Beating Mike the Mouse, the pea stealer

Posted on by stripeyanne

I’ve never seen him, but I know where he’s been. He’s big, he’s bold, he’s quick and he loves peas, all peas, especially my peas. Mike the Mouse is a one-rodent pea-eating machine. He not only knows when I’m opening a packet of peas ready to sow down on the allotment, he can tell from 10 metres away which variety. In other circumstances, I’d have massive respect for any being who has such pea knowledge, but Mike doesn’t care, he’ll eat the lot, including the packet.

For years I’ve dug my trenches, planted peas on the allotment and waited for those little green shoots to emerge. I waited in vain, because as soon as I turned my back, Mike was there, gobbling up every single pea, oh I dearly hope they gave him severe flatulence.

To begin with, I thought my pea harvest failure was down to inexperience, then I blamed the soil, pronouncing it pea-unfriendly. But talking to my neighbours, it was clear that there was one culprit and his name was Mike, though he was given other, unprintable names by my fellow allotmenteers, my guess is, he didn’t care, as his belly was permanently full of peas.

I’ve no idea where he lives, but I’m on the lookout for a bloody big entrance hole to accommodate his fat belly. Nor am I surprised that he’s lived so long, even Neighbour Nathan, Mousecatcher Extraordinaire, has failed to trap him. The scoundrel (Mike, not Nathan) even camped in his greenhouse (Nathan’s, not Mike’s), cocking a snook at all of us, leaving little pea-filled poos behind. The bastard.

This year I am determined to have a full and bountiful pea harvest. Petit pois Waverex and Ambassador peas should be flooding the allotment within weeks thanks to my cunning anti-Mike plan. The secret? Guttering. A two-metre length of Wickes gutter capped at either end with gaffer tape, filled with compost and planted with Mike’s favourite peas, all safe in the greenhouse and far away from the scoundrel. The peas have germinated and are now healthy plants, Mike won’t be having any of THAT, it’s the seeds he gobbles up. I hope.

There was comedy potential as we slotted the plants and their guttering in the car to take to the allotment. Fortunately Laura, our car’s computer, who responds to any request, opened the little flap in the back seat so the whole lot could be loaded from the boot to the front seats, we were keeping our fingers crossed that there were no emergency stops or the whole lot would have piled up in the footwell. Even more comedy potential as we carried it downhill to their new home, Laurel and Hardy music playing in the background, but nope, neither of us tripped, the peas were peaceful.

The idea of gutter-planting is to grow them in rows, ready to slide the peas directly into the ground, and by gum it works! Now they are settling into their new home, pushing out their little tendrils, shoving down their newly-liberated roots and preparing for peas. Though as I put in the final cane and covered them with netting to keep off Percy the Wood Pigeon and his greedy wife Patricia, I’m sure I caught sight of a pair of beady eyes, watching, waiting, with little paws rubbing a fat rodent belly, as if preparing for a feast of pea shoots……

Survivor tomatoes

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In a couple of millennia when we’ve ruined our planet and wiped ourselves out, visitors from another world will land in their saucer-shaped space ships, survey the landscape with their nine eyes and let out a gasp of awe from each of their three mouths. Blimey, they’ll say, just get a load of all those tomatoes, looks like we’ll be eating Italian tonight…and tomorrow…and tomorrow….

You see, tomatoes are the ultimate survivors. Their little jelly-coated seeds are practically indestructible, they gather in drains, gutters and patches of waste ground. They’ve been hanging around in my Hot Bin, the King of Compost Bins, which reaches temperatures of such intensity, nothing survives except worms, who are also ultimate survivors.

The Hot Bin breaks down everything from pineapple skin and mango stones to chicken bones and cat poo, making thick, black, crumbly, smell-free compost compost. I was delighted when I harvested my compost, it looked so…..composty… But within days of sowing seeds and plants, Iittle seedlings started to appear, and they weren’t the ones I had sown, I recognised them immediately, tomatoes.

