John
Thought I would filter the obvious words - there is another setting to avoid the S****horpe problem - will look at it later. I bought a 200BRM from Dixons - Donny (wife MAX comes from nr there).
Have you seen the Clarkson article on Oxford, I totally agree with him, but the local TV hate him. Here its is in full glory. The place has been ruined by over zelous traffic management schemes:
What a choke ... a prime example of Oxford's blocked roads
THERE has been a lot of talk about Britain’s woeful rail services in recent weeks.
But even if the Government manages to sort them out — without bankrupting the Treasury in the process — Britain’s transport system will still be far from cured.
Mending the trains is like mending the ingrowing toenail of someone who has terminal cancer.
Earlier this week, I thought it would be nice to take my wife out for dinner and then on to a film.
Nothing wrong with that you may think. Going for something to eat and then on to a cinema is not a particularly antisocial pursuit. But, if you live near Oxford, the most car-hating, fascist city in Britain, forget it.
They don’t want your custom. They don’t want your money. They would rather you stayed at home and ate babies.
First of all, parking is not just difficult or time consuming.
It’s absolutely impossible.
I drove round the block until I’d wasted half a tank of fuel before giving up and leaving the car in a space reserved for disabled resident lesbian doctors.
I’d picked the only decent restaurant in town that allows smoking. But in the true spirit of socialism, a party of fresh air fanatics had plonked themselves and all their DayGlo cycling clobber, in the smoking section.
So I was forced to sit at my table for an hour, breathing nothing but their hot air.
And naturally, when I came outside at 8pm, the car was sporting a parking ticket.
With hindsight, I should have left it there and gone to the cinema on foot but that simply isn’t safe any more.
Just about everyone I know who goes to Oxford regularly has now been stabbed, mugged, beaten or robbed.
Recently, a boy I know followed orders from the Central Committee of the People’s Council, used the bus and had a gun pulled on him.Oxford likes to promote itself as a genteel centre of learning.
But it is worse than Detroit.
Morse?
Do me a favour. This place needs Robocop.
But I guess they couldn’t afford to build such a thing. Not when they’ve spent so much on cameras and speed humps.
So we got into the car and bumped our way over the traffic-calming measures — which always make me angry — to the cinema where there were a couple of free meters.
These, however, were useless because until 11 at night waiting is limited to two hours and we were going to see The Lord Of The Rings, which goes on for five days.
Needless to say, they were five smokeless days too. So I was in a tense state when I came out to find that my car — moored up in a spot reserved for visiting homosexual astronauts from the People’s Republic of Cuba — had got its second £20 ticket of the evening.
Fuming, literally, I set out for London, and my problems really began, because once you’ve become entangled in the one-way system, so far as I can tell, there’s no way out again.
It would be interesting to know how many people listed on the police “runaway list” didn’t, in fact, run away at all.
They’re all stuck in Oxford, trying desperately to get home.
You have to wonder what on earth the local council is thinking about with policies that a five-year-old child can see are idiotic.
If you make cars unwelcome, and you provide no safe, reliable and, above all, convenient alternative, then people will feel unwelcome as well.
And they’ll take their money somewhere else.
So, Mr Blair, fix the trains by all means.
But if you can find five minutes before heading off for Africa or Tuscany or whichever part of the world needs you next, do you think it would be possible to write to your henchmen in the shires and tell them to grow up?
YOU want to know what I thought about The Lord Of The Rings?
Well, if they’d made a pop video for the Yes double album, Tales From Topographic Oceans, this is what it would have been like.
Ye olde radar detector didn't pick him up - so my be OK!
