Off to York Today!
Today I’m off to York to see a old friend. This is the ticket, I used as a test to find the optimum time to buy. It’s so much easier to do trips like that from here, than where I lived in the country. It’s just a bus or a bus and a tube to King’s Cross. It just depends what number bus turns up first.
Is that playing Bus Roulette?
The Welcome Invader from the East.
After racing yesterday, I took the train from Thirsk to York, so that I could see my old boss, who was in hospital in York. He seemed better in some ways to when I saw him a few weeks ago, but I understand from his family he has a long way to go. But I know he’ll do it, as he’ll find some way to pull through. I’ll also visit him when I can, as he has been such a great support to me over the previous couple of years through my troubles and I know I must pay that back. But I’m not that good on those sorts of debts!
But as I got back from York to Cambridge for the princely sum of just £13.20, it’s not something that would worry anybody on cost grounds!
After I’d seen him in hospital, I went with his son to the local Premium Inn. They had bottles of Aspall cyder in the bar! So over 250 years after it was first brewed in Suffolk, it finally invades Yorkshire!
I certainly needed a drink after the day I’d had!
Ely to York via Scunthorpe
I’m going to see Ipswich at Scunthorpe on the 25th. I have been told by East Coast, that I’ll need to use two single tickets, as I can’t break my journey at Doncaster, like I did last week at Micheldever.
So I’ve booked the first leg from Ely to Scunthorpe and that has cost me £16.45 First Class. Not bad as it would probably cost about £50 for the diesel in the Jaguar!
But getting from Scunthorpe to York, doesn’t seem so easy to buy a ticket. All that seems to exist are Anytime Singles at £20 or £13.20 with my Railcard. Why are there no Off Peak Tickets?
In the end, Ibought the Anytime Single from East Coast at £13.20!
Federer Roddick and a Lotus Elan
As I left Suffolk yesterday at the same time as the Wimbledon Final started. It was a lovely day for a drive in the Lotus with the top down and I sped up the A1 to see my old boss in York. I’d actually worked for him at ICI and I’ve known him since before our first child was born, almost forty years ago.
The A1 has been improved over the last year or so and I made Doncaster in just over the two hours, when before all the roundabouts had gone, it used to take two hours and a quarter. You wouldn’t have thought, that just removing these five bottlenecks would have improved things so much. But then you would sometimes wait for perhaps up to ten minutes at either the Gamston or Worksop junctions. Now you just sped through.
I should say a bit about my transport.
I always describe my Lotus Elan as the second best car in the world. That is not an arrogant claim, as in many terms, now as the car approaches it’s late middle-age, it is maturing like an old bottle of wine.
My late wife bought the car new in 1991 to travel to courts all over East Anglia in her work as a barrister and somehow it never got sold as she replaced it first with an Audi A4 Avant Quattro, a Mercedes sports car, a Mini and finally a Porsche Boxster.
When she died, it was sell the the three year-old Boxstern or the sixteen year-old Lotus. It was no contest. As the guy who services my cars, said after driving the Lotus back from it’s MOT, if you gave him the choice, he’d take the Lotus too. He wondered if anything handled so well?
I suppose an Elise does and my wife did try one. But as she tended to wear a skirt most days for work, an Elise is a no-no, as a lady can’t get out of one in a skirt, without showing all and sundry to passers-by. It will be interesting to see what the new Evora is like. I can afford one, but whether I want to spend over £55,000 on a car is another matter.
But knowing Lotus, I might get seduced at some time.
In my rules on what is the best car, you can’t judge it as of now. So if you think that your car is best, what will it be like when it is twenty years old, has nearly 110,000 miles on the clock. Will it still perform in the same way as it did, when you first bought it?
The Lotus does. Last summer, I let her (Lotuses or should it be Loti are all female) loose on the German autobahn. You’d be stuck in a queue of traffic doing seventy or so and there’d be some German hard on your bumper, flashing you to get over. (It is actually not a good idea to do that to any Lotus, as when they stop, they stop a hell of a lot faster than most cars and totally under control.) When the traffic cleared, it was just a matter of flooring the throttle and the car behind was left standing. Usually I’d pull over into the slow lane after a mile or so, as I don’t want to trash the engine. (I suspect I won’t incidentally! Like most Lotus engines they are tuned just as much for reliability, than power!) My tormentor would pass after a minute or so, with a German version of “What’s the fuck’s that?” on his face.
But perhaps where the Lotus is so different to other cars, is that drive anywhere and heads turn. Admittedly mine is Norfolk Mustard in colour, but what other car that is a twenty year-old design does that? I once remember a Lamborghini P400 Miura doing that in the 1960s in Oxford Street. But then that was possibly the noisiest car ever made.
So there are two things in my life, that I will protect with everything; my Rolex and my Lotus.
I stopped at York for tea with my ex-boss and his wife, admired their lovely garden and then set off over the Pennines towards Blackpool. Incidentally I filled up with petrol at York and the Lotus had averaged just over 31 miles per gallon. Not bad for a sports car, that hadn’t been driven for economy on the way up. I’d done the 171 miles from my home in two hours forty minutes, which is perhaps about twenty minutes faster than the last time I drove to York for the races. But then we’re back to the A1 roundabouts.
As I started off for Blackpool, Federer and Roddick, were still at it and it was 3-all in the fifth set. They were still at it, as I skirted Leeds. As I left the centre of Bradford on my way towards Keithley and Colne, the good weather was holding and the Lotus was still top down, but Roddick had finally succumbed.
What a match!
I was pleased though that Federer won, as he is such a gent and he deserves to beat the record of Grand Slams.
Will Murray ever get one? Probably! But nothing in this life is certain. Don’t I as a widower just know it?
If there is one problem with the Lotus, it is rain.
There I was driving through Colne in the sunlight and all of a sudden, just as I was about to join the M58, it started to rain. And it wasn’t drizzle.
Luckily, I was able to put the car into a side street within about twenty seconds, so I didn’t get that wet. And remember too, that to put up the hood on a Lotus is possibly the fastest of any car. You do need to get out, pull one handle, lift the roof from under the hard cover, throw it forward, jump in and click the latches. Usually, I can do it in a third of the time, it takes one of those fully electric jobs.
I didn’t get as wet as I might have!
Finally at the allotted hour of eight, I pulled up outside the hotel in Blackpool.
It had been a drive that I won’t forget. And all because of two modern and civilised gladiators.
The Anonymous Widower 