They were everywhere, with the cabbage, the kale, the cosmos and the Crown Prince squash, they even grew next to the Tumbling Toms I’d sown one to a pot. Suddenly there were four or five to a pot and they were all growing very nicely thank you in my super-compost. What to do? I could grow enough to feed the whole village. Naturally I didn’t want to just pull them up and return them to the compost (again) , it’s such a waste (and they’re free), so I re-potted them, all of them. I have no idea what kind of tomatoes they are, other than they aren’t Tumbling Toms, so I just made labels ‘Random tomato’ and left them to it.

Soon I had more tomato plants than I could cope with, so had to start giving them away with the warning that they could be anything from cherry to beefsteak tomatoes, or maybe a new hybrid, a kind of tomato lottery, except that hopefully you win every time!

The more compost I make, the more the tomatoes love it and the more they grow and grow. What with all the seeds hanging around with their little jelly coat, just waiting to germinate, and boy will they germinate.

Meanwhile down on the allotment, it’s a massive pleasure to see things grow after so much rain. It feels like it’s rained every day since before Christmas, the plot has been a quagmire, with its own spring bubbling up between the slabs on the path. Oh good, I said as I squelched down the path, more water. Remind me I was chuntering about the wet when I’m complaining about having to schlep watering cans around as the sun bakes the earth this summer. But at least the tomatoes will grow.

Random acts of kindness

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While I was out at the choir the other night there was a rattle of the letterbox and a plop as an envelope landed on the mat, it scared the life out of the cats and stopped Noel programming, but only for a nanosecond, he was in The Zone.

Inside was a handmade card, stamped with Easter images with a message from the village Brownies. A simple ‘Happy Easter’. A simple card. I was simply overwhelmed, it was so unexpected, so kind. The Brownies are very much a part of our village life, they cultivate a raised bed at the allotments, and they run the pay-as-you-feel cake stall at the village show, where they are very persuasive in getting us to part with our money, we always pay more than we feel…as I say, they are very persuasive. For Easter they each made three cards, keeping one for themselves and giving the other two to someone else, one of them was me, a touching random act of kindness.

It was my 400th parkrun on Saturday, 2000km of running, 374 of them at Woodhouse Moor, so I’ve made my own groove around the park, first in one direction then the other, as we changed the course post-covid. During that time I’ve also gone through several pairs of running shoes, quite a few sports bras that lost their elastic, five red hats and, if my maths serve me correctly, 1200 post-parkrun coffees. Then there’s the cake, it is a fact that post-run cake has zero calories, so I could say no cake was eaten, I could say that, but I’d be lying.

I didn’t want to make a massive fuss about my 400th. I’d worked it, more by luck than good judgement, so it coincided with the 800th Woodhouse Moor parkrun , which felt rather neat. It’s not even a recognised milestone, there’s no tee-shirt or fancy merchandise, I’ve another 100 to do before I can get any of that, so I scribbled the number on a piece of paper and pinned it to my back.

Contrary to my usual pre-parkrun routine, I didn’t stand around chatting and did what could loosely be termed as a warm-up, only to bump into the lovely Dave and his wife who’d come across from Boston (Lincolnshire, not Massachusetts) to visit their daughter Beth and, it turns out, to celebrate with me. How kind, how very kind.

There was more kindness to come, as Beth greeted me with the world’s largest Rocky Road, complete with my name and 400 spelled out in chocolate, biscuits, and gooey chewy rock and road. It was totally unexpected, I was gobsmacked, such a lovely surprise and such kindness. Thank you!

Happy 13th birthday to MEEEEEE!

Posted on by stripeyanne

It was my birthday this week, a very special one, one that took me into my teens. Me. A teenager. Again. Not that I’d want to have all the spots, greasy hair and temper tantrums that go with those growing- years, or the O-levels, good grief, they still haunt my dreams. But to hit the teen years as a parkrunner made it a very good birthday indeed. No spots, no O-levels, we’ll skip over the greasy hair and temper tantrums.

I hadn’t even heard of parkrun, although it had been going seven years, four in Leeds. Leeds, I was later to learn, and as run director, proclaim from the start line near the Duke of Wellington’s statue, was the first parkrun outside that there London.

