I don’t get let out of the office often. This is because even after a couple of years I’m still the new guy and you can’t answer the phone if you’re out of the office. So I look forward to the odd day away from the no walls of my office, especially when I get to have a hire car for the day. This is because having driven Fiestas for most of my driving life, I like to play around with something else occaisionally. So when booking a hire car to pop up to Oxford (It was actually didcot, but was marketed as Oxford) yesterday, I was looking forward to pretending to be Clarkson, Hammond or May in a new Focus, Peugeot 307 or Astra. Instead, I was given a Vauxhall Zafira.
Now I’m pretty sure I didn’t request a people carrier. I didn’t need 7 seats or a massive boot (you only get one or the other) and I have to admit to making comments while driving when I see someone in a massive car when they clearly don’t need it. I would even have happily taken a car without air conditioning if I could have had something a little smaller. Regardless, I was stuck for a day with a car which made me feel like I should have at least a couple of kids in tow, put simply, it made me feel old.
Clearly the people at Vauxhall have had experience of this so in an attempt at making the driver feel less old and more like the children in the back, they stuffed a massive engine in the front. I was driving the 1.9TD version which when you put your foot down in anything from 2nd to 5th would explode and was happiest in 6th when you were doing at least 75mph (disclaimer: this doesn’t mean I was speeding, just that the car wanted to go that fast). This made the journey rather fun, in that you could overtake at ease and fly down the motorway, except that despite the engineers best efforts, it still felt like you were driving a tank, or at the very least, a bus. It sounded like a bus, it had the gear change of a bus and in place of a regular handbrake they’d put something like you’d see in the centre console of a 747 but which worked in a completely different way that I couldn’t get the hang of.
They also cleverly provided an arm rest on the drivers seat, which prevented me accessing the handbrake while down and meant I kept hitting it when changing gear if it was up. I couldn’t find anywhere to put my cds, I didn’t like the indicator or windscreen wiper stalks and why the hell did it need to have a ‘Sport’ button, which when you pressed it, seemed to give you an extra 2 horsepower and would no doubt simply kill the planet just that little bit quicker.
They’re marketed as ‘Clever family cars’ and I whether they’re right will depend on whether you believe that school run mum should have the power to go at 80mph when she’s in a rush.
The current internet age is brilliant for discovering new music. Why having heard the rather brilliant name ‘the all new adventures of us‘, I wouldn’t have been able to listen to a selection of their songs on myspace and decide to buy the debut album if my computer wasn’t hooked up to the interweb.
Except I haven’t bought the album, because despite enticing you in through a fancy mp3 playing web page, the album is a limited release on vinyl only and no I don’t want to “pop to Argos” and buy one. Let’s put it this way, I’ve not had a hi-fi system since uni. I’ve got a digital radio and I’ve got a computer, there’s no space on any shelf for a record player and considering that I’ve only got one vinyl single to my name (’The Prayer’ by Bloc Party bought because it was 99p) there’s not really any point in me getting one. And no, I’m not going to buy a copy on the basis that I might get a copy of the mp3 at a later date, possibly.
Surely, you’re a band, sales are good and offering a digital copy of your album is not going to take anything away from the whole limited edition release thing. Some come on guys/gals, care to indulge me?
It’s a…
“temporary public ownership solution”
Good to see that management speak is even used at the top of government.
So, we all know that recycling is good. This was one of my major gripes in Andorra where everything up the mountain came in a plastic bottle or polystyrene cup but there wasn’t a recycling bin in sight. But is it a step too far when my new work trousers come with a label proudly exclaiming ‘these trousers are made from 14 recycled plastic bottles’?
I’m not sure about you but it just takes a bit of getting used to. Maybe it’s just me but I tend to assume that a product, once recycled, comes back in pretty much it’s original form. Newspaper becomes tomorrows newspaper, can becomes next persons can, plastic bottle becomes plastic bottle filled with mineral water, shipped between mountain ranges, drunk and binned. Still as the M&S press release puts it:
“Trousers are made from recycled polyester which is made by chopping up used plastic bottles into flakes, melting them and then squeezing them through tiny holes to make a polyester yarn which is then woven into fabric.”
Which is all very well but how much energy does it take to ship bottles around the world to have them melted, made into trousers and then shipped back around the world? And at what point does this actually stop helping the planet and start just being a pr gimmick? Sorry, that’s just the cynic in me letting loose.
Either way, it’s better than drinking out of something made from peoples old trousers!
I’ve added a small selection of photos from last week to the photos section. Some others will end up on Flickr. Sorry there’s not as many as last year, but that’s a result of spending more time boarding and less time with a camera in hand.
At the start of the week I wouldn’t have boxed myself as an intermediate snowboarder. Sure I wasn’t a beginner but there wasn’t a group for “not a total beginner lacking confidence and practice on snow” so attempting to blag it as an intermediate was the only option. Once I found out that some of the other ‘intermediates’ had never been outside of an indoor snow centre, the confidence suddenly returned, and remained.
After a morning of lessons, it all felt good again. Another couple of runs instead of lunch made me feel even better and even turning on steeper slopes, the one thing that really had me rattled last time was conquered with persistent practice. By the end of the week we’d at least tasted all the available runs in the resort, bar the steepest reds and blacks. When there’s always someone stuck half way down a run, it’s not the greatest advert. We’d even tried most of the slopes in the non snowboard friendly (read: flat in a few places) resort next door.
Sadly though, Andorra seems to have absolutely no character to it. Wherever you look there was a crane putting up another identical charmless hotel and I really missed the couple of little outdoor bars pumping out music just as you got off the pistes at Saas-fee. It also appeared to have missed out on the bumper snow season that the Alps and states are having.
Still, I’m now happy to consider myself an intermediate snowboarder and that’s another country to cross of the list of places I’d like to throw myself down the side of a mountain.
Photos will be forthcoming, in the meantime check out this panorama on Flickr.
My board from last week, name taken from a bit of classic Snow Patrol.
