A Postcard from Down South

This past week has been half term.  Well partly; it was for our youngest son.  Eldest son being at college in Yorkshire was on half term the week before, but since he's in Monday to Wednesday, we made a flying visit to the south coast for my Mothers birthday.

Like most seaside resorts Bexhill on Sea doesn't really suit the winter.  We normally visit for a week or so in August.  Now in late February, without the light and warmth of the summer sun, the windblown streets are quiet.  The cafes and restaurants that usually buzz with the activity of the city day-trippers, are dark and quiet.  They wait for the better weather along with the ever present Herring Gulls, circling on the strong sea breeze, mournfully calling to each other, denied the scraps of food provided by the careless summer tourists.

None of this bothers our Border Collie of course.  The chance to chase her ball on the beach is a rare treat.  She leaps in and out of the waves with careless abandon.  So much so youngest son has to wade into the water to retrieve her ball before it is carried away by the retreating tide.  He curses the dog, she wags her soggy tail, shakes out a mixture of water and damp sand and urges him to throw the ball once more.  At least he's finally cleaned his dirty shoes.

On Friday we make the pilgrimage to see my Nan.  Soon to be 97, living independently in the same house my Mother and her siblings were brought up in.  We have a birthday lunch with her and my aunt who lives a few miles down the road.  Nan is slowing down a bit, but she insists she's definitely not deaf as I have shout our family news to her.  She doesn't get up to the church as much as she used to, but the priest now comes to her once a week.  Almost everyone that walks past the house waves at her.  The old lady in her window is a fixture of Rye for so many, not just our large family that live nearby.

We take the chance to walk around the ancient town.  I have been coming to visit family here all my life.  The town has changed out of all recognition.  The shops are now catering for tourists more than locals.  As a kid, my cousin and I would frequent several of the shops on the High Street.  Woolworths, long since gone is a council office and library.  The banks have gone, as has Lipton's Grocers and Freeman Hardy & Willis shoes.  The bookshop remains, as does Adams.  When she left school, Nan got her first job working for the printers that was attached to Adams.  The shop with its large oak framed windows is a newsagents, stationers and most important for me growing up, a toy shop.  Walking in I remember the smell of the place.  It is almost the same as it has always been.  Copies of the national and local papers, magazines, pens, paper, envelopes and up the worn wooden staircase lots of toys.  I'm suddenly distracted by a family from the Midlands, clearly on their own half term holiday.  The children are running rings around their parents, wanting all the toys and threatening to combust if they don't get their own way.  Mum is trying to restore order with a mixture of threat and compromise in her broad Brummie accent, while Dad is wondering if it's worth trying to bribe the kids with ice cream from the kiosk across the road.

Adams of Rye

We wonder down to the Landgate, the surviving fortified entrance to the Town.  It's twin Strandgate was demolished in 1815 after falling into disrepair.  Where there was once a public toilet on the corner of Ropewalk is a Micropub.  As the drizzle begins to fall we hurry inside to find a spacious and busy interior.  It would be rude not to sample some local ale, and we are not generally considered rude.

Landgate, Rye

We walk back through the Market Carpark and past the railway station.  Further on is the Pipemakers Arms, favourite watering hole of my late Grandad, quiet on this damp Friday afternoon.

Saturday finds us visiting Hastings.  We decide to take advantage of the £2 bus fare cap and catch the 99 from the end of the road.  The top deck affords a glorious view of the sea.  Grey outlines of ferries and container ships can be seen on the horizon.  Boulogne is 45 miles away across the channel, tantalisingly out of reach.

Hastings is busier being a weekend.  Youngest son and I go in search of a Saveloy.  This bright red sausage has always been a firm favourite of mine but you just cant find it here in Yorkshire.  My wife and eldest son are less keen on them and visit a well known bakery chain for lunch instead.  We enjoy a drink at a what appears to be an Elizabethan Inn, but was in fact built in 1947 using bomb damaged materials.

Returning on the bus we are reminded why we usually drive.  

