This is an attempt to cram all my interests into one site; I just hope I have got all the links correctly set up or there is no knowing where you will find yourself! By clicking on the relevant title at the top of the page you will be conveyed to a photo gallery.

TRAVEL

My first experience of foreign travel was a trip to Norway via Denmark to stay with a college friend and his family. (Note - its perhaps best not to follow me on a trip as shortly after crossing the Skagerrak to Norway the boat sank in a storm and again shortly after I had returned home the boat from Oslo to Newcastle caught fire mid North Sea!)
Later in life further summer holidays were spent in Jersey, Spain and Portugal with family life seeing the usual beach holidays in The Canaries and Mediterranean region. Since retirement I have been a little more ambitious and visited New Zealand (2006), Barcelona (2007), Australia (2008), Venice (2008), China (2009), Lisbon (2009) and Montenegro (2009) with plans to visit Kenya in 2010 and in the future.....who knows?

PHARMACY BYGONES

Having spent my whole life associated with the profession of pharmacy its perhaps not surprising that over the years I have amassed quite a collection of jars, tins etc., all representative of a time when the pace of life was a lot slower and there weren’t boxes to tick, targets to be met and so on!


MOTORING

My first car, a black Mk.1 Austin A40, was purchased in 1968 for the princely sum of £120 when I had finished college and needed to learn to drive to get to work; I later sold it for £90 so it didn’t really owe me anything. Those were the days of “real” motoring when you carried a spare can of petrol in the boot because the fuel gauge couldn’t always be trusted and during winter the engine would sometimes cut out owing to carburettor icing - engine adjustments were made with a screwdriver unlike these days when a laptop computer is required. When calculating a 0-60 mph time a calendar was useful - not the case with my current car!
Incidentally the cost of my driving lessons was 16 shillings (80 pence) an hour!

NFA 757 in all its glory.

After selling the A40 in 1970 I bought the first of three Opel Kadetts; Opel had just moved into the UK market and their cars had superior build quality which wasn’t associated at the time with home grown cars. The engine size was 998cc. and the car cost me a total of £906, 5 shillings and 9 pence; I was able to negotiate a discount from the garage owner, Mr. Heinz Landgraf, reducing the cost to £860. I stretched my budget to the limit by having a radio fitted (a Blaupunkt Sandringham) for the sum of £43-18s-3d and filling the tank with 7 gallons of 3 star petrol cost a further £2-4s-4d (in new money that is 32p per gallon!)
It was an exciting period waiting for my first new car but an industrial dispute meant that I had to be very patient. The planned delivery date was August 1st. to coincide with the issue of the new (“J”) registration but a dockworkers’ strike meant that at that particular time my car was sat on a quay side in Belgium and didn’t arrive in the UK until September.

In 1996 I made a quantum leap purchasing the first of three Volvos (two 440’s and an S40) - fuel injection, electronic ignition, air con. etc. all of which definitely saw the end of home servicing! The final model was the T4 variant of the S40 - let me just say that anyone who thought a Volvo was a boring ride quickly changed their mind after a short trip. One of the motoring correspondents wrote in his review that “the performance of the T4 is manic” - I wouldn’t disagree!

I made a brief foray into the world of kit cars taking over a Dutton Melos from Jonathan who by now was too involved in medical training to find any time for tinkering with cars. The model was originally assembled in 1984 based on a MkI Escort 1300XF and really was the forerunner of all Lotus 7-type cars. It had the sort of engine I understood and the intention was to make the restoration a retirement project but after making some progress, a cold garage and restricted workspace convinced me that it wasn’t such a good idea and I decided to sell it.

All my life I have wanted a sports car but family responsibilities dictated that I should be “sensible” and so when I retired I decided that now was the time “to do it” so I blew the pension lump sum on a Honda S2000GT!

Photographed on delivery day with Carsington Water as a backdrop.

Day out in the Yorkshire Dales with Jonathan and his Lotus Elise.

Quotes by that driving god, Jeremy Clarkson

“Speed has never killed anyone. Suddenly becoming stationary . . . . . . . . . that’s what gets you”

“I don’t understand bus lanes. Why do poor people have to get to places quicker than I do?”

“We all know that small cars are good for us. But so is cod-liver oil. And jogging. I want to drive around in a Terminator, not the heroine in a E. M. Forster novel”

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