Actually running had only recently entered my vocabulary, I’d never been a runner, I’d only started running at the age of 48, encouraged by a friend who had no idea what she would start. I then heard about parkrun from someone at the climbing wall, it seemed some of my fellow climbers were runners and were keen on this parkrun thing. For a start, it was free, which is always good news in a climber’s book and it wasn’t a race, which is great news for someone who can barely run and it was at 9 on a Saturday morning, well two out of three isn’t bad.

I remember turning up for the first time, I did it on a whim. Noel was away on a first aid course and I was up at the crack of dawn. I know, I thought, I’ll try out this parkrun thingy, maybe go for a coffee afterwards. I got there and didn’t even know where the start was. I was half an hour early, overdressed, nervous, but ready for a new adventure. I don’t remember much about the run, except I was massively overheated and incredibly overexcited. Noel joined me the following week…and the next. We became parkrunners.

From running with a couple of hundred at my first parkrun, I now rub shoulders with 700 or so most weeks at Woodhouse Moor. And when I’m not running, I’m volunteering. I’ve lost count of the number of friends I’ve made, adventures I’ve had, shoulders I’ve cried on, coffee I’ve drunk and cake I’ve eaten, let’s just say it’s a lot.

Fortunately for me as a not-very-good runner, parkrunning isn’t really about running, though in my birthday week I did complete my 399th, so I’ve worn my own groove around the park. It’s only 13 years, with one of those lost to covid, but I feel I’ve been a parkrunner all my life and I can’t imagine my Saturday without it.

Plinky plinky, plinky plinky, tingy tingy ,BING!

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Plinky plinky, plinky plinky, tingy tingy, BING! What the hell was that noise? Plinky, plinky….. the tinkling sound was coming from the direction of my new phone, which was vibrating itself across the table and about to tumble on to the cat’s head. The cat had emerged from one of his many sleeping places to investigate the insistent irritating noise that woke him up… Plinky, plinky……

In the old days, phones were as big as your head, the bit you spoke into was attached with a curly cord to a base unit fitted with a dial and the whole lot was plugged into a wall. Plugged into a wall, I ask you, oh how the youngsters today would chortle at that. The ringtone option was RING (loud) or ring (quiet), which you adjusted by moving the phone further away to another room, providing the wire was long enough.

My fancy new phone had chosen its own ringtone, which it hadn’t had the courtesy to tell me about. Those clever clogs marketeers at Samsung must have been congratulating themselves on being very creative as they conjured up a whole universe of astronomical names for the ringtones on the Galaxy phone. I think the default setting for mine was called Pluto is No Longer a Planet.

The random ringtone was one in the long list of stressors that came with my new phone. Time was when all you had to do was take it out of the box and turn it on, but no, not now, that would be far too simple. Now, every new phone has free sessions with a marriage guidance counsellor and a soundproof bag to scream into. It’s not that I’m a technophobe, I’m quite savvy really, but it’s the faffing, I can’t be doing with the faffing. So many apps to transfer, so many passwords to drag out of the recesses of my butterfly brain, isn’t there just one button you can press to make the new phone do what the old one did? Actually yes, there is, and that button is called Noel who is looking up the details of the free counselling sessions as I write.

We are compatible in so many ways, whether it’s a shared love of climbing, skiing, running, trekking, reading, music, movies, good food, art, mountains, Paris, coffee or Top Gun. Yes we have differences, he loves curry, I hate it, he’s also as much of an introvert as I am an extrovert, but that’s good for balance, I couldn’t do with another one of me in the house. When it comes to systems and processes, he’s the man, he’s detailed, rigorous and forensic and that’s just when he’s making coffee. I like to think I’m the bluesky big thinker, strategic, untroubled by details like remembering passwords, Noel begs to differ, he thinks I’m a nightmare as he has to pick up the forgotten password pieces, he may have a point, but I’m not admitting it.

Needless to say, the transfer of all my apps, and I can’t believe I have so many, took a little while. Noel was at his wits’ end, I went out into the garden and bothered a few weeds with my strategic thinking. They weren’t impressed either.

Noel transferred everything, including my cheesy wallpaper of him with the cats. Everything, that is, apart from my Santana ringtone , I love that ringtone, I’ve had it years, I recognise it immediately, but it’s disappeared. Instead of Smooth, it’s Plinky plinky, plinky plinky, tingy tingy, BING! Bloody Pluto! Plinky plinky, plinky plinky, tingy tingy, BING! I’m not answering any phone that makes that noise and that’s that.

