MarkW

I was 3 in the summer of 1976. All I remember was travelling from Stoke to Bournemouth for our holidays in a Morris Marina and the heat making me travel sick.

Did it seem to last forever?

Was he on a Cowasaki? I'm sorry - drink has been taken...

My favourite moment from my course was when they showed a slide of a road curving off to the right and said "It doesn't matter how good a driver you are, nobody can tell me what's around that corner." I said "I can. My mother's house is around that corner - that building on the left is the Mr Kipling factory in Newcastle-under-Lyme."

I did one last year for the heinous crime of doing 56 mph in a 50 zone through the interminable bloody roadworks on the M6, at 2 o'clock in the morning and with - big surprise - absolutely no sign of any work actually being done. The final question of the day was "What can you change about your driving behaviour to reduce the chances of getting another ticket?" I said "Next time I'll speed on the bike and not in the car - it only has one number plate, so I reduce my chances of getting caught on camera by 50%." It wasn't the answer they were looking for.

I did one last year, and one of the only bits of semi-interesting information I retained from it is that insurance companies are not supposed to ask about speed awareness courses, and any that do should be reported to the Insurance Ombudsman who want to stamp it out. No idea if this is true or not, but might be worth further investigation...

The more I read about moped and bike crime the more wasteful I think it is to have all those highly trained firearms officers kicking around with nothing to do except accidentally execute the occasional random commuter for looking a bit foreign. What a waste of a resource! I may decide to go into politics you know, and then there will be changes to street policing - a bit like the death squads they have in Brazil, but with the ability to give directions to Madame Tussaud's.

I take it you're a rebreather man then?

Now there's a blast from the past! I spent many a Saturday peering through their window when I lived down there.

I fear they're a bit more Smith (Adam, not Winston) than Orwell around here.

It's like the Wild West down there. Until a few years ago HG1 was the only postal district without a Tesco, and now we have Aldi on the doorstep. The whole place has gone to the dogs...

Aldi?! This is Harrogate! We only agreed to a Sainsbury's on the outskirts because we thought it would help to keep poor people out of the town centre. If you want Aldi I suggest you venture into one of the deprived surrounding areas, like Wetherby or Leeds.

You can laugh, but it'd be a different story if you met one of them outside. I saw one in Waitrose car park a few months ago, and he didn't return his trolley to a designated area. They just don't play by the same rules as the rest of us.

The MCC up here gets pretty wild, and I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of them: they hang around Ripley Castle on a Sunday, eating ice cream in the sun and chatting to passing kids to give the impression they're friendly. I even heard that a couple of them once trashed the tasting table in the local Majestic Wine Warehouse.

Indeed. What boggles my mind is that there are grown men out there who are prepared to kill their fellow human beings over which bits of fatuous fabric they choose to adorn themselves with. Utterly moronic.

Sounds like the Scottish National Party.

That reminded me of those spam emails I keep getting that make ridiculous promises for their 'male enhancement' products: "GAIN TEN INCHES IN JUST THREE WEEKS!!!" Why the hell would I want a 12 inch cock?

I've just been banned from the gym after an incident on the leg extension machine. The instructions said "Adjust leg roller. Pull knob until it comes over the ankles." That took a bit of marksmanship...

That'll be my fault, derailing things with my daft digressions. Terribly sorry... Carry on chaps... As you were...

I know. Whilst we're on foreign entomology... Entomologists use a little suction device called a pooter to collect insects. It's just two pieces of tube poking through the lid of a pot, one with mesh on the end. Stick the open end near the insect, suck the mesh end, and the insect lands in the pot. I once led a field trip of Brazilian entomologists in a forest, and told them they had to bring plenty of pooters with them because I'd got through so many of them, either wearing them out or just losing them. I thought they looked appalled, and it wasn't until someone told me that 'puta' was Portuguese for 'prostitute' that I realised why.

Hee-hee! Turned out nice! Sorry - I'll get my coat... Technically they're not wasps - Vespa being the genus of the hornet rather than the wasp, which is Vespula. Sorry (again) - the pedantic entomologist has now left the building.

Indeed it would! There's so much good stuff in here that my kids would love to see - if only flights weren't so expensive...

Here I am again, killing a couple of hours before heading home this afternoon...

It's what happens to me after prolonged contact with Americans: the filter between my brain and my mouth (which is prone to catastrophic failure at the best of times) just can't cope any more. On a trip to DC later the same year I got stuck with a woman who was determined to tell me at great length about her personal relationship with God. I had already exhausted my usual routine for getting rid of these people, but she was having none of it. When she told me she couldn't wait to turn 33 because that was how old Jesus was when he died and she wanted to see how much she managed to achieve by the same age I said "Well, even if you don't manage to walk on water or cure the lame you have at least found someone who'd be only too happy to nail you to a cross." Even that wasn't enough for her to take the hint, and she proceeded to entice me to join her church, where a world of idiotic bliss could be mine at the low price of the complete surrender of my critical faculties. Sometimes, when the religious dingbats are closing in from every angle, the only thing left to do is jump in the Mustang, drop the roof, and drive like a bast*rd up the nearest freeway in search of enlightenment. I headed to the Udvar-Hazy Centre near Dulles Airport and spent the day looking at the space shuttle and various other technological marvels. This was doing wonders for my soul, right up until I got to the Enola Gay exhibit, where a gung-ho tour guide was describing the bombing of Hiroshima with rather too much bravado for my liking. The next day I came back to the UK, where slightly more sanity prevails.

'Pub' - ah yes - another one of those things from the years B.C. (Before Children). My wife's ace. I was in a cafe in California a couple of years ago and got stuck talking to some drippy hippy woman who sat at my table. When she asked about my wife and how long I'd been married she said "Oh my! That's just so amazing! I hope that one day I find someone whose energy I connect with on that level. I guess she must have had a real powerful aura to draw you into her orbit and captivate you like that." "I guess" I said. "But mainly I think it was her tits and arse." She moved tables after that. I'm not really cut out for this New Age crap.