and oh, the sweetness of the air

It would be a shame to travel all the way to a country where they have regular V8 races and to not watch some V8 races; so last weekend I went to watch some V8 races.

On Saturday night I went to Woodford Glen Speedway to watch dirt track death racing with post apocalypse deathtrap cars of death.

It was sort of comparable to UK stock cars and banger racing; louder and faster (some of the modified stocks were pulling wheelies as they accelerated off the back of the final corner), but much less destructive.  Although one chap still managed to flip his Super Saloon on the back straight, messing up his car and bruising his elbow in the process.

The next day I went to Ruapuna Park to watch something slightly more civilised; V8 Supertourers, the Kiwi equivalent of Aussie V8 touring cars.  Support races took the form of Rennsport (a load of German stuff) and classic muscle car racing.

It was a pretty fun waste of a few days, and almost helped to take my mind off the fact that I was completely missing the final race of an enthralling F1 season.  Thanks, NZ telly.

I also finished painting some toys this week; a Big Mek with a kustum force field...

...and a Painboy with his grot minion.

The painboy is great for making Nobz mobz much more expensive and only slightly more survivable.  The Big Mek with his whizzy gubbinz does much the same thing but on a slightly larger scale; thereby having a mediocre effect on a much larger proportion of the army.

Sinister foreign confectionery; Whittaker's.  It's not a single type of chocolate bar - Whittaker's will happily sell you a whole range of yummy things to stuff into your stupid face.

I've chosen the Bittersweet Peanut Slab not because it is especially delicious (they're all delicious) or exotic (none of them are exotic), but because I like the black and gold packaging.  It reminds me of the JPS Lotus cars from the seventies and eighties.

buggers muddle

Since my arrival in New Zealand I have been making use of a hire car to get around.  It turns out that there is a category of hire car even lower than 'Economy'; this.

A majestic 2004 Mitsubishi Lancer sedan with 180000 kms on the clock.  Like many cars here it is an automatic; which means instead of numbers there is a bunch of confusing letters on the gear lever.  I reached into the glovebox and consulted the manual.

The manual was in Japanese.  It also seemed to include a helpful section on how best to crash your majestic 2004 Mitsubishi Lancer sedan.

As much fun as the majestic 2004 Mitsubishi Lancer sedan was, I couldn't afford to have it on hire for the full three months that I'm here; but a car would still be essential for weekend hobbit-hunting.  In theory, a cost effective solution would be to buy a second hand car and then sell it on again when its time to leave...

Of course, this meant having to find a balance between the conflicting requirements of "must be cheap" and "must be cool".  What I found was this 1990 Toyota Celica GT-R... it was advertised at $1350 (cheap-ish), and had pop-up headlights (cool for the eighties, so good enough for me).  A test drive revealed that it was full of what some might refer to as "character" -  covered in dents, a collapsing drivers seat, peeling paintwork, knackered front shocks, worn cv joints, a disintegrating steering wheel and possibly water in the oil too.

Of course I bought it.

Less striking, more stricken.

In the end I forked out $1050 for it, which is about $1050 more than it's worth.  It's a manual though, and surprisingly, everything on it seems to work - including the active suspension, which as far as I can tell is a button that does nothing more than make lights come on on the dashboard.  But they are green lights, so they're probably telling me that everything's okay.  The manual might be Japanese, I don't know - I'm too scared to open the glovebox in case I find a severed head in it.

I have decided to call it DeathCar2000.

We moved into more permanent temporary accommodation this week.  It's nowhere near as fabulous as the cottage, but it is also half the price of the cottage; and we could always spend the money saved on fairy lights, scatter cushions and a disco ball if we start getting fabulousness withdrawals.  Aside from the lack of fabulousness, it's not too bad here; two double bedrooms, a living room with a pair of sofas, a crappy but usable kitchen and a similarly crappy but usable bathroom.  It feels a bit like student accommodation; the furniture boxes have been ticked at the lowest possible cost to the landlord, and there's next to nothing in the way if knick knacks or anything to make it feel like a home.  Nothing is particularly nice, but nothing is particularly dreadful either.

And finally... I spotted this poster on the noticeboard outside the canteen at work.

I have literally no idea what it's all in aid of, but the sign-up list beneath it has around a dozen names on it.

crowdsurfing is strictly prohibited

I had a dream the other night that I went to a zoo. Instead of being kept in cages and enclosures, each animal was contained within a wicker effigy of itself; and the animals could all speak, but only in the manner of their keepers. So all of the goats were trapped inside wicker goats, and had Polish accents.

I've checked this out with the Pixie; it definitely means I'm gay, apparently.

Meanwhile, in real life, manly stuff has been happening. A couple of weekends ago, we went to watch a game of live action subbuteo; AFC Wimbledon vs Bristol Rovers.

