This is the best cartoon I’ve seen over the last few days.
It was one of those shared-on-WhatsApp things, so I’m afraid I don’t know whom to credit.
Author Archives: qsf
A Wee Campervan Caper – Travels with Tilly
Christmas breakfast on the edge of the Cairngorms, 2019
Hello Everybody, and Happy New Year! I’ve been doing something very foolish in 2020, and now I’ve stopped.
Let me explain…
This time last year, over the Christmas and New Year period, Rose was visiting her family in the States, so after dropping her at Heathrow, I turned our little campervan around, and headed north, accompanied by my cocker spaniel. The only thing I knew at the time was that we were spending the first night in the Lakes, and that we were probably heading for Scotland. The rest would be decided en route, mostly based on the weather forecast. I’m not sure if the Dark Sky app is often used as a route planner…
Anyway, I recorded quite a large chunk of our journey with my GoPro, and came back with a ridiculous amount of video footage, some of which had technical issues to overcome, and I discovered I had a mammoth editing task on my hands. I feared it could be well into the spring before I was able to share any of it. And then we had a spring unlike any other. So then I hoped that lockdown would give me more time to work on projects like this, but actually 2020 has been really quite a busy year for me, and it was only once we got back towards Christmas again that I was actually able to devote any time to it.
“At least”, I said to myself, “I have to finish it before the end of the year.” And I did! I clicked ‘upload’ on the final episodes just before midnight last night. 🙂
Now, let’s be clear here: You’ll note I say ‘episodes’ above. There are, in fact, nine of them, and that’s after I’d edited out enough material for at least four more! This is perhaps the most extreme let-me-bore-you-with-my-holiday-snaps variant one can come up with, and I don’t expect the average Status-Q reader to be interested in watching one, let alone nine of these little narratives.
An AirBnB for New Year’s Eve, December 2019
The van is visible in the bottom right. Click for a larger version.
Amazingly, though, there are people who will enjoy my holiday snaps! Some are watching already.
Those longing for the open road amidst Covid restrictions, or those planning their next motorhome trip in more normal times, do like to get ideas for their next adventure, or relive the memories of journeys past, and road trip videos are very popular on YouTube. I’ve watched a lot of them, and some were partly responsible for me buying the van in the first place.
That’s before you get into the experiences, hints and tips of the full-time motorhomers: try searching YouTube for ‘van life’ if you want to enter another world.
But, even though producing this has, in some ways, been a burden that I wanted to get off my shoulders for a whole year, it’s also been a joy. Rewatching my holiday several times over means that some of the best bits are burned into my memory; there are sites, sounds and places that I would otherwise have forgotten in a month, and that I’ll now remember for ever.
And, in the unlikely event that you want to experience any of it too, there’s a YouTube playlist, and the journey begins here:
Ass-onance
Rose suggested a better rhyme for the old carol:
-
Oh, the holly bears a berry as green as the grass
And Mary fled to Egypt on the back of an ass!
It works better if you pronounce ‘grass’ the way she does, rather than the way I do!
29 years ago today…
…I was fortunate enough to marry this rather gorgeous girl. Can’t imagine what she was thinking.
Your electrons, sir. Will that be all, sir?
When I was young, you didn’t put your own petrol in your car. Self-service petrol stations were still a novelty in the UK, and you just drove up to the pump, wound down the window and said, “Fill her up with four-star, please!” (That’s a phrase, I realise, that would be unknown to anyone under about forty years of age here.) It was terribly civilised… assuming that an attendant was available when you needed them. Interestingly, in New Jersey (and one or two other small areas of the States), self-service fuelling is illegal. I had this explained to me by the attendant when I tried it once…
Of course, a visit to a petrol station today is often simultaneously smelly, messy and expensive, which is why I’m glad that it’s been a very rare experience for me in the last five years: most of my refuelling comes from just plugging my EV in at home. This has, however, been considerably easier since I had my own driveway; for the first couple of years I had on-street parking only.
About 40% of the homes in the UK don’t have any off-street parking — the vast majority of those being in inner cities — and this does make EV ownership much harder. It’s a lot better than it used to be, today’s cars having much larger batteries and recharging much more quickly than when I started. Going to the charger once a week for a quick top-up is more viable now, if you can’t, say, charge at work, but it’s still not as handy as plugging in your car overnight at home.
So I was interested to receive an email this week from a new service called Zumo. They will appear at your doorstep on their e-scooters, take your car away overnight and return it to you, fully charged, in the morning. I have no idea how commercially viable this is in the longer term, but I think it’s a great idea, and I applaud their ingenuity. The opportunity to add extra services, such as cleaning, checking the tyre pressures and the washer fluid etc — maybe even an overnight MOT test — could make for a very low-hassle car ownership experience!
Eventually, of course, cars will be able to go off and charge themselves. Five years ago, Tesla released a little video (below) showing how they might be able to plug in when they get to the charging station. Cunning, but a little bit creepy!
In the meantime, however, I wish Zumo every success, and I hope they can find a pricing model that works.
Where have you bin all my life?
I have a new car. It’s rather clever. As I’m driving along it can recognise nearby vehicles, people, cyclists, traffic cones…
But I was somewhat amused yesterday to discover that it can also recognise wheelie-bins.
(Click for a larger image.)
