venta

As someone said to me at the weekend:

"Liz, you're ranting, and it's not pretty".

Mind you, he hadn't seen in me in five years or so, he'd probably forgotten I'm always ranting.

Things I was ranting about last night:

The section of M69 from the M1 to J2 (southbound). It should stop with all that concrete corduroy nonsense and get a proper carriageway.

People on large roundabouts in the wrong lane. Now, as someone who regularly ends up trying to navigate and drive round unfamiliar roundabouts, I have a certain sympathy with people in the wrong lane. I'm prepared to cut them a fairly large amount of slack, and let them in where required. However, if you're about to pull some kind of unexpected cross-lane manoeuvre, the least you can do is bastard signal.

People who drive snarly sports cars far too close to me. Trying to drive in my boot is not going to make the queueue of traffic in front of me speed up.

Wet carpets. They are heavier, more intractable and more awkward than you might think.

Foxes. If the little blighters don't stop going through our bins, and throwing the contents round the garden, I am going to establish the Swinburne Hunt. On mini-scooters.

Having landed back home at teatime yesterday, I had an unexpected burst of enthusiasm for Getting Stuff Done.

Accordingly, I cleared out my car boot (for dubious reasons, it was full of engine oil and mini cheddars) - including taking out the carpet and washing it in the bath. I vacuumed out the inside of the car, and washed the outside. I even, in accordance with the instructions on the bottle of wax/wash stuff, dried the paintwork down afterwards with a chamois leather.

Why this outbreak of car care on a fundamentally rickety vehicle ? Well, both the inside and outside of the car had gone way past the point at which my mother would have ceased to call it a car and begun to refer to it as a mobile slum, and it was really getting quite grim. On the other hand, I also felt rather like I owed the car.

You see, for a couple of years my largely, er, idiosyncratic car has been lurching along from one fault to another. However, though it has manifested strange noises, wilful indicators and schizophrenic central locking, it has always been 100% reliable at actually getting me places, and inexpensive. During April, three major things went wrong - all costing large sums to mend, and one of which would have left me stranded had it not chosen to go wrong about 200 yards from my house.

At this point, I had Stern Words with the car. Any more of that, I said, and it'll be straight down the scrap yard with you. Investigation last week into a misfiring engine revealed that a vital part of the distributor cap had, in fact, completely disintegrated - in such a way that the car really shouldn't have even been capable of running. It was, however, and had continued to get me to and from work with what was, in the circumstances, a miraculous lack of complaint. I felt that it deserved a bit of a polish.

Oh, and I helped Andy prune the ScaryThornBushes down our driveway. Prune is such a prim word, conjuring images of little old ladies in sensible gardening gloves, snipping away at their roses. It doesn't really suggest the wholesale (and largely horticulturally uninformed) devastation we wreaked on the prickly little buggers that have been tripping us all up for months. Still, they'd been asking for it, and I think they're sorry now.