Week Twenty-Eight: In Which We Meet Meerkats.

Apologies for late publishing of my Monday ‘This Week’ column (I do so hate the netty ‘˜Blog’ term, it sounds to me like a rude word for somewhere you go to excrete…) but I had a date with MeJulie and some Meerkats as a birthday treat. You can go and sit in with them, and get used as a human Meerkat lookout post as you feed them veg and mealworms!
The point is, I found out that my clutch had gone (the snargel bolts were scoring the snadger plateor something) proper burned out, en route to ICE-T 19. I was a bit miserable until Larry at the Volvo specialists had called me back that very Saturday morn and booked my car in for Monday for a new clutch. He said it was not bad to get to 211,000 miles on the first one. And I had to borrow a loan car and fit my old Snooper navigator to it to find the Paradise Wildlife Park in Broxbourne, in deepest Hertfordshire. Now, that morning, the A10 was blocked Northbound from the M25 after an horrendous crash. My own car with the Trafficmaster SmartNav system freshly installed in it, could have easily coped with the redirect around the traffic, as it uses the blue traffic sensors on all M ways and 95% of all trunk roads. But that was in my car and this was Larry’s!
So, I simply programmed the Syrius navigator to avoid motorways and we thus avoided the go slow on the M25 and got around the blocked A10 without even seeing it. Clever tech that saved our day. And let my wife keep her appointment with a Meerkat who left a bum smell on her shoulder!
ICE-T 19 was a roaring success yet chilled in an odd way. I have a few vids and some pics and will assemble the full-on feature as soon as possible.
Adam Rayner Online Editor