10 cars I dislike. and reasons why, of course.

So, I felt like writing a blog, and I can’t think of much that happened other than a slightly changed repeat of the tree fiasco of yesterday and you don’t want to read about that, so i thought I’d just make a pointless list of cars that I don’t like and why I ddon’t like them. Yay.

1) Porsches that are painted pink. I saw one the other day and thought ‘why ruin a perfectly good car with a dreadful colour?’ Surely the only reason you paint a car a dreadful colour is to get noticed and with a Porsche you’ve got that anyway, rendering the whole exercise kind of pointless.

2) Porsches that are painted yellow. Ditto. Do people not think of the depreciation on these things???

3) the Daewoo/Chevrolet Matiz. Branding it a chevrolet is not going to make it cool, it’s just going to bring Chevvys image down.  It is cheap, but looks it and lots of the ones I’ve seen seem to be painted ‘Burnt Sienna’ (a.k.a urrrrgh-ish orange)

4) The Mini. I may be alone in this one, but I dislike it (this is referring to the new one. The old one was fine) because it is an obvious fashion statement, and I dislike obvious fashion statement cars especially ones with a ‘retro image’ like this one. It is also not that mini any more, so defeats the purpose of the name, and you are paying so much for the styling, as a decent one costs about the same as a decent Ford Focus and that is a much more practical car, that in my opinion looks better. It’s not even like the mini is rare. I see so many that its just nto head turning at all. If you want a mini get an old one. They might be more expensive to run, smaller and secondhand but noone buys a new mini on practicality anyway…

5) The Beetle. Ditto the mini. The only exception to this retro styling thing is probably the Fiat 500. I quite like that actually, however I can see I’ll like this car much less when  a few more get sold, although at least it is fairly cheap compared to the Beetle and MIni.

6) The Maybach. It is ostentatious, an outrageous display of wealth, from what I’ve heard not even that great unless you’ve got  a chauffeur, hideously expensive and you might as well buy an S-class mercedes. Or just go for the obvious choice of the Rolls Phantom if you really want to spend over 300 grand on a car. At least thats imposing and scary not just showy-off.

7) The Subaru Impreza WRX. I am not a fan of normal-ish cars with massive spoilers on the back and this is probably the worst. I also don’t like racing stripes on non-powerful cars but this is nto the worst culprit for people painting those on. Yes, I know this car has over 200 brake horsepower so its not exactly slow, but does it really need such over-the-top race styling?  I prefer things like understated hot hatches that look the same as the normal version, unless you’re going to go for the full-on supercars, which can of course get away with showy because that’s msot of their reason for being.

8) The Perodua Kelisa. If you’ve only got £5000 to spend on a car then don’t buy a new one or you’ll end up with this. Be sensible and get a nice used polo or something…

9) Any Hummer. They are just too big. End of.

10) The Toyota Prius. Unfortuneately I must end on a classic target for people to criticise but it must make this list sheerly for it’s so called environmental statistics that don’t seem to add up. Fristly, the quoted figures are 65mpg. The new Polo Bluemotion can do 74.5mpg and that is a diesel and is significantyl cheaper. I know that the Prius is much bigger, but a lot of people don’t need a bigger car and if you do you could get the greenline focus which does over 60mpg.  On a road test I read recently, the Prius was out-mpg’d by a BMW 5 series, which is a much bigger car with efficient driving stuff enabled, so it shows you don’t even get the stated figure. Also, think how much of a carbon footprint the Prius must have had to be made. It is from an international company so all of the materials and labour will have been sourced from wherever is cheapest meaning high carbon from shipping, and from what I’ve heard, the Prius is worse than a lot of cars for this. The really green thing would just be to keep your old car for a few more years until it is no longer economical to run. You may be able to look down on all the ‘un-green’ people in thier old bangers that only do 30mpg, but they’re not having the carbon footprint of importing a new car. If you’re going to buy a new car anyway, you might as well get something you like, not just something that you think will make you look green. Rant over now, sorry.

