Month: December 2018

340 miles in a Nissan Qashqai.

A few years ago, I rented a Nissan Juke and drove it a few hundred miles and I came to actually like it a little bit, despite the fact that I was unable to refuel it and despite having to drive it very slowly to ensure that I got back to the rental company safely.

Having to exit the car rental place onto a busy roundabout with no idea where the clutch was going to bite was a little bit scary, but all was well, the engine had plenty of power and the gear change, while exceptionally long-throw, was predictable. The drive home was uneventful, unless you consider driving something that is perhaps 50% bigger than anything you have driven in a while outside of the B&Q truck, uneventful. The steering was nice and light, the clutch and gearbox easy to use, but the brakes are stupidly sharp, which means that even a gentle touch on the pedal had the nose diving for the tarmac and the passengers trying not to eat the dashboard. Around town then, this is not the best choice.

Last weekend we needed a car to drive up north and despite booking a ‘Skoda Octavia or similar’, they handed me the keys to a Nissan Qashqai. Initially I was somewhat skeptical, they had given me a compact SUV rather than the big Skoda that I thought I would be getting.

Read More

Do you really need a car

All cars end up here

Recently we added up what running a car was costing us. Initially we looked purely at the monthly costs, but then we started to look at the ‘per mile’ costs and it was suddenly fairly scary, turning that into a ‘per use’ figure was even more insane. We realised that we were using the car perhaps twice a month and each use was therefore costing over £100, excluding fuel – which given our usage was amazingly minimal. 

We worked out that each mile cost us about £2.50, plus fuel. 

Read More

My Religious Opposition

I was raised in an not especially religious household, we went to Church on an infrequent basis and I was sent to Sunday school for a while, but in general there was no great emphasis on religion that I remember. I was encouraged to pray, but mostly religion was not a subject that was discussed a great deal

I went to Sunday school because my parents wanted me to go, while there we were told stories from the bible and while interesting, I quickly identified them as fiction. There was no basis in reality that I could see, simple, cute, whimsical stories that often had a moral to them. In near every example the story proved that being good to others would generally lead to a good outcome, while being bad would generally be your downfall. I got good at this, I could identify the bad actors within a couple of minutes. I paid all of this education lip-service, because my parents wanted this.

I distinctly remember some of my peers taking this seriously, they took the stories to be actual records of things that had happened, rather than my interpretation of them as being moral-based stories that promoted better behaviour.

Read More

Its Over

A long time ago Jeff Lynne wrote a lyric that went like this..

It’s over, it’s over, all over,
It’s all over now
And the way you looked
Don’t even mean I’m down.
When you kick out the sea
And the sun says goodbye
There is nothing much to speak of.

Well a momentous fight that I have been going through for four years and four months is finally over and the lyric has been popping in and out of my head ever since.

On August 1st 2014, I was hit by a car while cycling around a roundabout. The crash broke my collarbone fairly badly, left me with a broken bicycle and a lot of cuts and bruises.

Initially the driver gave me false insurance details, then the owner of the car (his daughter) called me to tell me that I would never get a penny and she was going to sue me for damage to her car. By then I had already filed a police report and had been patched-up at the hospital, so I called a solicitor that specialises in bicycle accident claims to help me to untangle this mess. This turned out to be a brilliant move on my part.

Read More