I’m trying to imagine what I would have thought, back in the days of my old rusting Minis and Hillman Imps, if you’d told me that one day my car would have a built-in ability to recognise and draw pictures of the waste-disposal facilities it was passing…
Gunshot
The Barton Road Rifle Range as seen from the next field, on a recent misty evening.
Redundant Yuletide Instructions?
Waitrose are, once again, selling mice pies under the ‘Heston’ brand. Apparently, this is something to do with a celebrity chef and has nothing to do with Ben Hur.
Anyway, they’re rather good, as you can see from the emptiness of the packet.
However, I couldn’t help feeling that since they were mince pies, and in particular ‘Night Before Christmas Mince Pies’, the label ‘Best before 14th January’ might be somewhat superfluous?
Driving from the past to the future
Yesterday was an interesting day for me: I part-exchanged my old electric car for a new one, and got a vision of the future.
I had a great fondness for my old BMW i3, despite its foibles; we had been through a lot together in the pioneering early days of EV ownership (that is, about five years ago!) But it definitely represented the past, and, given that part of my plan here has been to try living in the future, it was time for a change. Before selling it, I charged it at the new Gridserve Electric Forecourt (and almost had a charging experience reminiscent of the early days!). But everything worked out in the end.
Here’s a video.
If you don’t want to see me reminiscing about my experiences with the i3, you might want to start 7 minutes in!
Christmas purchasing advice for geeks
Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be beautiful, or believe to be useful, or can connect to Home Assistant .
If buying for others, you may need two of the above.
The light of the charge brigade?
The British county of Essex is often the butt of jokes here, since it has a few notably unappealing areas, but this is unfair. In general it’s a lovely county with some particularly pretty spots. Just at the moment, though, it has a different kind of jewel in its crown, at least from my point of view, because it’s also home to what looks like one of the coolest car-charging areas on the planet. If you want to see what the future of car travel might be, the place to go is probably the Gridserve Electric Forecourt near Braintree, which opens formally next week.
It has no fewer than 36 rapid chargers, and most of them are very rapid; there are a dozen that can supply 350kW (which almost nothing can actually consume, yet, but they’re future-proofing). 350kW, to give you an idea, would gain you about 25-30 miles of range for every minute you’re plugged in. There’s a bank of the Tesla v3 superchargers, too, which can do up to 250kW.
Now, you might well ask, how can you supply this quantity of electricity, even with that many solar panels? Well, the answer is that, as well as a good grid connection, they have an enormous battery pack next door and a solar farm just down the road. While you’re charging, there are cafes, loos and shops available.
I haven’t visited yet, but it just so happens I’ll be in that area next week, so I may well take a look.
Oh, and they’re hoping to build 100 of these.
In the meantime, there’s a Fully Charged video about it, which will probably be available to the general public about the time you read this:
Update, a bit later:
I did visit here the following week, just after it had opened to the public; here’s a clip from my vlog post at the time:
Mellow mornings
On John’s blog, for some weeks now, he’s been running a series of recommendations: Things to listen to instead of the morning radio news. This is a jolly good scheme.
I used to be a big fan of the BBC’s ‘Today’ programme, but have become ever more frustrated with the presenters, who are so much more interested in asking questions than in getting answers. Mishal Husain, in particular, seldom lets anyone finish a single sentence. And that’s even before you get to the contents of the news itself, which isn’t the most positive accompaniment to breakfast. No, if you want to read or listen to the news, do it a bit later on; don’t start or end your day with it — that’s my recommendation! The only thing worse would be starting and ending your day reading social networks.
Anyway, my variant on John’s scheme is that the most common command I used to give my Amazon Echo — “Alexa, play Radio 4” — is now increasingly replaced with “Alexa, play music by X”, where X is a classical composer. This does require you to have Spotify, Amazon Music or a similar music source linked to your Alexa account. (You’ll have quite a lot of Amazon Music available automatically if you have Amazon Prime.)
Why not try a few of the following over the next couple of weeks, to start your day on a different tempo?
- Alexa, play music by Handel
- Alexa, play music by Franz Liszt
- Alexa, play music by Thomas Tallis
- Alexa, play music by Johann Strauss Two (it seemed to prefer that to ‘the second’!)
- Alexa, play music by Chopin
Now, this post would have more impact if I finished it here, but I think it’s worth offering a few practical tips.
I couldn’t get it to play a favourite of mine, Bernhard Crusell, though he’s definitely on Spotify. I’m guessing this is because Alexa needs to recognise the name before passing it to Spotify, and it had trouble with this one, helpfully offering ‘Crouseau’ or ‘Soft Cell’ as alternatives!
Sometimes you’ll get variations on the theme. You may get a playlist based on the composer, or music from the Johann Strauss Orchestra. But it’s likely to be in line with your mood anyway! If you think “Surely this wasn’t written by Chopin?”, then a useful query is “Alexa, what’s playing?”. And occasionally you may want “Alexa, skip!”
If you do have more than one source of music available, you can compare them for variety. As I type this, for example, I’m greatly enjoying the playlist I get with “Alexa, play music by Corelli from Amazon Music”. Recommended.
Finally, you will, of course, be limited by the audio capabilities of your particular Amazon device. If you have Sonos speakers or similar linked into your system, then you can use that instead. In my case there’s a big Sonos speaker hidden away on top of the fridge, and if I say “Alexa, play music by Chopin in the kitchen” to send the audio stream there, it’s a completely different experience.
And I think we can agree that Frederic deserves it.
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