knobheads

Bank Holiday Weekend

| Richard

Well that was a busy one!

After a somewhat heavy session on Friday night at Abacus with colleagues – damn you Happy Hour! – Saturday found me packing for the weekend and heading over to GT for Saturday, including seeing “The Avengers”/”Avengers Assemble” (which I can recommend as a good, fun film) and a nice meal out afterwards.

Sunday morning and GT was running a half-marathon so I left at a reasonable time and headed off to Manchester with a stay at the comfortable Radisson Edwardian and an evening out at the Comedy Store‘s “King Gong” stand-up show with some very good (and some really awful) stand-up comics.

Monday was a day shopping at various stores in Manchester including a 20+ minute wait at Starbuck’s in the Arndale Centre for a coffee. I was somewhat disturbed though by this that I saw whilst walking through Top Shop:

I'm sorry? "Formal"? Jogger?

Then another night at the Radisson Edwardian that ended with me watching Homeland’s disappointing end (well, for the first series anyway): why do the US networks insist on keeping these series running on and on rather than actually developing a story with a start, a middle and an end? I won’t now bother with the second series.

Tuesday saw me mainly sitting in traffic jams on my way to Birmingham for a meeting and then back down to London. Somehow, despite excellent driving conditions, people had variously managed a series of crashes on the M6 and one on the A406 North Circular that closed it leading to really long tailbacks. How do people manage to crash in such excellent conditions?

Save Us From Ourselves!

| Richard

An excellent piece of tabloid journalism from the BBC News site:

Call for law change on quad bikes

“Doctors say the law should be changed to force people who use road-legal quad bikes to wear helmets.

Accident and emergency medics say lives are put at risk because riders do not have to wear protective gear – despite the fact the bikes can reach 90mph.”

Oh my word! Think of the children! Something must be done!

And yet…

“There are no separate statistics on the numbers of quad bike crashes, but two particularly high-profile accidents have made headlines and brought the dangers to wider public attention.

In 1998, comedian Rik Mayall suffered serious head injuries and spent five days in a coma after his quad bike overturned while he was riding it at his farm in Devon.

In 2003, rock musician Ozzy Osbourne spent eight days in a coma, broke eight ribs and punctured a lung while riding a quad bike in the grounds of his Buckinghamshire mansion. He was not wearing a helmet at the time of the crash.”

So there’s nothing to support such a cry for us to be protected from ourselves. And clearly the high profile accidents took place off road. Not sure what a crash helmet would have done to save Ozzy’s broken ribs and punctured lung, but hey, let’s not let facts get in the way of a hysterical piece of so-called journalism.

Let’s Race!

| Richard

I drove up to Grimsby last night for the first time in the RX-8. Now although I was ‘making good progress’ as usual, it seems  that if you’re driving a sporty car, the knobheads seem to try to prove something.

A case in point was the rep in an Audi RS4 Estate on a 10 plate who immediately accelerated away when I’d overtaken him.

When I got closer on the A46 I came up behind a Skoda Octavia. Again he must have seen me rapidly approaching him as we drove towards a 40mph limit because as soon as we were through it and heading out, he accelerated hard and kept on until he was well into ban territory. I carried on as usual and, of course, caught up with him a few miles later as my driving wasn’t quite so erratic as his was.

What is it with other people’s perception of sports cars?