Fortunately and even after the password-fixing trauma, Noel gallantly stepped in, OK it took a while and I did whinge a bit, but when he did, he went the extra mile, all the way to mach 10. I’d worked out how to change the phone’s name, I called the previous one Galaxy McGalaxyface, but thought it was time for something new, so in honour of my go-to escapist movie of all time, I called it Maverick. Noel, in honour of our shared love of said movie, installed a new ringtone, the first few bars from Top Gun, it’s bloody brilliant. He can be my wingman any time.

Bobbles and probes, a lesson in soil

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Tearing down the allotment clutching an uprooted pea plant screaming ‘agh, agh, it has bobbles, it has BOBBLES! We’re doomed!’ was the very bottom of my learning curve when it came to vegetable growing.

The pea plant had offered up a fine harvest, but what I saw when I pulled it up filled me with fear. Bobbles, lots of them, clinging to the roots, maybe they were alien eggs, maybe they were poison, bobble-infested peas could only taste bad. I concluded I was a failure before I started and our plates doomed to be pealess.

But before I made a pyre of all my gardening tools to appease the Bobble God, I had a quick check with the all-knowing Google. My search told me that not only are bobbles not a dreaded disease, they are essential for soil health and the drug of choice for many plants as they are packed full of nitrogen, which, Google informed me, was A Good Thing. Plant lots of peas and beans, said Google, leave their roots in the ground when done and your soil will be very happy indeed, then plant brassicas there the next year, they’ll love all that nitrogen.

I now embrace bobbles, though they are weird and do freak me out a bit. I have done my homework on what the soil needs, other than the coffee grounds I take down to the allotment. The soil wants bobbly nitrogen for healthy growth, especially leaves, phosphorus for roots and potassium for flowers, though both phosphorous and potassium are bobble-free. I don’t use synthetic fertilisers, so it’s a combination of home-made compost, poo, bonemeal, calcified seaweed and more poo. I can confirm none of it smells good.

Now I’m on my way to being a soil nerd with my latest purchase, a probe. I have absolutely no idea how it works, but by thrusting what looks like a pair of knitting needles attached to a plastic box into the soil I’ll know whether it’s acidic or alkaline, too much of either is bad, anything in the middle is better. After extensive probing I can confirm my allotment soil is in the middle, which is a relief, as I’m only a trainee nerd and am not sure what I’d do about it.

Hopefully the soil preparation will mean bumper harvests in the allotment this year. It’s been a slow start thanks to the wettest February ever, but when that lot drains, the planting can start. I have high hopes for peas this year, bring on the bobbles.

Letter to a new skier

Posted on by stripeyanne

Dear Young Anne, hello from the future, this is Old Anne, you, or rather me, only older and wiser. When I say wiser, I’m talking about life experience, the lessons learned by doing, or not doing and the wishful uttering under the breath, ‘I wish I’d known then what I know now.’

Well thanks to the magic of the internet, and the contrivance to write a blog, I’m speaking to you from 2024, more than 20 years into your future and I have a few words of advice for you before you set off on your first ever ski holiday. I know you’re excited.

Before you pack, remember this, the more of a beginner you are, the harder you’ll work and the sweatier you’ll get, and believe me, you’ll sweat like you’ve never sweated before. By the end of the week, you’ll sweat beer. So pack as many changes of clothes as you can and wring them out once you’ve worn them, otherwise your luggage will be over the weight allowance.

Skiing is a faff. No matter how long you think it’ll take you to get ready and on the pistes on a morning, you’ll seriously underestimate. And you know those fancy braces you bought to keep your salopettes up? Ditch them (see weeing below).

Nearly every slopeside and ski station toilet in the known universe is downstairs, usually two sets of concrete stairs covered in melted snow and unmentionables. You need to know this, because you will wee a lot, possibly for your country, it’s to do with the cold, the altitude and biology. Over the next few years as you ski more (and believe me, you will want to) you will become the go-to authority on location and quality of toilets everywhere. You will develop the propulsion method of stair descent making good use of the handrails to take your weight and swing down the steps. Coming back up is easier, mainly because you’re so relieved to have made it – and glad that you didn’t have to faff with the braces.

