Well it's not all doom and gloom - one needs a distraction after all - and this years Rally of the Tests was a cracker.

Starting in Bournemouth and winding our way down to Exeter, Taunton, up to Malvern and then further up to Stoke on Trent before heading west to North Wales for the finish in Llandudno, it was 4 days of frenetic fun.



Big Mike and I have done the event twice before together and he's done it several more times.    Each time the real challenge is to finish without breaking down....it's not called a Reliability Trial for nothing.  

In 2005 in my BGT we managed to brake hard enough to shift the engine forward so the fan could try and corkscrew it's way through the radiatior.   This was in the Derbyshire Dales and we had to be towed back to the control in Buxton, where we (well, the rally mechanics to be more accurate) stripped the radiator out, fixed it and off we went again.    We'd lost a lot of time, so our result was not tip top.   But we finished.

In 2007 in Mike's BGT on a particularly rough stage in a Scottish forest we managed ...   more »

Boris Johnson in the Torygraph today rails against our dear leader, long since named 'Tax and Waste Brown' by otber bloggers, after the pre Budget announcements aimed to rescue our economy at a stroke.

What muppets.   As good old Boris says, you got us into this mess Gordy, with your NuLab policies.   And like a  broke and desperate gambler who has already lost the family siliver you are now putting the house on the next spin of the roulette wheel.    Our national debt will  increase to over 8% by 2010 - levels not seen since Harold Wilson.   It is madness.

I've been whingeing on about the level of government spend for as long as I've been blogging, but there is a statistic at the bottom of Boris' article that really brought it home to me....read on:

We now know that to fund this fiscal stimulus, taxes are going up on incomes over £40,000; we know there are going to be huge increases in national insurance that will hit employees, employers and the self-employed. How on earth is that supposed to boost job creation?

Might it not have been better, if you were going to splurge £20 billion in tax cuts, ...   more »