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My Renault broke down again on Friday, two days after returning triumphant and repaired from the main dealer.  By some unfortunate happenstance, my warranty hadn’t been renewed last year, and I paid what I now find to be more than the value of the car to have a faulty dashboard part replaced.

The battery is totally dead again.  Last time that happened, I took ages to get it fixed.  This time – who knows?

Maybe I should mention it keeps giving me electric shocks every time I get out – I thought it was just me, since supermarket trolleys and filing cabinets also give me electric shocks.  But since there have been repeated wiring failures on lights, ignition, dashboard, etc etc, maybe there’s another place where the battery is shorting out against the car frame?

Knowing that the repair costs are starting to rack up to more than the value, it’s probably time to look again at buying a car – last time I did that, it was a horrible, confusing time, not to mention expensive, so I am far from looking forward to it.

But given that it breaks down so often, why do I keep driving the Mégane? And why am I still thinking about another Renault?

It’s the cockpit experience.  Although the Mégane was my ahem, 4th ((Rover – shook itself to pieces; Ford Fiesta – crashed; Skoda Favorit estate – mystery radiator problem)) car in a very short driving career, it was the first nice, reasonably new car.

The pedals feel great.  They’re smooth and responsive (except when the hydraulics failed those two times).  The steering wheel is reassuring.  The stick radio controls are really handy, and the CD player works.  The radio gets louder when you accelerate, and quietens down for the slow bits – and best of all, you can almost always hear it over the engine.  The seat adjusts in five dimensions, including time and space. There’s room in the back seat *and* the boot. Although not quite enough after the Skoda estate car.  The handbrake clicks reassuringly, it doesn’t rasp gratingly. I know nothing about what goes on under the bonnet but all the bits I relate to directly feel nice.

I’ve been driving P’s car over the weekend, and it’s, erm, not quite so refined.

If I replace the car, I should go for a smaller one.  Most of my journeys are small hops across town with only me in the car.  (Of course, with a green hat on, I shouldn’t be making those journeys by car.  But I still can’t cycle. And even if I could, a bike would not be ideal for hoiking piles of leaflets across town, a job I do surprisingly frequently.

I initially went for a Mégane over a Clio because I looked in the boot and thought “I can’t go camping in that.” But having seen how some people manage to fit the most amazing amount of kit in the smallest of cars, maybe that’s no longer the best way of thinking?

So is there a small, not eye-wateringly expensive car that has the nice cockpit experience?

It’s August, so thoughts turn to holidays.

Last year, this photo from a friend on Flickr led me to the Landmark Trust for the first time.

I started off on their website, and liked what I saw but thought that their prices were slightly on the steep side. They point out that if you divide them down to per person, per night, they are not at all unreasonable, and a closer inspection showed that they were rather more affordable out of season, and still more so massively out of season.

Their handbook is a rather gorgeous, coffeebook tome, and I think it’s worth the tenner it costs. I bought it the first time with the intention of giving it to a friend for Christmas, months away from the event; and unfortunately after that we agreed not to give gifts, so I ended up with it for myself.

There was a bit of cross-over between Landmark and my bellringing friends. Landmark manage all of the property on Lundy Island, which has a church with ten bells and few neighbours, and is therefore a good location for ringing the more antisocial peals and quarters.

This year, an email arrived saying that their website is now searchable, and so it is. I have been playing with it for a while. The information on the site duplicates the info in the handbook, but hopefully will grow to be more – and more responsive – than the printed copy.

If you are interested in booking, then there is a very helpful group on Flickr with lots more photos available than in the handbook. Scroll down on the group’s homepage to find a clickable index with a page for each of the Trust’s properties.

The photo group answered some of my questions. We have now booked a November weekend with friends in an isolated house with fireplaces – something to keep my pyromaniac side happy, anyway. But I still have questions. We’re planning a bumper foody weekend – but what is the kitchen kit like? Is there really no heating but the open fires and the woodburning stoves? And is there no television? (fingers crossed!)

See also

• Lundy’s bells on Dove’s Guide
• www.mylandmarks.me.uk
• www.landmarker.co.uk

The English Buildings blog – that I started reading thanks to Liberal England – recently paid a trip to Leominster.

How can I describe Leominster? My family are from there on my father’s side, but I was born and spent the first part of my life in Tenbury Wells – more specifically Burford. So technically, is Leominster my home town? The town where I spent the second half of my childhood?

Anyway, it’s a town I’m very familiar with and it’s also a town that few people visit and fewer can pronounce. (It’s “lem-ster” – and not even all of the people who live there know that, apparently). So it was a little surprising to see English Buildings had been there at all and I was interested to see what famous building they might have chosen. The famous Grange, the enormous priory church? Some of the big old Victorian mansions up the Bargates?