There are two types of chairlift, the ones that don’t declutch as they come round, and smack you hard on the back of your legs, and those that do declutch, so don’t hit you as hard. In both cases, make sure you are standing just a bit in front of Noel, he’ll take the hit for you. By the way, Noel will go on to be a ski instructor, go figure, you sleep with a ski instructor!

Your ski boots say they have a ‘walk mode’. They lie. The modes are ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘bloody uncomfortable’ rather than walking and skiing. You will start by walking on your heels, by the end of the week, you’ll want to crawl, that’s fine, all the other newbies will too. There is no easy way to carry your skis, so when Noel offers to do it, let him, it’s good practice for his instructorship.

On the slopes, you’ll fall a lot, off the slopes, you’ll fall, though not quite as much, but the theme is falling. Falling is easy, it’s the getting up that’s hard, but try not to blubber and sob as you do it, it’s not cool and your tears will freeze. Just don’t point your skis down hill as you try to get up, it will be a comedy moment for everyone on the slopes except for you.

Slopeside restaurants are expensive, anything you eat outside will immediately go cold and you’ll have two flights of stairs to descend to the toilets. But you’ll love it (apart from the stairs) because being in the mountains is ace.

And finally, you’ll make huge plans to dance the night away after falling over all day. Those plans will come to nothing, you’ll finally get to your room after walking back from the slopes, have a shower to relieve your aching limbs, sit on the bed and the next you know, it’s morning and time to start the faffing all over again.

I hope this has helped, don’t let me put you off, I’m just trying to manage expectations. Each season, you’ll get better, more confident and fall less, though you’ll continue to wee just as much. That’s life – and age.

Being in the future, I don’t want to create some kind of time paradox by telling you what happens in the world, anyway, you’d never believe me. But I have just one word of advice, check out something called parkrun, you’ll not have heard of it because it doesn’t exist yet, but when it does, oh boy, everything will change. Love Old Anne.

I chose Maverick

Posted on by stripeyanne

It’s January, my birthday month. I’d like to say I’ve stopped counting the years, but the world of running, or in my case over the past few months, shuffling, there are no age secrets. On the plus side, the older you are, the better your stats, I am planning on being a record-breaker when I reach the VW100-104 category but even for me, that’s a long way off.

To celebrate clicking over into the VW65-69 category I decided to hold a year of celebrations. My running club is delighted to celebrate with me, female cross country runners of vintage years are few and far between, and the Peco team needs at least one to score points. Go me!

For my birthday year, I needed a celebration launch event that would start as I meant to go on, you know the kind of thing, loud, silly, immature, colourful, chocolate-fueled and most important of all, sharing it with friends who know me well enough to humour me and smile politely.

January is a bit of a daft month to have a birthday, it’s cold, dark and grey after the colour and carnival that was Christmas. As a child there was the added glumness when relatives handed me one Christmas gift, smiling as they told me it was for Christmas AND my birthday. I think that’s when I learned how to search for swearwords in the dictionary. I’ve got over it, and can swear magnificently in two languages. with the odd smattering in others.

So with an eye on the weather and comfort of guests, I decided a film party would do the trick. In Leeds we are blessed with wonderful museums where we can show off our industrial heritage and by gum we have a lot of it. The fantastic Armley Mills Industrial Museum shows off heavy engineering, from textile machinery to trains, it also has the smallest cinema in the country, the Palace, with just 24 seats. And for a modest fee, you can hire it and show your favourite film.

I love all-things cinema, it was the treat of my childhood and the only place you could buy Kia Ora, which made all the kids hyperactive during the cartoons. In those days, the Olden Days, TVs were as deep as they were wide, the pictures, such as they were, always black and white and tuned with a dial with numbers that went to 11, despite there only being three channels. It puzzled me when I watched the Wizard of Oz on our tiny TV that they were following the grey brick road and Dorothy’s slippers were dark grey. When I was taken to the cinema, I was given the gift of colour and have celebrated all things colourful ever since.

