In response to this ‘article’ (which is entirely old hat anyway) and inspired by the stupid comments they published, here is my contribution:

I’ve heard of some horrific head injuries incurred while walking down the street. Trips and falls, and of course muggings and other violence, can even be fatal, and most of these deaths could have been prevented by the wearing of a helmet.

Thus, I always wear a helmet when out walking, and consider anyone who does not to be a fool.

I urge the government to make walking helmets compulsory with immediate effect. The law can be enforced, and fines handed out, by traffic wardens and litter inspection teams – thus no additional staff will be required, and a tidy profit can be made by the local council too.
R Perrin, Climthorpe

Something I forgot to comment on was this:

“It’s plain and simple that helmets are effective,” Ms Lee continues. “If you think of people who have mobile phones, computers, I bet they all have covers on to protect them. You have a skull protecting your brain and if you know anything about computers you know that if you damage a computer you can’t load the programme. That’s exactly the same with your brain.”

Then again, there’s not much to be said in response to that mindless babble is there? Stick the the nursing, love Ms. Believe it or not that quote came from the actual article, not a comment from some passing halfwit.

Secondly, a more serious use (it’s all relative) of the same setup, namely providing a guided tour of the grapevine:

The camera shoots the video in MPEG format, so I used Riva FLV Encoder to convert them to the more web-friendly FLV format, and also to reduce the resolution and bitrate a bit. This Wordpress plugin made it easy to embed the videos into the post. Although it was a bit more effort, I much prefer this approach to relying on an external service to encode and host the video as I did here.

Can you guess what it is from the picture? It’s a driveshaft. Not very exciting to most people I suppose, but if you’d been waiting six weeks for the bloody thing to turn up, you might see it my way.

For those who don’t know what one is, and who care, and who are reading this (a very small group of people indeed), it’s a bit of a car. The end on the right goes into the diff, and the end on the left bolts into the wheel hub. In between are two CV joints and 10kg of metal. Any the wiser now? Or more excited?

The plan was to get it fitted at the garage, but I’ve waited so long I’ve decided to do it myself. We’ll see how that turns out. Bearing in mind that the first hurdle is to get the drain and fill plugs out of the diff (notoriously sticky, and haven’t moved since 1985), the most likely outcome is that I either give up right there, wrench the car off the jack stands trying to shift them, or blow myself into the middle of next week waving a blowtorch around under the fuel tank.

The rest of the job looks pretty easy though, so I might find myself driving triumphantly up and down the road before the weekend is out. Then, sooner or later, it will be time to do the other side.

A bonnet. Or a hood, if you speak the U.S. dialect. Interestingly, both are things you might put on your head. I wonder if the French open up the beret to check the oil. They don’t, I’m only joking, they open le capot, which isn’t anything you’d put on your head in any language I don’t think. On the other hand, a capote is a cloak with a hood, and I definitely remember seeing the capote anglaise worn as headgear during my schooldays.

Anyway, despite starting by going off on a tangent, the title of this post is actually very literal. Tim Bray followed up an excellent write-up on OOXML with a post on reflections, punctuated with a nice “reflection in a bonnet” picture, making me realise how many pictures I have in that rather odd category. So for your viewing pleasure (or perhaps just my own amusement, you decide), I dug out a couple.

Wind is probably my least favourite kind of weather, and moreso when we’ve had what seems to be weeks of it. What’s normally an easy journey up and down the A1 on Friday was made a lot less pleasant by various obstacles in the way, ranging from lorries lying on their sides to bits of signage that had become detached and blown into the road.

To make matters worse, I arrived home to find that I’d spoken too soon about the shed standing up to the constant wind. Half the roof has detached itself and flown across the garden (narrowly missing the gas man, it turned out) and one of the windows has blown out and smashed into pieces. Luckily the turkeys who lived inside are long gone (very tasty they were too), so there’s no desperate rush to fix things.

“Police say a number of people are seriously hurt in a crash involving 30 cars which was caused by fog.”

I can’t think for the life of me how a crash can POSSIBLY be caused by fog. Did the fog wrap its icy claws around everybody’s accelerator pedals? Jam the brakes? Topple a bridge? Fuddle their brains? No. Driving ‘faster than they could see’. Stupid bastards. Of course, as is usually the case, the casualties will probably not be restricted to the stupid ones.

I want to know who said the so-called accident was “believed to have been caused by dense fog and rain”. Hopefully just some webmonkey working late at the BBC, and not the Chief Constable quoted later in the article.

Fine? Penalty points? Revoke their licenses permanently I say.

Nationwide Autocentres, Harrogate

Summary: Hurrah

I know I shouldn’t have gone anywhere near one of these places after the experience at their Manchester branch, and the price quoted at the Leeds one. However, we’ve taken our various cars here many times and they’ve never put a foot wrong. At a cost of £69, I drove in, the wheel bearing got fitted in no time, and I drove away happily listening to the engine purring rather than the hub grinding away. The end.

(I really wasn’t taking any chances this time mind you – I went with a shiny new set of bearings in the glove compartment in case of any shennanigans, but they weren’t required.)