 

So, there it is, my bottom 10 list of my least favourite cars. I’ll probably think of one I’ve forgotten then… I hope you stayed with me and didn’t get bored (which you probably did as I realize I’ve moaned about the prius rather a lot, and one of these days I’ll get round to writing a less moany car blog, with the cars I do like. Until then, adios amigos…

Like something out of a really bad sitcom…

So, today we went to the park after we’d been swimming, badmintoning and cycling and James and Gruff decided that they were going to play rugby. Great idea, until they decided to play it in the bit with loads of trees. They kicked the ball. It got stuck in the tree. Now they ask the question, how do we get it down?

First they tried hitting sticks at it. This failed. Then they tried throwing Gruffs bag into the air to knock it down. This got stuck in the tree as well, lower down in the branches. Then they threw James bag to try and knock this down. It succeeded in knocking Gruffs bag down but James was now stuck (you can see where this is going. Check out the myspace video when Will’s put it up). So, Gruff threw his bag up to knock down James and this time they both got stuck up in the tree. James now throws his wallet up into the tree to knock down the bags. (He really is that stupid). This did not get stuck in the tree but flew over the tree into the big pile of bushes just behind it. Now we go and look in the bushes for the wallet which we find in only about 10 minutes or so and James proceeds to throw at the tree again, getting it stuck. Luckily, this was knocked down fairly easily by the stick and so now for the task of getting the bags down. This was easier said than done, and to save you the boredom of hearing all the details, loosely involved James and Gruff rugby-lifting Pippa so that she could knock them down with a borrowed walking stick/borrowed umbrella/longest stick we could find. This eventually succeded in getting the bags down, and just left the task of the ball. This was managed by knocking it down with sticks and vodka bottles, until they smashed. After a while thesticks worked though, so alls well that ends well I guess. Until James said there was another ball stuck up another tree…

 

Here is some footage taken of getting the bags down the tree, let’s hope that it works. I would like to thank Will for his amazing camerawork.  Unfortunately the embedding didn’t work, so I’m going to have to give you the link and hope that that works, so you can see the delights of our rugby-ball-getting-down0from-treeness

Things I learned during work experience.

So, after a week going up to the office in Birmingham every day to discover the world of quantity surveying I have now made this scintillating list of observations of the construction industry, working life and council flats. Enjoy.

1) Office hours of 9-5:30 is too long. If they were shorter I’m sure that people would actually do the same amount of work, they would just find ways of doing everything faster, as most of the time an awful lot of people were just making tea or chatting.  If people knew they could get home earlier if they did more work people would be more inefficient, so would have more freetime, so would be happier at work, so encouraged to work even harder.

2) Builder’s do no work on a Friday afternoon. I went to one site where about 15 builders were outside having a fag for over 30 minutes.

3) Renovating council flats is an expensive business. I saw one flat block which had had over £1 million pounds spent on it and I couldn’t see a thing that was different except new windows. And they say the government wastes its money…

4)The world has gone health and safety mad. In order for me to be allowed to go to a finished construction site, where all the reisdents were still living, I needed to wear a hi-vis jacket and hard hat. It seemed a little pointless as all these chavs were pointing and laughing as they didn’t need to wear them. It seemed less stupid the next day when I was actually on a building site and got to go up on the roof (there’s a pretty good view up there :)) but then I needed safety boots as well. With my skirt suit that really is a very good look.

5)I can’t really think of any more stuff to go on this list without getting really silly, so I shall quite while I’m ahead. Bye people.

When I am older I shall wear purple…

Ah, a quiet day at home. Noone to see, nothing to do and peace and quiet. Until my today she’s decided that I’ve suddenly become massively interested in family history down to how many teaspoons my  great-great-great uncle Ben has (seriously. She had found an inventory of stuff in his house after he died and was now showing it to me insisting that I’d asked about it. I hadn’t). Incidentally it was 12. She also talked about renewing her driving license, which doesn’t seem to make sense as I know she has not driven in over 20 years and does not own a car, and interspersed all of these with singing ‘fly me to the moon’. Never mind. Meanwhile, over in Hereford my other grandmother has just been calling constantly asking when my GCSE resulst come out and when she should phone to get them, before insisting that she gives us money for some meal/hotel/outing etc that we’re having/staying with them and we keep saying ew should pay for . I swear as people get older they begin to remember every single little detail, such as whether once 5 years ago we talked briefly about inventories after funerals and then forget improtant stuff, choosing instead to spend the time trying to foist their money off onto their children and grandchildren. Still, I thnk being older gives you an excuse to be a little mad I think. Has anyone ever read that poem, When I am Older I shall Wear Purple? It sums it up rather well I think. And now off to go and do what I really ought to be doing today and tidying my room. Woot.