As a mature student (snigger) I chose to study cinema for my MA. Of course we quizzed each other on our favourite films, there were a lot of worthy masterpieces. But personally I go to the cinema to be entertained or maybe challenged. I want to escape from the world outside and find something different, I want to laugh, cry, gasp, cheer, boo, clap, be surrounded by sound, colour, and movie magic. I want to leave bursting to chat about my favourite scenes, or characters, or sights, with the discussion continuing way after I get home. Much to the surprise of my fellow students and the lecturer, I named Top Gun as my favourite film. It had me right from the start, one note building up to a brooding crescendo as the scene on the aircraft carrier unfolds. Men in overalls doing serious pointing and arm waving as the F14s launch, heat haze, vortices and testosterone everywhere. Over the years, it’s been my go-to film when I want to escape and when I need to be cheered up. Noel and I watched it together the night before his cancer surgery, at the end we assured each other we could be each other’s wingman any time.

The Top Gun Sequel, nearly 30 years later, was eagerly anticipated in our household, Noel is a walking airplane encyclopaedia and for me, it’s all about Maverick, my hero. With such a huge gap between the movies, there was all the potential for a cringefest of a movie. But no, this is Tom Cruise we’re talking about, the man who does all his own stunts, the man who flies his own P-51 Mustang in the movie, Tom Cruise (MV60-64) who still scrubs up well.

Of course I chose Top Gun Maverick to watch with my mates for the launch of my birthday year. It ticks all my movie boxes and has celebrates the oldies. In the movie they call Maverick the old timer, but he shows them he’s still got what it takes, he’s the only one who (spoiler alert) hits the impossible target, escapes, gets shot down, escapes again in a vintage F-14 and flies off into the sunset, in his own plane. Cue, music….and cheers from the audience in Armley Mills!

The next birthday year celebration, an art run around the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, is at the planning stage, though there is no suggestion we’ll be dressing up as Maverick. Though before that, maybe I’ll hire the cinema again so we can watch the original Top Gun.

Socks is grounded

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Socks Akers is in the bad books again, though as always he denies any wrongdoing or ill intent. He insists he was fostering feline/rodent relations, building bridges between the species, issuing an invitation to visit. There was definitely no hunting involved and any chasing was just a bit of fun, no harm intended.

I suppose I could blame the cat flap. Cat flaps are a great invention, a cat can come and go as he or she pleases, if you’re not careful, any cat can come and go, as we discovered when Socks invited his nemesis, Flabby Tabby, in for a fight. There was fur everywhere, so a more sophisticated flap had to be fitted, granting exclusive access to the resident cats. Flabby Tabby was banned, unless invited and that was never going to happen.

It was all working vey well, there was the odd incident when a mouse appeared out of nowhere, with a little help from Socks and the lounge was like a scene from Tom and Jerry. Katja took over from Heidi as the female cat of the house, but chose to ignore the flap and indeed the entire outside world. She’d been a stray for three years, living off her wits and the kindness of strangers before she moved in with us. She stated emphatically that she’s had quite enough of the Great Outdoors, considered them over-rated and would not be swayed from that opinion, even if treats were involved. Plus she quickly came to the conclusion that Socks was a noisy attention-seeker who should be ignored and hissed at in equal measure.

It’s true, he is noisy. Received cat wisdom is that felines who carry on do it to attract the attention of the people they own. Socks makes a right racket, from the moment he emerges through the cat flap to wherever he finds us, including if one of us is in the bathroom, that is if he wants to find us. He can be very quiet if, say, he wants to hide something. Something he knows he shouldn’t be bringing into the house.

The other day, Socks was very quiet, we’d heard the clicking of the catflap as he came in and the hissing of Katja as he must have strolled past her, but then nothing. Sleeping, we assumed, or maybe watching over this garden kingdom from his viewpoint on the bedroom windowsill.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. It wasn’t Katja, she was pushing out the zeds. No, it was another creature with four legs and a tail, a long, thick tail unlike any mouse tail I’ve ever seen, but an exact match for a rat, albeit a small rat. It was just sitting there, waiting for something, or someone. I did what any self-respecting person would do and shrieked loudly, though not loud enough to wake Katja, then jumped on the sofa, just in case it decided it would run up my leg, like they do in the cartoons. I called for Socks and Noel in that order, though only one appeared, the not guilty party.