This ought to be the last mention of wheel bearings for a long time, but unfortunately the same wheel bearing on Nibby’s car is making an unpleasant noise now. With any luck though, there will be nothing worth writing about that.

Here’s what we have for episode one:

Kwik-Fit, Harrogate

Summary: Don’t bother

Booked in several days in advance for wheel bearing replacement, to be done in the morning and picked up just after lunch. I dropped the car off at opening time, 8:30am, and having heard nothing at all by nearly lunchtime, phoned to find they hadn’t even ordered the part yet. They called back shortly afterwards to say they’d now ordered it, but needed to keep the car until five o’clock. This was highly inconvenient, but I agreed. They also said it needed a tyre – news to me, but I said replace that while you’re at it then.

At 5:15, after a walk across Harrogate from the point where I managed to get a lift to, I was just about to arrive at Kwik-fit when I got a phone call from them. The wheel bearing “just didn’t turn up, do I want my car back tonight?” I said that I did, and continued to Kwik Fit where I waited half an hour for them to put a wheel back on. I then paid for the tyre, and the car was brought off the ramp still sporting the same 4 tyres it went in with. “Bloody hell, I told him to put the tyre on before he went home.” It was suggested that I “come back another day” to get the tyre that I’d paid for fitted, but of course I declined and got my money refunded.

In the meantime, I can’t figure out which of the four good tyres they failed to rip me off for.

Nationwide Autocentres, Ardwick, Manchester

Summary: Avoid like the plague

Following the previous day’s fiasco, I wasn’t taking any chances. I phoned ahead and explained that I needed this doing today and had to drive back to Yorkshire that evening, so if they didn’t have the time or couldn’t get the part, could they please say so straight away so I would have the opportunity to take it somewhere else. No problem, said the manager. This conversation was then repeated in person when I dropped the car off.

Several hours later, having heard nothing, I thought I’d pop round and see what was going on. The car hadn’t moved from where I’d parked it, so I asked the manager what was happening. He said he’d “get one of the lads to look at it when they’d finished what they were doing”. I asked if he’d ordered the part yet, expressing the same concerns as earlier. “No, but the part won’t be a problem” he said. I wasn’t convinced, and he said “Ok, I’ll ring them now”.

A couple of hours later, I had a quick sneaky look which confirmed what I now suspected – the car still hadn’t moved.

Finally, at nearly 4pm, they phoned me to tell me that they had a part but it might not be the right one, so if they were to try and fit it and it was wrong, they would have to keep the car overnight, something they already knew was impossible. The manager claimed there were two possible parts, and he only had one, the other being out of stock, although this story changed several times as he continued to contradict himself and blatantly lie. He couldn’t adequately explain why he didn’t attempt source the part 7 hours earlier, nor why he didn’t even know what part he needed. I put a stop to the conversation when he eventually pointed out to me that “I had nothing to complain about”.

Motosave, Regent Street, Leeds

Summary: What’s the point?

Following the previous days’ fiascos, I wasn’t taking any chances. I phoned ahead and explained exactly what part was needed, and that I wanted to be sure they had it. “No problem at all”, they said.

I arrived at the agreed time, and not to long after, they got me to pull the car up on to the ramps, and the mechanic agreed, “yes, you need a wheel bearing there.” He proceeded to explain that it would be impossible to do it this afternoon though, because he wouldn’t be able to get the part as all their suppliers were closed for the afternoon due to the impending Easter break. The mind boggles as to why this wasn’t mentioned on the phone, instead of “No problem at all” which means something entirely different to me. Anyway, another complete waste of time.

Nationwide Autocentres, Leeds

Summary: Thanks but no thanks

Not that I intended taking the car here (see above), but I was passing so I thought I’d call in just for my own amusement. £161 was quoted, no mention of confusion about two different parts, needless to say, because there aren’t two, and they did score some points for saying they couldn’t get the part that day. The amusingness of that price though, will only become clear in episode two, so tune in next time for more gripping drama.

When I started it up yesterday, I noticed it was idling at nearly 1500rpm instead of the more sensible 900. I wasn’t particularly concerned, but then on the motorway, cruising at an apparent 5550rpm, it dawned on me that the tachometer must be counting ignition pulses and the six cylinder engine is sending more than the tachometer I took out of the 4-cylinder version is expecting. I drove on, smugly dividing the reading by 1.5 and thinking about fixing it later.

In the meantime, I’ve opened all the windows due to the overpowering smell of oil, and they stay that way until I remember that I didn’t reconnect the oil pipe to the back of the instrument cluster properly. As a consequence, oil is leaking from the connection and following a complex path leading to a point directly above my left foot. Nothing in these cars happens by accident, and I’m sure the German engineers rigged this on purpose – since it’s an automatic they know exactly where my foot is going to be. Their plan worked anyway, and I’ve reconnected the pipe as they intended it.

On the plus side, my trainers came out of the washing machine cleaner than before. They stink of oil still, but that’s an improvement on the previous odour.