Buses Festival at Gaydon

A couple of months since my last visit to Gaydon for the truck show, I was back again on Sunday, this time for the Buses Festival. Organised by Buses magazine, this was a new event on the rally calendar for 2014 in response to dissatisfaction with the 2013 Showbus venue at Long Marston, and returned bigger and better this year, with almost a hundred vehicles in attendance. This was the first bus rally I had attended for a couple of years so these are my impressions, both as a first-time visitor to this particular event and as a returnee to bus rallies in general.

The M50 - a drive into the past

A trip to South Wales with a friend at the weekend saw part of the journey undertaken on the M50 motorway, or Ross Spur as it is sometimes known, and as a passenger I was able to appreciate the unique character of this odd little road. While many readers would probably consider roads in general to be boring and motorways especially so, the M50 is actually rather interesting, despite being a mere 21 miles long with only four junctions. Being one of Britain's oldest motorways but lightly used and little modified since it was built, it is probably as close as it is possible to get to an authentic 1960s motorway travel experience, and one of those four junctions is also rather remarkable.

What is true equality?

My recent post "Is DDA killing the bus industry?" has proved to be by far the most popular and controversial piece on this blog and has provoked a heated debate, but has been misconstrued in some quarters and I have been branded anti-disabled as a result. That is not the point of the article at all and these detractors have missed my fundamental argument, so I feel this follow-up is necessary to clarify my position and the true nature of the issues under discussion.

Re-read the article and you will realise the real issue is that the government is using the Disability Discrimination Act as a 'one-size-fits-all' solution to many subtly different problems with a complete lack of any flexibility to allow exemptions or alternatives where it isn't appropriate. The word 'equality' seems to be widely misunderstood these days and has taken on a new meaning of applying the same rules to everyone. In fact, true equality is subtly but importantly different: it means providing appropriate adjustments for those who need them, but (and this is the critical part that is usually overlooked) without unduly interfering with conditions for those who don't require such adjustments.

Is DDA killing the bus industry?

This may be my most controversial bus-related piece yet but I firmly believe the Disability Discrimination Act, for all its good intentions, is actually doing a great deal of damage to the bus industry and discriminating against the able-bodied majority of passengers for the sake of a handful of disabled users. DDA has gone too far and rather than promoting fair and justified equality, in some cases is actually now giving the disabled greater rights than the able-bodied and forcing the latter to accept unfair compromises to avoid being labelled discriminatory. To me, the government's attitude of trying to create an all-inclusive service to accommodate everyone is fundamentally wrong and ultimately benefits no one as each group's needs are so different, and bus users would be far better served by separating the disabled and able-bodied and allowing attention to be focused on each group's specific needs individually. 

Unsung heroes: Mitsubishi Space Wagon

For the next instalment in the unsung heroes series, I pay tribute to an arguably significant car that was eclipsed by another and never received the recognition it deserved. Renault's 1985 Espace is widely credited with creating the MPV market sector, but as a purpose-built seven-seat family car it was actually beaten to the market by the Mitsubishi Space Wagon launched the previous year. While the Espace still gets all the glory, the Space Wagon has largely faded into obscurity and is now a very rare sight. This piece is also something of a personal indulgence as my dad owned three first-generation Space Wagons while I was growing up and they played a vital role in my childhood, so I remember them with great fondness.

B252 YGN was said to be the very first Space Wagon in the UK. Here it is outside my parents' house in May 1990.

The big booking fee scam

Booking fee. Two simple little words that make my blood boil when buying tickets for an event. What is a booking fee really paying for? Booking is a compulsory part of the process that can't be avoided and isn't a special extra service so why should you be charged an additional fee for it? Any genuine extra costs involved in the booking process are marginal so basically these fees give the event organisers a legal way to make their customers pay more than the advertised price and maximise their profits from ticket sales, which seems highly unethical to me. 

