Have a good trip au Mans, Martin. Here's hoping it's as exciting as it appears to be when there's footage on the telly.
I'm extremely envious.
I spotted something this morning. 3:45, so only just light and I was driving south on the A9 by Perth, on the way home from a placement visit with one of my more entertaining students - the first I've had to carry out during an employer's night shift and what a disorienting experience it was too! Anyway, the thing is, I have no idea what I saw but it appeared to be some sort of 1940s saloon, American perhaps, with a single lamp in the middle of its bonnet (plus the headlamps out in the wings of course), styling similar to the US-built Fords of that period and a DeSoto-ish roof line with small windows and broad pillars. I was sitting at a constant, radar guided 69mph (I always set the Glof's cottaging control to 1 mph under the limit as 3 of my current points are a result of Police Scotland's policy of releasing cameras to the wild so that [the cameras] might breed
) and this odd old motor sailed past as though I was standing still so either its driver was a local who knew precisely where every camera in the area would be at that time or he just didn't give a toss, but the exhaust note of the old car was strange, not as musical as a V8, nor as consistent as an IL6. IL8 maybe? The "hood" was certainly long enough.
I swept through Edinburgh on the way back East as it would - so I assumed - be quiet at that sort of time (I had assumed badly, the feckin' place was heaving as per usual) and in the capital, so it seems, it's compulsory these days for every third building to have a Morris Minor stood outside. OK, that remark may have been
slightly exaggerative. Edinburgh folk like their classics and Minors are always around given their suitability for daily use, but today, there were more than I think I've seen on any single day since the early '80s.
Then, coming past the cement works on the coast road to the south east of the city, two 1950s-style Bedford buses in
Trossachs Trundler livery were clearly lost as they operate out of Callander and serve that area, which is a good 50 miles away to the north west.
Finally, on the way into Berwick as I wanted a roll & egg and had time to kill, I did spy an apparently near perfect Subaru Sumo in the dark blue that was applied as default colour to these weird, yet highly effective Rascal-sized vans in cases where they weren't required to be finished in the livery of someone's floristry business. I felt almost old when it dawned on me that I could remember having PDI'd these vans when they were being sold new and even more scarily; that I found myself remembering the torque settings required for attaching bits to other bits when working on the abused examples we used to see through the dealers' workshops when I was with IM all those years ago.
It's amazing what hunger can do to the human mind.