Noel the Brave, as he shall be known from now on, collected Ratty McRatface, our unwelcome guest, in a box and returned him to the wild. I stayed standing on the sofa, hopping from foot to foot, just in case there was more rodent action. With all the commotion, Socks sauntered downstairs looked at me as if I was an idiot and asked if we’d seen his new best mate, he’d brought him in. Yes, we said, we’d seen him, removed him, banned him. Looks like we’re going to have to recalibrate the cat flap. In the meantime, Socks is grounded.

The car with no crrrrrrrkkkkkk

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I’ve been driving one kind of car or another for more than 40 years and every last one of them had a handbrake that made a satisfying crrrrrrrkkkkkk as I lifted the lever. Granted, some had a longer crrrrrrrrrkkkkkk than others and once, but only once, I pulled the handle off, not completely, but it did merit a callout to the fourth emergency service, Noel.

My first car, a bright yellow Citroen Dyane , the Flying Custard as I affectionately named her, though 0-60 in two minutes was more of a meander. Her handbrake was just below the dashboard, it looked like an umbrella handle and made the best noise ever when I pulled it, nearly as good as the grinding of the four gears and the whining of the 600cc engine. They were the only sounds I could hear, it had no radio and the heating was just a vent from the engine.

We’ve just had to buy a new car, a definite grudge purchase after the control panel on our VW Golf lit up like a Christmas tree as we hurtled down the M1 and it wasn’t even Christmas. It was most insistent with its flashing and beeping, a quick consultation with the internet confirmed our worst fears. It was Serious, with a capital S, the cost of repair would be more than the value of the car and that included its full tank of diesel.

Thanks to Noel’s excellent research and spreadsheet skills and my ability to keep out of the way and let him get on with it, our chosen car, a Skoda Octavia, was located and purchased. I hadn’t expressed any preference, other than it being red, as I rashly assumed it had a handbrake that went crrrrrkkkkkkk so all would be right with the world.

It’s been a while since we bought a car, even longer since we bought a brand new one. My word, they’ve gone all new-fangled these days, all screens and voice activation, moving maps and someone called Laura who will find you the radio station of your choice, or phone a random person in your phone book if you don’t say their name correctly.

The key doesn’t need a keyhole, the car senses you’re approaching and obligingly unlocks. You don’t even put the key in the ignition, it just knows….and it knows your name, it’s witchcraft I tell you. There are no knobs or dials, just screens. And Laura, the all-knowing, but not necessarily all-understanding Laura, who must be related to Alexa, beeps and bongs if she doesn’t like your driving, which in my case is quite a lot. I can see Laura and I are going to have issues and once I locate the mute button, she will be silenced for good. I should point out that Alexa has also been shut up in our house, if I want something doing, I just ask Noel.

I do like the car, even if it’s not red. It’s clean, shiny and drives like a dream, it has two more gears than my first car, the radio has a gazillion channels and the heating has so many settings even Laura is confused. Good, serves her right. But its major flaw is the handbrake, it’s a button. A button, I ask you, where’t the satisfaction in just pushing that? Where’s the crrrrrrrkkkkk? I tried Noel’s patience severely the first time I drove, it, my muscle memory telling my arm to pull the lever, and waving around in thin air when I couldn’t find it. Laura got very vexed. Good.

I was all for sending the car back and getting one with a proper handbrake, but both Noel and Laura pointed out this was the new crrrrrrkkkkkkk-free world so I’d just have to get used to it. Fortunately I am getting used to it, though I have asked Laura to make a crrrrrkkkkk sound every time I use it. She obligingly dials all the Clarks in my phone book. Oh where is that mute setting?

I hope you’ve enjoyed my musings and rants over the past year, it’s just for fun, you know, and I hope it’s a distraction from the bad and sad things going on in the world, it certainly distracts me. Thank you for all your kind comments and encouregement. Have a very merry Christmas and peaceful new year.