An Unexceptional day? Far from it

Hagerty's Festival of the Unexceptional

Saturday 25th July saw the second running of the Festival of the Unexceptional at Whittlebury Park golf club, following the success of the inaugural event last year. You may not have heard of it but this was a highlight of the show season for me so I was delighted to hear it would be returning and was very much looking forward to attending. The organisers were very lucky to be blessed with fine weather: the rain poured down throughout Friday and Sunday, but Saturday fortunately stayed dry and bright apart from a bit of drizzle during the prize giving, which no doubt helped make the event such a success.

Unexceptional, eh? That doesn't sound very interesting

Quite the opposite actually. These cars may have been unexceptional in their day but have now become exceptional simply by surviving when so many of their contemporaries have bitten the dust. Organised by Hagerty Insurance, based in nearby Towcester, and dubbed a 'Concours de l'Ordinaire', this is a car show with a difference: the usual classic fodder such as MGBs, E-types and vintage sports cars are not welcome and instead it celebrates everyday family cars between thirty and fifty years old, although the age limit wasn't strictly enforced as both a 1950s Hillman Minx and a 1989 Volvo were accepted for display. These are the sort of cars that used to be common street furniture, could be seen everywhere and were taken for granted, but have now become rare thanks to attention being focused on preserving more exotic vehicles. This show was right up my street as I can't get nostalgic about the majority of traditional classics but things like Montegos, Cavaliers and Fiestas were the cars of my childhood.

I remember when most car parks looked like this. Yes that is an Isuzu Piazza in the foreground.

Beware of Ctrl-Z!

This is not the post I was intending to publish today as that one fell victim to an infuriating feature of Blogger behaviour so I was moved to write about this instead as a warning to others. I have a first-class honours degree in computer science and am currently studying for an MSc in the same subject so I am by no means the average novice user and I feel I am suitably qualified to comment on how stupid and dangerous this feature is, particularly as Blogger is intended to be a simple tool that can be used by people without high levels of computer literacy.

I'm sure everyone knows what Ctrl-Z does: it is a pretty much universal shortcut to undo your most recent change. That's all fine and very useful but Blogger's implementation of Ctrl-Z has another nasty little trick up its sleeve: if you press it again when there are no previous edits in the history, it deletes the entire content of the post to leave you with a blank page. This isn't documented anywhere and the one relevant post I could find dates back to 2011 so it's not a new problem. That's not what an undo function is for so why they have decided to implement this feature and what benefit it has is unclear, but combine it with the automatic saving that is turned on by default and you have a recipe for disaster. For novice users this can doubtless cause blind panic and extreme anger as they think "Oh my God, where did all my work go?!", and possibly drive them to stop blogging as a result.

Unsung heroes: the rise and fall of Proton

In the second of what I hope to be an occasional series on the unsung heroes of the motoring world (the first of which is here), I turn my attention to a car manufacturer that may never have produced anything remotely exciting or technologically advanced and is now virtually invisible in this country, but once filled an important niche among those wanting cheap reliable no-frills transport and appealed particularly to the retired generation.

The Malaysian firm of Proton has had a presence in the UK for over 25 years now but you would easily be forgiven for not realising the brand is still active here as 2014 sales totalled a pathetic eleven cars! Yes, you read that right: less than a dozen cars sold in an entire year, and all but one of those were in December after a ten-month drought with no sales at all, so cynics might suggest they were actually dealer-registered in desperation to avoid the acute embarrassment of selling only one car all year. The range may be cheap but is now distinctly on the elderly side, the newest model dating back to 2006, and although there have been promises of all-new products for several years these have yet to materialise, leaving Proton as a tiny and forgotten bit-player in the UK market. It wasn't always that way though...

Copyright or copywrong?

Copyright law made simple

I was moved to write this piece because total ignorance of how copyright law works with regards to photography seems worryingly widespread and has recently reared its head once more as someone has yet again made the all-too-common mistake of trying to claim they hold the copyright to a photo because they are the owner of the subject matter. The person in question seemed absolutely convinced his understanding is correct, to the ridiculous extent of claiming a government document explaining the law was wrong! He was most put out by the photographer rightfully asserting his copyright, with a rather peeved attitude of "how dare he try to claim copyright to a photo of my property?", so a simple explanation of the law appears to be called for.