Now I like buses.  Growing up in London I would travel on a Routemaster almost everywhere.  You could happily watch the world go by from the top deck, even if the smokers made the view a bit foggy.  The conductor selling purple ink tickets from his Gibson machine.  The mothers prams tucked in the cupboard below the stairs.  The bell string along the cabin ceiling.  Nowadays of course buses only have drivers, there's no smoking thankfully and you pay by contactless card.  The quality of some of the passengers however leaves something to be desired.

AEC Routemaster the backbone of London's Buses from 1956 to 2005

A father and his friend join us with their small children on the top deck.  They swear continuously at the children for not being grateful enough for the day out they've enjoyed at the seaside arcades.

"I'm not f*****g taking you anywhere again."

"Don't eat all them sweets, you'll have f*****g dodgy poos all night."

Meanwhile a teenager in the front seat with black hoodie over his head and his feet up on the rail gets a phone call.  He puts it on speaker of course, it's his Mum:

"Where are you?"

"What?" he shouts.

"I said where are you?"

"What?" louder this time.

"Where are you!?"  Mum is exasperated.

"Glyne Gap."

"I'm going to Eastbourne so I won't be at home."

"Are you driving?" The lad is after a free trip with Mum.

"No I'm catching the train."

"Oh, right never mind."  He hangs up.

The more respectful passengers roll their eyes.  Thankfully we arrive in Bexhill and escape the circus.

We spend our last evening in Sussex drinking wine and enjoying a good laugh with Mum.  She'll miss us when we go, the boys particularly, but my Brother and family are booked in for Easter which is only six weeks away.  She needs that time to recover.

We returned on Sunday evening, a six hour drive unusually for us not disrupted by traffic.  

Arriving home we discovered that the bathroom drain was blocked.  We should have stayed on the coast.

The Ultimate Driving Machine?

Bavarian Motor Works

Growing up in the later years of the twentieth century and being a bit of a car nerd, I can fondly remember the glossy adverts for the latest models.  Each brand seemed to have their own identity.  

Everyone knows Audi was vorsprung durch technik even though we had no idea what it meant, progress trough technology apparently.  My Grandfather made a fleeting appearance in an ad for the Audi 80, as the hapless ships captain dropping the car from a millionaires yacht into the Mediterranean.  Audi's boast of the car being made from galvanised steel meant it wouldn't rust, was offset by my Grandfather reporting the car was ruined by the time they'd fished it out, off camera of course. 

Ford had a catchy jingle to go with Everything we do is driven by you.  Volkswagen had the famous Changes advert.  A recent divorcee played by model Paula Hamilton, throwing away her possessions until finding her car key.  She smiles and drives off in her Golf to the caption: If only everything in life was a reliable as a Volkswagen.

Land Rover has been The best 4x4 by far for as long as I can remember and Fiat's Hand built by robots slogan was cheekily rewritten by the comedy show Not the Nine O'clock News to: Designed by lasers, built by robots, driven by Italians accompanied by a picture of a motorway pile up.

BMW, with their rear wheel drive saloons have always marketed itself as The Ultimate Driving Machine.  Adverts would be testosterone filled speed fests, with chiselled males and beautiful girls in exclusive parts of the world.  These adverts appealed to a certain type of person which according to YouGov is:

"Male, aged 40-59, lives in East Anglia. They’re likely to hold right wing political views and work in the business, finance or consulting sectors. Your typical BMW driver is interested in motorsports and motoring, and enjoys dining out."

I think we might all add that BMW drivers tend to view indicators as an unusable optional extra but I digress.

So with this owner profile you may be surprised to learn that when we had to replace my wife's rusty Honda HRV, given that it had gained the structural integrity of a lace doily, we went for a BMW X3.  The reasons were eminently sensible.  It's a 4x4 SUV, it's a comfortable drive, it's an automatic, and most importantly it was cheap.

BMW X3

The X3 when launched in 2003 was the first mid size premium SUV on the market.  It was designed in conjunction with Magna Steyr, the Austrian tractor manufacturer who also built them until 2010.  

