I was quite saddened to see the news recently that SAAB are likely to disappear as a major car maker. Of course, they have not been the SAAB of old since they joined the General Motors stable but I still have very fond memories of my old 99. It was one of the best second-hand cars I ever owned – a real pleasure to drive and lot of fun. When I bought it, the roof had some minor damage from some sort of chemical spillage that had eaten into the paint but I got it for a good price and took it to a specialist for a respray. The guy was a big SAAB fan. I asked if the chemical damage was likely to continue to eat away at the roof. He gave me a withering look and opened up the bonnet. “Feel that” he said, indicating the thickness of the bonnet. I put the edge between my fingers and had to agree that this was indeed a fairly solid chunk of metal. He seemed pleased and then said: “There’s more metal in that bonnet than in a whole Ford Fiesta”! And he might well have been right.

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“Microsoft has reached agreement with European Union anti-trust regulators to allow European users a choice of web browsers. The accord ends 10 years of dispute between the two sides.” That’s what it said on the BBC news website last week. Who exactly are these guys? Did we elect them? I don’t think so. But we have paid out of our taxes to fund this petty and ill-conceived war – first over the bundling of the Media Player In Windows and then later the bundling of Internet Explorer. And guess what? I am, whether I like it or not , a European – and for as long as I can remember now I have had a choice of web browser. It’s not rocket science. I really do not need some puffed up creep full of his self-imposed sense of importance to tell me that I can download Firefox any tme I want to. Or Opera. Or Chromium. Or Safari. I have never been forced to use either Microsoft’s Media Player or Internet Explorer. And nor have any other Europeans. And how come Apple are not being hounded by these idiots? Do they not bundle Quick Time and Safari in exactly the same way?

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On a personal note, I recently discovered – or perhaps a better word would be realised – that I was wasting a lot of shampoo and conditioner washing where my hair used to be but no longer is. The hairline has moved a couple of inches or so backwards but my method of hair washing had not kept up with the times.

I have ranted on before about the curse of chewing gum being casually and selfishly discarded on pavements.

But I had never really considered post-chewed gum as a sculpture medium.

So both my OH and I – and maybe Sid the dog – were somewhat surprised and amused to find this little art piece attached to a lamppost recently.

The top picture here is of a 1952 Vauxhall Velox that I recently encountered at a local town show. It bought back memories for me because my father had one of these when I was a kid and his, too, was black. A few years before I could legally do so, he even let me once have a drive although decided this was a bad idea when I nearly put it through our neighbours hedge. He loved this car just like he loved all of his cars from his very first owned ’30s Wolseley Hornet convertible in which he courted my mother through to the Cavalier he cherished when he died.

Saturdays for him were often spent with his head under the bonnet, or lying underneath the thing, tools spread everywhere, tinkering with this or adjusting that. And Sundays, of course, they were off for a drive. His family were the first people to own a car in the village I grew up in and he was so used to the mechanical workings that he bemoaned the rise of electrical components and would have hated my computer controlled Audi. No – he would have loved to have driven it but hated the fact that he couldn’t repair it. Except, of course, it doesn’t really go wrong. A Sunday drive in the late ’50s often ended up counting the cars pulled up on the side of the road, bonnets up, refusing to go any further. How often do you see that now?

And that’s my problem. Because I have always had a hankering to get a ’40s or early ’50s Jaguar. Whenever I see one I just want to buy the thing. But then I remember my Dad and all the cars on the side of the road and I realise that I haven’t got a clue. I can usually manage to get the bonnet open and I can do the oil and water thing and the rest is just… lots of bits of odd shaped metal and pipes all joined together in some chaotic, mystic fashion. I know the names of some of the components as well – but I wouldn’t be able to identify or find them. So rather than having some motoring fun I play it safe and don’t remember the last time a car of mine actually broke down.

The Ford Consul is vintage 1962 (the last year this model was made). In 1959. my eldest brother worked as a test driver for Ford and took me in one of these up the M1 the day it opened. I was 8 years old and still remember being awestruck by this huge road that just went on and on and the speed that we ate up the miles.

They might not be real vintage – but it was fun to see them both again.

I have made no secret over the years of the twin facts that I am a smoker and that I use a MacBook Pro. What I have probably not mentioned is that most of the time I roll my own ciggies.

This means I can be endlessly entertained as stray bits of tobacco and ash disappear without trace between the keys on my laptop. They have even managed to work their way down the side of the trackpad. But, amazingly, things still work. Which is not the case for the MacBook belonging to my other half. She doesn’t smoke and probably the worse thing to get lost between her keys are small particles of Green and Blacks. And I do mean ’small’ as any Green and Blacks that might get lost would automatically register as a tragedy and I would have heard about it. Her MacBook, despite being newer than mine and not subject to tobacco abuse, had sticking keys and the odd one that had to be hit firmly with a small mallet to function.

So – always helpful and thoughtful – my eldest son came over to Swordfish Towers at the weekend armed with his compressor and airbrush to gently blow – at round 50 psi – the muck from our Macs. That’s him in the first picture doing just that and the second is an enlarged area of my screen where you can see some of the stuff that was being blown out.

Great fun was had by all as we watched hairs, fluff and other unidentifiable particles coming back out from their resting place. The good news is that my wife now has a fully functional keyboard. We did not, however, retrieve enough tobacco out of mine to give me a smoke.

I find it hard to believe that I have written nothing for over a month. I know I had been getting lazy and missing days between items – it does say ‘random and irregular’ at the top – but a whole month? Well – I have an excuse.

I was in a small, light aircraft that had to make an emergency landing in the Amazon rain forest and it took the pilot and I a month to get back to civilisation surviving on suspicious looking insects and… OK. I’ll try again. I was walking across a field in the Yorkshire Dales when there was this sudden loud engine noise above me and a bright light in the sky and I suddenly found myself amongst weird looking aliens who threatened to carry out nefarious medical experiments on me unless I gave them my credit card PIN. Only felt like minutes but when I got back a whole month… How about this? I was crossing the Solent on the Isle of Wight ferry when we were boarded by Portuguese pirates and held for ransom. OK. I’ll own up to the truth. I had to take a rail trip to Penzance and what with the usual rail delays, missing trains, missed connections and confusing timetables and ticketing, it took me four weeks to get there.