Despite this kind of being our home town, we were there to cheer (very quietly, as we managed to end up at the home end surrounded by Rovers fans) for AFC. And here's why.

Ten years ago, first division Wimbledon FC decided to up sticks and move 56 miles north to Milton Keynes - home to grid road systems and concrete cows. This was (quite understandably) unpopular with their fans; supporting Wimbledon was already a lot like being trapped in an abusive relationship, and having to make a round trip of over a hundred miles to watch a home game was taking the piss. So they decided to start their own club, holding open trials on Wimbledon Common for anyone that fancied trying out. A team of players was selected, and AFC Wimbledon went on to get spanked 4-0 in their first game.

AFC Wimbledon eventually finished third in their opening season in the lowest division of English football, and had a higher average attendance at their home games than Wimbledon FC (by this time referred to by fans as "The Franchise") who were still playing games 7 leagues above AFC.

Since then AFC have been promoted five times in the last nine years, hold the record for the longest unbeaten run in all senior English football, and are presently just one league below the old Wimbledon team (now the Milton Keynes Dons). They also lost 1-0 in the cold and rain-soaked match we went to see; but it was still a fun day, and we're looking forward to doing it again next year.

We had more fun a few days later, when we took the track slag out for a day of trying-not-to-crash around Castle Combe. We soon discovered that it was just a couple of weeks before the start of the racing season, and that the vast majority of track days up and down the country had been booked out by "proper" racers trying to get their machines fine-tuned; which meant that a) there were a lot of very cool modern and classic race-spec cars in attendance, and b) we spent most of our time trying to avoid them on the track.

We're continuing to tweak the slag after each run; since I drove it last the brakes have been modestly uprated, and the old steering wheel with its boring airbag has been replaced with a spiffy little steering wheel with a neat yellow stripe.

So now the car stops a bit better, and has more yellow stripes on it. Next on the list is tweaked suspension, to stop the car from wallowing about in the corners like a fifteen year old Bavarian executive coupe; and a few cosmetic issues, to stop us from looking like a bunch of chumps that don't really know what we're doing.

We made a start on this at the weekend; the now superfluous studs and brackets that the rear seats connected to were angle-grindered to oblivion, and made a start on removing the big black patches of tar-like sound deadening material with the aid of a Dan Dare style heat gun and a scrapey thing.

The heat ray was merciless.

bei einnahme sofort arzt aufsuchen

So we found a new place to live.

It is not in Westbury-on-Trym, where the three leading causes of death are 1. boredom, 2. old age and 3. nothing else; and it is a three bedroom house, which hopefully means there shall be no wrangling with tin-pot dictators in flat committees that prohibit all movement, conversation and roller-discos after 7pm because it's a bit noisy and people are trying to die of boredom and old age in peace.

We don't get to move until mid-August; and almost didn't get to move at all, thanks to the credit check agency that vets potential tenants on behalf of our future letting agency. Because I don't start grown-up work until September, there was some question as to whether I would be good for the rent; and the offer letter from my future employer (for which I have studied for five years, completed an essay-style application form, participated in online written, numerical and logical reasoning tests, and attended a two-day assessment centre evaluating my abilities as an individual and a team member) was "only a conditional offer, and anyone can get one of those."

I forget how hard I laughed at this.

Fortunately it is possible to work around their bullshit system, by simply owning up to being a penniless chump and making Dom and the Pixie pay all the rent instead. Awesome.

The whole debacle only lasted for an afternoon, but was somewhat slightly stressful all the same; and so some form of cathartic recreational activity was called for. This was conveniently served up a few days later in the form of a track day at Castle Combe, run by the splendid folks at BHP. Matt, Laura and I took the track slag out for its first outing since we added lightness by, erm, ripping out all the innards and throwing them away. It was an open pitlane, which meant that there was a good mix of exotica, oddities and track hacks in attendance.

We've always found the other folks at these events to be a friendly bunch, and this particular day was no exception. Everyone displayed a remarkable tolerance for our ceaseless questions about their cars, the other guys with BMWs (ours was one of five E36s in attendance) were eager to share their ideas on various performance upgrades, and we even had one old boy offer us a few passenger laps in his Lotus 7-alike. What a tip-top geezer.

There were only a few slight hiccups, the first being a rear wheel that attempted to detach itself from the rest of the car whilst I was tearing around. It probably would have hung on for a few more laps, but I'd promised the Pixie that I wouldn't die and so pulled in to reattach the wheelnuts. The second problem was the brakes, which we worked so hard that the new pads which we had fitted five days ago were reduced to little more than powder by the end of the day.

All of which made for a somewhat cautious drive home. Still, we had an amazing day, met some nice people, and can now legitimately claim to have driven the wheels off of our car.