So from an ownership point of view I was expecting a relatively easy time, and yet the Ultimate Driving Machine is at times a royal pain in the behind.

With my mechanical skills best described as enthusiastic amateur, I have tackled the following jobs:

• Full Service and Oil Change.  Relatively simple and the car ran much better afterwards.
• Replacement of faulty Air Bag Sensor.  A real pain having to disassemble the passenger B-Pillar trim.  The part is discontinued and took a while to source.
• Repair Vacuum Leak 1.  The rubber intake boot split allowing unmetered air into the engine.  This caused the car to run rich with poor fuel consumption.  I ordered a new part from the BMW dealer and dismantled the engine ready to replace it.  I then discovered my own car had an oil leak and I couldn't drive to pick the part up.  I got the train which took three hours, I had to change at Carnforth and then had a three mile walk from the station in the rain to collect the part.  I got very wet, but the car got repaired.
• Repair Vacuum Leak 2.  A rubber pipe at the bottom of the engine perished causing high fuel consumption again.  This time I ordered a part to be delivered from a specialist.  Trouble was it never came.  I managed to find one from a motor factor 50 miles away in Leeds and had to drive there to collect it.
• Replace front brake pads.  A simple job, that caused no drama.

These repairs were relatively simple, just time consuming.  However by far the worst job on this car by a distance is the rear screen washer.  This is without doubt the stupidest piece of design in the history of the automobile.  I know that might seem a bold statement.  You might say what about the Austin Allegro and its square steering wheel?  What about the Saab 900 you could drive with a joystick?  What about the Morris Marina and its Trunnions?  Or even the G-Wizz or Suzuki X-90? There have been a lot of poorly designed and built cars over the years but, all of those pale into insignificance because the rear washer on a BWW X3 is Premier League stupidity.

Let me explain.

The car has a screen wash reservoir in the front under the bonnet.  It has two pumps, one for the windscreen and one for the rear, so far so standard.  The rear washer jet is supplied by a 6mm pipe that runs from the reservoir to the rear through the car under the carpet.  Again nothing too unusual in that except, BMW in their infinite wisdom decided to make the pipe in two sections.  The joint is on the drivers side of the transmission tunnel and is a push fit.  

So what? I hear you ask, well the problem is this.

When there is cold weather, the rear jet freezes.  When the rear screen wash is activated the pressure forces the joint apart.  As the now broken pipe is lower than the reservoir the entire watery contents leak into the rear footwell, where it soaks into the foam sound deadening material and rots the carpet.

Moreover, this pipe cannot easily be reached, that would be too sensible.  No, no, instead you must remove the rear seat, the drivers seat (remembering to disconnect the battery so the airbag system doesn't fault), and all of the surrounding plastic trim.  You then peel back to sodden carpet to reveal a small lake and the gushing joint.

The Offending Joint

Repair is the next problem.

The first time, I spent hours drying the carpet with a halogen heater and the hairdryer.  I simply pushed the joint back together.  It clicked and I thought no more of it.

Two weeks later it broke again.  This time I glued the joint.  That repair lasted a month.

This time I meant business.  I taped with PTFE tape, glued and for extra piece of mind clamped another larger hose over the top.

Summer came, the car dried out and I felt I had cured the problem, until this week when the weather went cold and the screen wash disappeared.  Yet again we have a leaking joint.

So what is the solution?  Ultimately a new piece of pipe from pump to jet without a joint.  That would involve removing the interior of the car completely and in the current freezing temperatures is not appealing.  I could send it to BMW who charge £500 to effect a repair without a guarantee it won't do the same again once the weather goes cold.  Instead I'm going to use a coupling that is used by water dispensing fridges.  They use 6mm pipe and it is possible to get a fitting to join two pieces of pipe together.  You have to order online as no one appears to stock them, believe me I trawled the local plumbers merchants and DIY stores.  I event went to a shop that sells fridges.

The Solution?

