February 2026 Second Half

 

February 2026

Second Half

February continued with nicer weather good enough to have some longer walks in our local park with daffodils and hawthorn blossom emerging as the weather warmed. I had a phone call to an old friend, Les, from the model railway side of Whitewebbs Transport Museum. He had been the custodian of my model engines I had built in the early 80s until he had a stroke and left the museum leaving them with the office for me to collect. I had not been to the museum for over a year and decided to put that right. Another old friend is George, who also has not been well, I contacted to him to see if he wanted he wanted to go to the museum. It turned into a very social day for both of us. I collected my models and met some new faces at the museum and enjoyed the new display of bikes.

Chris is the lead for motorcycles at the museum and is also an active member of the LE Owners Club has reorganise the first floor display after the new lift was installed to make sufficient space for wheelchair access and found bikes to fill the space vacated by the loss of the Rex Judd collection and the loss of the valuable 1898 Holden. Sad for the museum but being a charity they had insufficient funds (millions) to buy the collection but other interesting bikes have replaced them. Museums that change their displays regularly are worth returning regularly.

Another fine day and spent some time in the back garden. The chimenea was moved to the middle of the lawn to burn some old wood and the rear supporting leg fell off. Part of the cast iron body had rusted away around the attachment bolts of the rear leg. Easy repair by putting a plate inside with new bolts to secure the leg in place.  It was tested out later with a warm glow lasting into the evening.

Last thing for the month was a visit to a jewellery faire at Kempton Park. It was not just gems necklaces and earrings but had quartz and bits of petrified wood and crystal balls. This was Gita’s element another skill hidden for years. It was just like me going to a bike show. Ooh! I like that and that and that! She made jewellery until life got in the way and now stimulated by the faire she bought a new stock of things to start making bits again.

February 2026 First Half

 

February 2026

First Half

We had a very wet January and the start of February was no better. Observed Sunday forced me into a car for my first attendance at the club meeting for 2026 at the new venue Normandy Village Hall. A new route to learn with satnav prompts and choosing different routes for me to follow each time it is programmed. Why does it do that? Despite the miserable weather there was a good turnout of bikes made resplendent by weak sun and pale shadows.

I had a meeting at home with a 2CV club member who was planning a trip through South Africa and wanted to know what mods I had done to the El Cid for my Endurance Rally around Morocco in 2004. With Adrian, my brother, navigating we came 19^th out of 33 entrants and first in our class. A good few hours of discussion took place that evening and great to pass on useful information and jog my memory.

I have an old remote hard drive that I needed some information from and when I plugged it in to my Windows 10 PC it didn’t work requiring a USB connection and not an ethernet one. To retrieve the information I needed to buy appropriate adaptors and power supplies. Chat GPT helped immensely to get the right components. All available on E-Bay and arriving in a few days.

With visits to the dentist, just a check-up and no drama followed by a trip to Charing Cross and a visit o the Neurology department to check my connections were still working was a torture of electric shocks and needles. The shocks gave me involuntary movements in limbs and face and the pins showed movement. There was a grotesque picture of me gurneying. It was a good job it lasted momentarily. Can you imagine the scenario of walking into hospital normally and leaving a twitchy wreck. I used public transport this day to support ULEZ  and got a fictitious  charge on my account for a journey I did not do in the Burton. It is a better method now of being able to challenging it on line.

I completed changing the shower thermo cartridge after many weeks of procrastination doing the job was easier than the thought of doing it and now have hot water in all the right places. I stripped the old one down to find out how it works and discovered there was not much wrong with it other than a bit of wear and no greace to keep it running smoothly and plug the gaps on the shaft and splines.

On the few fine days I started the Burton after a couple of months to check everything was still working then the El Cid to make sure the windscreen wipers were still working for the planned visit to the French car meeting at Blackbushe Airport. There was the dry ride on the Buell via Amersham a combination of A roads, lanes and motorways to complete a circuit.

For some reason the upgrade of Edge caused me enormous problems that include links in emails, slowed my PC down to a crawl and disrupted many of the operational software. To sort it out I had to reinstall the Edge program. This rectified many things including the speed of the Windows 10 PC. It is now obvious to me that Windows wants me to buy a new PC for their newest operating system, not offering an upgrade. Making life even more difficult by making you look for the specifications of the PC to see whether it is upgradable and what it can be upgraded to. Where do you find this information. All this is to make everything more expensive and ties you into them with systems you now have to pay for like 365, cloud storage, even PDFs all of which require internet access to work. Useless when travelling even in the UK.

We had a lovely evening out at the Becks Theatre seeing the Dire Straits tribute band “Money for Nothing” giving renditions of Telegraph Road and Love Over Gold. It was a night to remember.