Imagine the perfect Easter holiday…
One week skiing in St Anton – followed by a nice long weekend playing with my car. Excellent!
Here are a few photos of Angus showing me how to ski:
this is......how...
..to...
...do...
...it...
...!..
Not knowing if I have any Irish blood in me didn’t stop me going to the St Paddy’s day bash at the King’s Fund (and yes that is OJ I’m drinking – what can I say, I’m a light weight!)
Rummaging through the family archives threw up some motoring relating relics:
My mother during the war with what we think is a Tickford bodied MG
My father proving I’m not the only poseur in the family! He’s the skinny looking Lt on the bonnet.
An early pride and joy – Jaguar XK140
Family barge in Teheran – a Dodge of some sort - wasn’t I cute….
My mother and sister in West Africa
Father and sister
My two sisters
Another barge in Teheran – Opel Kapitan
The Dodge’s ‘evil eye’
Not a car but a Lockheed Constellation – the first plane I ever flew in – aged 6 months! Apparantly there was a special cot attached to the bulkhead in the first class compartment – I bet I didn’t get any bubbly.
My grandfather and friends in Rio in the late twenties early thirties
And finally – how I miss that little Clubman… sniff.
These have to the most beautiful (non-female-human) structures in the world!
To get rid of the Japanese knotweed they are introducing a little bug from Asia called a psyllid…
Psyllid, BANG and the knotweed is gone…!
Went to an exhibition at the Richmond Adult Community College at the weekend and discovered that they have jazz music classes on Saturdays.
At Lunchtime the students play a gig in the cafe – and some of them were terrific! Some were more entertaining from their enthusasm rather than level of accomplishment… A saxophonist (who was ace) told me he bought his instrument at the age of 53, and had been playing it for 18 years!
We’ll definitely go back again.
Searle’s sketches
Ronald Searle is 90 this month and to celebrate the Cartoon Museum in Holborn has an exhibition of his work – Quite fantastic. Especially his repotage drawings, and those from his time as a PoW of the Japanese at Changi.
I love the sound of a really expensive car door closing. The thought of ROJ making the same sound almost makes me salivate…
So I put on the doors.
They don’t clunk.
Yet.
But they do give the car a more car like shape.
When I arrived at the farm the weather was appalling – but Monday morning it looked lovely.
And yesterday it was glorious.
Still – I wasn’t there for the weather.
As well as putting on the doors and cleaning up and fitting the window winders, I also renovated and fitted the front brake calipers – using new stainless steel pistons and an AM parts seal kit. The Aston uses Girling 3 pot calipers – the front ones are huge. You may remember I originally painted them gold, and they looked revolting, so I repainted them silver, much better.
So what else did i do?
I broke another tap in a captive nut and had to grind it out using a diamond bit in my Dremel – what a bore that was.
I took apart the exhaust mounts and painted them with Hammerite – the new springs I ordered flummoxed me, they are coiled in the oppposite direction.
And now it’s back to work for a rest!
I was rather tickled by the packaging that some wire wheels for the Dremel came in – I had ordered them through Ebay from Hong Kong …
