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.