I'm writing this whilst I wait for my Amazon delivery.  Hopefully this is the permanent solution.  Anyway I've cut a hole in the carpet, just in case I need to repair it again.

Pardon Monsieur? Un 2CV?

 

1989 Citroen 2CV

In 1934 when Michelin took over the bankrupt Citroen Car Company, they commissioned a market survey.  What vehicles should the company look to develop?  Away from the bright lights of Paris and the cities, France had a mainly rural population.  Cars were expensive and somewhat fragile.  These country folk used the horse and cart as their preferred mode of transport.  If Citroen could tap into this market, they could make a killing.  To do so they would need something new and radical.

A design brief was prepared.  The new car should be low cost, rugged, able to transport four people and 50kg of farm goods at 30 mph on poor rural roads.  It should be cheap to run with a fuel economy of 95 mpg and should be able to transport eggs across a freshly ploughed field without breakage.

By 1939 the Toute Petit Voiture (Very Small Car) was ready for launch and preparations were made for the unveiling at that years Paris Motor Show in October.  However, with the outbreak of war in September, the project was put on hold.  Fearing that the Germans would adapt the TPV for military use, as had happened with the Volkswagen Beetle, the prototypes were hidden across France.  Three of these were only rediscovered in a rural barn in 1994.

1937 TPV Prototype

It took until the 1948 Paris Motor Show for the 2CV to arrive on the world stage.   In the intervening years Citroen had refined the design by improving the engine and developing a four-speed gearbox.

The motoring press were not complementary about the very basic car.  The 9hp engine could only propel the car to a maximum speed of 40 mph.  An American journalist asked if it came with its own can opener.  Despite these criticisms Citroen were flooded with orders, so much so that there was soon a five-year waiting list with second hand examples more expensive than new due to their scarcity.  Even so by 1952 Citroen were producing 21,000 cars a year.

Through the 1960's the car was continuously improved, so that by 1970 the new 602cc engine was capable of 22hp.  The windscreen wipers were now electric instead of relying on the speed the car.  The speedometer received a backlight so a driver could monitor their speed at night and the bench front seat was changed for two separate seats.  Seat belts were even fitted as standard from 1974 onwards.

The last 2CV was built in 1990, a remarkable run for a car that was designed in the 1930's and remained mostly the same until the end of production.  In total almost four million were built.

So why this automotive history lesson?  I shall enlighten you.  Mrs P loves them.

My wife is a huge fan of the Art Deco style.  The 2CV with its curves is unlike anything else.  A cheap to run classic car that evokes the style of the 1930's but is modern enough to remain useful even today.

So what? I hear you ask.  Well dear reader it's like this.

Whilst falling down one of her evening internet 'rabbit holes' she spotted a 1984 example, running and driving with a long MOT for less than a grand.  It sparked a bit of discussion between us.  We could keep it in the garage, it'd be ideal for the youngest to learn to drive in, parts are plentiful and cheap etc.  By the time we'd given consideration to going and having a look, it had sold.  As the saying goes "He who hesitates is lost."  So now I'm spending my spare time scouring the internet for a reasonable and cheap, (emphasis on cheap), 2CV.

Should we get something that we can restore, without too much expense over the winter? Should I try and film the restoration for YouTube to help finance it?  Are we completely bonkers?

2CV or not 2CV? That is the question.

Answers in the comments below please. 

The Jubilee Tour

I have to say, with everything that's going on in the world, it is really nice to talk about something positive.  This past weekend has been a lot of fun, getting the band on the road and playing to happy audiences.

On Friday evening we were delighted to be a part of the Jubilee celebrations in Rathmell village.  A crowd of over two hundred enjoyed a wonderful BBQ and bar.  We played fifty-three songs in a two and a half hour non-stop set, which left us shivering in the cool evening breeze by the end!

After the usual hour or so packing up, helped in no small part by my lovely wife, we were ready to depart for home when Bass Player Alan marched up to my car window looking somewhat glum.

