the insurer. Hoorah ( Read more... )

An informant sez: "you could get a brand new petrol car for the price of that Corsa."

Which appears to be more or less true. Some more links:

Nissan Micra 1.2 Spirita (2007, 7K8 miles, £4,995)
Nissan Pixo 1.0i (2010, 6K4 miles, £5,995)
Renault Clio 1.2 TCE Dynamique (2007, 3K4 miles, £6,592)
Vauxhall Corsa 1.0 Life (2009, 4K6 miles, £7,495)
( Read more... )

I am Up North with smallclanger, who is having some quality time with his grandparents. His ambition seems to be to go through the shelf of games in the back room and try out each one once, and so far we've played Ratrace, Mhing and In One Word in addition to Game of Life which he's seen before, Fluxx which by now is an old favourite, and Escape ( Read more... )

• The Good: I went to the Boar's Head Gaudy on Saturday, and the one person I most wanted to see was there.
• The Bad: a flash snowstorm earlier in the day had caused a couple of dozen cancellations, and the eventual 70-odd attendees did not include any of my former classmates.
• The Ugly: I was caught out in said snowstorm because I'd gone to Tesco ( Read more... )

So what did I do last week?

On Friday (27th) after work I braved the M6 which was apparently made of queue during the day, but fortunately the hour or so getting ready had made it late enough to avoid most of the traffic - and smallclanger and I stayed the night with my parents ( Read more... )

So, the Citroën garage (who I've not yet spoken to since Tuesday) wanted £800 to replace the clutch, another couple of hundred for the flywheel and about £300 for the brakes, if I remember the conversation correctly. I've now contacted two local garages.

P Bruno have told me that the cost of the parts is: clutch kit £155.35; flywheel £214.05; set ( Read more... )

My car is overdue for an annual service¹ and it's been roughly 12.5K miles since the last one, which coincidentally is the recommended service interval (despite what the odometer thinks). It's just coming up to 75K miles.

In addition, the central locking had been playing up (the first time it happened was outside oldbloke's house six months ago, and then ( Read more... )