13 things I learnt in Scotland

Well I’ve just got back from my delightful holiday with my parents in sunny old Scotland and heres a short/long (I don’t know yet, I haven’t written it) list of stuff.

1) There’s a reason people go to Spain or Greece or anywhere abroad for their holiday. It’s actually sunny. In the UK it is not.

2) Scottish people are ugly, rude, fat and gender-confused. Oh sorry, and arrogant. (I apologise to any Scots that don’t fit this stereotype, but in two weeks I did not see a single hot guy except one who wasn’t too bad, but then turned out to be a woman with a stubbly beard, and as for service in some of the restuarants I  won’t go into it)Also, on the fat note, Scotland is one of the only places in the world you can buy a deep-fried mars bar. Need I say more?

3)German people are also rude and even more arrogant. Again I apologise to any non rude Germans I’m just speaking from the ones we saw on this holiday. Also, people from the Netherlands are bad drivers. Well, the people there were… so although I know this is almost certainly a massive over-generalisation, I will leave it in anyway, because I jolly well want to.

4) I am still amused very easily by slight innuendos, even with my parents not getting them. For example I laughed quite a lot at the ‘Cockburns solicitors’ in the small Highland town of Forres.

5) On the same innuendos note there are a lot of bird names that are quite amusing. This holiday, as my mum has got into birdwatching we have seen Tits, Shags, Thrushes and the Himalayan Snowcock.

6) Iif you are walking through a wood wearing a swimming costume and bare feet and carrying a full size canoe you get some funny looks as well as sore feet.

7)Real Italian food is not as nice as pizza hut. At least not at the ‘real imported Italian ingredients’ resturant we went to.

8)As much as I complain about the rubbish and constant repeats on digital tv, you still miss it when theres only 4 channels and then even more when BBC1 starts breaking.

9)You can buy t-shirts that say ‘Eejit’ on them. And they were 70% off. I started wondering who had a birthday coming up…

10)My bike is crap. Especially the brakes. And when you then borrow a bike with amazing brakes you will throw yourself off  and land in a conveniently placed muddy puddle if you don’t realize and slam them down like you would on your old bike.

11)Whenever you’re waiting for something (internet cafe, phone box etc) people always take much longer when they know you’re waiting for it. At least Scots do.

12) It’s hard to find shoelaces in the Glenmore 24 gift shop that don’t say ‘cool girl’ or ‘bad boy’ on them.  Next time, try to make sure your laces break when you’re in a big town, rather than in a visitor centre which just has a gift shop, a  cafe that only seems to sell mini milks, and one of the most hilarious videos I have ever seen where the sound doesn’t match up with the people’s mouths moving.

13) My family drives slowly. Or other people drive quickly. On the way home I thought we were travelling at the speed limits on the motorway but we still got overtaken by a pick-up truck, 2 VW campervans, a smart car, a toyota prius, a transit van and a caravan, amongst others.

Well there we go. I hope that was enlightening. Or at least didn’t bore you to death.

Welcome to my world…

Yo, I’m Jenny, I’m 16, and if you’re reading this then you probably don’t care about that, you just found this accidently and now want to go and look at something more interesting (either that or you’re now annoyed at me for guessing what you’re thinking), but I suggest you don’t. Mainly because I want lots of blog views and will almost certainly fail to get them, but partly because you may find something here that interests/amuses you. That is assuming that I get round to writing new blogs regularly. I felt that I needed somewhere to get my humdrum thoughts out of my head and onto paper, or failing that becasue I know I will forget, onto the world wide web to share with the world/ the few people who found this on a search engine and wondered why. So, with this amazing tool I hope to make multiple blog and lists that share my amazing imagination, spectular wit and incredible exaggeration. Either way, I hope you enjoy whatever I’m writing and congratulations if you reached up to this point.  You may now either continue to read some mroe blogs, or make a hasty retreat from this page and look at something more itneresting.