In fact, they chose Lloyds Bank in Corn Square, a building I probably passed every day when I lived there, and that just fit into the square and seemed a little unremarkable.

I’d certainly never noticed the key feature that English Buildings highlighted – the extra carving over the portico. Next time I return, I shall have to make sure I look out for it.

One line in Jonathan Calder’s blog post about Frog Island jumped out at me. “Nottingham Arkwright Station”

Where was that? I don’t think I’d heard of it before. In these information days, I can find out all about it from all over the internet.

It was a station on a railway line that was removed in the late 1960s, entering the city of Nottingham over the Trent, crossing the Old Meadows on viaducts, crossing the Midland station at a higher level than the remaining tracks, onto a viaduct over Canal Street. After that, I think it went into the tunnel under the Lace Market to go to Nottingham Victoria Station – that too was demolished in the 70s and replaced with the Victoria Centre.

The Canal Street viaduct is now in use for the NET tram, which currently terminates abruptly before the station, but which should continue at a high level over the railway station when Phase II gets going. The tram doesn’t use the tunnel, but runs at street level left through the city streets.

The tunnel is essentially unused now. When they were talking about “bridge strengthening works” in Parliament Street, it wasn’t the pedestrian link to the Victoria centre they meant, but the tunnel beneath the street. You could briefly see corrugated metal under the road as they took up the tarmac for the works.

One use the tunnel does have is to carry the steam main that feeds the district heating system. It heats the entire Victoria Centre – the shopping centre and all of the flats – before heading north to St Anns.

The south end of the tunnel has recently been blocked by the new Nottingham Contemporary art gallery.

When the Nottingham Arkwright station closed it was demolished, much of the Old Meadows with it, and replaced with “Radburn” style development. This happened about ten years before I was born and twenty before I came to Nottingham. And now thirty years later the area has attracted £199,000,000 in investment to renovate those houses, and undo some of the unforeseen problems the non-standard layout caused.

Loads more information about the line, and the station on these blogs, including masses of interesting photos. It’s raw and real – the stations look neglected; tracks give out suddenly. Viaducts are brutal and imposing and dominate the landscape.

• Arkwright Street Station on Wikipedia
• On Subbrit’s disused stations page – scroll down for photos
• Photos of the route through Nottingham, and the demolition process
• 1960s photojournal of the route from Leicester

So, on Saturday, I was given an early birthday present of a pink Flying V ukulele.

And on Sunday, I mucked about with it a bit.

Thanks to this Uke tuning website; these uke beginner lessons; this information from the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain about this prom.

Excuse this cathartic rant about the horror that is the Outlook Web Access user interface.

But there are two tiny things that get in the bloody way every time I fire it up and just drive me crackers.

The first is the box of recently / frequently used email addresses. It has a scroll bar. At the top and bottom, arrows, a little box showing how far down you are, and the space around the little box. Normally with such technology the top and bottom arrows let you scroll up line by line, and the space around the box lets you scroll through the data page by page. But with OWA, the two different places to click do exactly the same thing. Clicking in the space around the box moves the data down line by line. Clicking on the arrows moves the data down line by line. IT SHOULDN’T BE LIKE THAT!!!

Two of the people I email most frequently are called Susan, and are close to the bottom of the list. So EVERY DAY I have to scroll through the email box to find their details, and every day it irks me that the box just doesn’t work properly.

The second thing — oooh, how it irks! This is not a problem when using it from home and Chrome, but using it on Outlook at work where that’s the only browser choice it comes up on a daily basis. I’m the sort of web user who always deliberately has dozens of tabs or browser windows open at once. There are 10 at the top of this page as I type and another three in the computer one foot to the left.

If you go to the menu, File > new says that if you press Ctrl-N you get a new window. A new browser window full of browsery goodness where you can go and look at other websites.

So, frequently, I do precisely that. I press Ctrl-N. And do I get a new browser window? Do I buggery. I get a new blank email. I didn’t want a new blank email, I wanted a new browser window, so when the keyboard short cut fails me, I have to go back into the menu to get the new browser window I actually wanted and needed. And there, smugly smirking at me, is the same little line of text that erroneously tells you that the short-cut for a new browser window is Ctrl-N. IT LIES!

Grrrr.

A baking hot week followed by a rainy weekend, apparently, just when I intended to head to Wales with the tent.

You half expect it with UK weather, and Wales certainly gets more than its fair share of rain. Something to do with geography, I think.

But this is just taking the mickey. It’s only going to rain in one place, apparently.

Guess where I’m going camping.

No time to write them up!

Here, have a LOLCAT to tide you over.

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