Missy Charm

Heard enough of the Boss? Try the Bus! His guitar playing was characterized by maximum overdrive pedal... Love guns and cars and money ? Hip-hop is for you! The album featured wedding disco favourites such as 'Money on tha Floor, Fo' Sho' and 'Blastin' Suckas Wit' Ma Water Pistols' Don't forget motorbikes! Battleaxe (named for the then Prime Minister) released this heavy metal rip-snorter in 1983. Lead singer Richie 'Revved Up' Rawlinson penned all the chart-bottomers on this rarely heard LP. Tracks include 'Burn Down Bejams', 'Timothy Whites Riot' and 'I Beheaded the Managing Director of the British Shoe Corporation' . All were inspired by Rawlinson's work as a filing clerk at the Godalming social security office.

Was that photo taken in Brixton?

Yer never alone with a Centura XL...

You'll be stuck with that until Katie Price gets her driving licence back...

That explains something. Years ago, for reasons I now completely forget, a work colleague drove a group of us to the local Tesco's in his then-brand-new Astra. The Astra was one of these: Which is the shape after the one pictured. I put a bag of shopping in the boot and closed the tailgate - not hard - the latter action having the effect of causing the parcel shelf to pop out of its mountings and jam against the rear windscreen. We, the colleague and I, ended up rowing about it; he accused me of being heavy handed and I his car of being badly designed. Between us we managed to fix the parcel shelf, which seemed to solve the problem. Interesting, though; perhaps indicative of the drop in quality. I've driven a few of those Astras as company motors, but they were too new, at that point, to really show any signs of being badly made.

For some reason there are hundreds of old Vauxhall Astras round my way. These ones: But not that many of the next generation.

I hope that you look in the mirror first, make sure the sun isn't in your eyes, take account of acceleration times and make sure to telegraph your intentions to other drivers by signalling clearly!

Whereas I have to make do with a Ford Soft-Focus... The VW Touareg isn't well named either, given the moniker's derivation from 'Tuareg' - a collection of peoples in the Middle East and Africa known, amongst other things, for mass rape, pillage, slaughter and the use of child soldiers.

Someone will know the actual answer, but I suspect the last car to be fitted with a manual column change was the Nissan Cedric Japanese taxi. The taxi was based on the 1987-debuting Nissan Cedric private car and remained in production until, unbelievably, 2015! It was sold only to commercial clients, of course, and was equipped with various oddities to suit the Japanese taxi driver - including, until some point in the production run, a column-change manual gearbox: Quite when that feature was dropped I don't know, but other things about that photo suggest it's a fairly recent car. The radio is certainly nineties, if not early 2000s. Toyota's Crown Comfort taxi seems to have gone over to floor change for the manual somewhat earlier than the Nissan, so perhaps doesn't count.

Have you seen this? https://www.mg-rover.org/threads/1989-sterling-827sli-crank-no-start.874076/ Relates to the American Sterling, but assume certain bits might be the same...

As someone else has said: that's in an enclosure at Colchester Zoo. The odd thing, however, is that that Land Rover Discovery has been in use as an enclosure decoration or piece of animal play equipment for a very long time indeed, perhaps 25 years or more. Here's a photo of it from 2011 in the same position (the Pileated Gibbon enclosure): I remember the car performing a similar role much earlier than that, too. At one time, a long time ago, it looked almost in showroom condition; bizarre, considering it would have been worth money in those days. You could see through the windows quite clearly, back then, and the interior was immaculate - almost like that of a car that's never been driven. I don't know what the story behind it all is.

You could get a much better Consul than Anne's, i.e. a going concern that was just about roadworthy, for under a grand twenty years ago. Twice that would buy you something quite nice and even Zephyrs and Zodiacs were quite cheap. The only old Fords worth anything back then had Cosworth badges.

An informative piece about Miss Naysmith and her life can be found here: https://josephclift.com/writing/miss-naysmith/. It contains various details not seen elsewhere as well as - for those here - another photo of the Ford Consul. The red Mercedes that replaced it was, apparently, torched; people these days forget how much crime there was twenty years ago. Naysmith seems to have been the architect of the life she led; rejecting of society rather than, as observers assumed, rejected by it. It's a case that raises interesting an interesting ethical question, namely should that sort of thing be allowed? At some level her choices would have been detrimental to others and her behaviour, at times, left a lot to be desired, but that's one of the prices of liberty. But the counter-argument is that we are straitjacketed by convention and cannot comprehend such a life of apparent autonomy. We can't all live like that. Ought one or two of us do so, if only to hold a mirror up to the majority? Incidentally, the verse on the side of the Consul is from Dacre's 'I'll be Your Sweetheart', an 1899 music hall number.

Final thought: could this be anything to do with the brakes? My parents' automatic car won't start without the brake pedal being depressed. Would something like the Rover have a similar system?

No, it's a different sort of problem. The issue I have is that rainwater collects somewhere on the exterior of the tailgate and then runs off, invariably into the boot, when the tailgate is opened. It's not a leak per se, as no water is finding its way past the seals - it's purely runoff. Is yours one of the newer ones? Looking at photos, it seems Ford may have solved the problem on the facelift models by redesigning the tailgate peak spoiler. On the facelift ones it's full width and sits over the taillights, thus looking as if it acts as a sort of gutter to direct water away from the boot aperture. On earlier cars it sits between the taillights, meaning it directs water into the gap between tailgate edge and rear wing. Incidentally, ST models have always had the full-width spoiler. Perhaps it was noted that ST models didn't suffer the same way and the modification was carried over to the normal line.