"My battery's flat," he said with his customary gruffness.  So we spent a fun few minutes searching under his bonnet by the light of an iPhone to locate the terminals to attach the jump leads.  Fortunately his van came back to life with the assistance of my Land Rover and we headed home.

A few minutes later, whilst crossing the Moorland just before our home in Bentham, we encountered four young girls standing in the road, flagging us down.  In the hedge beside the road was their Volkswagen Polo with hazards blinking.

"There was a car on my side of the road so I had to swerve," said the young driver sheepishly.

"Hang on, I've got a tow rope in the back."  We pulled them back to the road and told them to be careful.  After all the excitement we made it home unscathed at 12:30am.  Fortunately one of the local pubs has a late licence.  Even better our son was having a drink there after work, so he made sure that there were two pints waiting for us when we arrived.

Roll on to Sunday afternoon when we reconvened to play at The Coach House in Bentham.  An afternoon that was supposed to be outside in the baking June sunshine, ended up inside after the heavens opened and remained so for the whole day.

Having chatted with Landlord Karl the night before over a drink, we discussed the set list.  I am going to confess here, as I did to him on Saturday night, I can't stand Neil Diamond's 'Sweet Caroline.'  I do get grumpy when people ask us to play it.  So imagine my delight when I woke on Sunday morning to read the Coach House's Facebook post advertising the gig.  

"Come and hear all your favourites," it read. "Particularly American Pie and Sweet Caroline."

Australian publican humour aside, we played for a happy mix of tourists and locals who enjoyed our three sets between 4pm and 7pm.  A particular mention for Keith the guitarist, who's star turn is impersonating Hank Marvin on Apache.  He was absolutely flawless and went down a storm.  

I made sure to sing American Pie for Karl just before the end, just to make sure he wasn't disappointed.

The whole show rolls on to Wigglesworth next Sunday afternoon for the Capplestone Estate Open Farm.  Bring it on!

Why Can't We Write Our Own?

 

So many rock and roll songs are written about journeys across America.  This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, after all the music and the pioneering artists were all from the United States.  Being in a band in North Yorkshire is quite a long way from Memphis Tennessee, so there has always been a temptation to write a rock and roll song that captures the essence of America with a feel a little closer to home.

The trouble with this is that America is such a huge country compared to the UK.  The USA is forty times the size of little old England.  In the UK you are never more than 70 miles from the coast.  In the US the most central point is Belle Fourche in South Dakota.  This town of approximately 5000 people is over 1000 miles to the nearest coast.  That distance alone gives the songwriter plenty of acreage to reference on any particular journey. 

Take Route 66 for example perhaps the most famous of 'road' songs.  Chicago to Los Angeles is a journey of 2000 miles with big cities on the way.  Plenty of possible places to get your kicks on Route 66.

By contrast Helen Wheels by Wings, arguably the best known UK road song is about a drive from Glasgow to London via the M6, just over 400 miles.  Not a journey with the same number of highlights.  Places such as Kendal, Liverpool and Birmingham charming as they are don't stir the emotions in the same way as St. Louis or San Bernadino. 

When our drummer asked why couldn't we have our own Yorkshire rock and roll song, I had to go away and think very carefully about how we could.  I mean North Yorkshire has some spectacular driving roads, but it isn't exactly Oklahoma City.

So with a faithful 12-bar blues pattern in A, I went away and wrote Settle Rocks, about a journey along the A65 from Skipton to Settle.

This is a frequent journey that folk around here make.  Skipton is the nearest main town to Settle, so most will travel along the winding single carriageway road, often choked with farm or holiday traffic to get their weekly shop done.

References include the dodgy weather, it is Yorkshire after all, The Leeds Liverpool Canal, Tractors, Caravans, The Flying Scotsman on the Settle - Carlisle Railway and the famous Dales Three Peaks: Ingleborough, Whernside and Pen-Y-Ghent.

Ok so it might not be as romantic as driving an open topped Ford Mustang through the wide open spaces of Arizona or New Mexico, but its our own bit of Yorkshire rock and roll.