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I've had a great run out with @CraigHew and @Greenstreak-Andy D before Andy Sorns his car for winter on the 31st 😂 Route was partly thrown together last night and adapted on the fly based on which direction the sun seemed to be. We've got wet, muddy and chilled but had a great day with good company. Fuelled up and ready to blat: 'Damp roads' but the sun's coming out! RAF Cosford Trust @CraigHew to tow a yellow sandwich box! Carding Mills Valley: Demon Tweaks My mirrors were less than useful for most of the day! My third full breakfast in a row over the last 3 weeks, all WSCC Induced!

Yep, a great day, despite the mostly damp roads. Just a bit of an engine inspection, breather connections on S2000 cam cover. RAF Cosford museum The VC10 length of service.. Andy

This is the menu for Sunday, just to whet your apetite

Got my Xtr2 road legal!

Coming. 😀🚙🚙🚙

Lucky you... you was in it even before my GF!!

Thanks, I’m the old guy in the yellow Westfield wearing his new birthday Sealskinz gloves.

It is not over yet as there are remaier MP's and supporters trying now to find a legal way to stop him actually presenting this to parliament. Jeremy Corbyn was interviewed 26 minutes before the details of the deal were released. They knew a deal had been done but he still said this deal is unacceptable and they would vote against it. What an utter contempt for everyone as he has no idea what he wants except not a general election. Boris has played a blinder. If the deal goes through he wins. If they refuse and we leave on a no deal, he wins. If they find a way to stop him and we get a GE he will win that as it will be spun as he was on the side of the democratic will of the people and it is those who refused to vote for his deal who have plunged us into more turmoil, so he will win again. And if we have left, with or without a deal, the Brexit party have no place to go, they cannot rerun leaving with the EU so any vote for them would be wasted, so Boris wins again and people said he was stupid and a buffoon.

I have one of these in saloon version as my company car and I’ve got to say it’s brilliant, I have never kept a car for so long, I used to have a 2017 rangerover autobiography for towing but sold it and bought a f90 m5 competition so fitted a tow bar to the Passat, it tows my brian james shuttle with my Westfield in it just as well as the Range Rover did and is a lovely comfortable car. It is a diesel though but I do believe diesels have benefits for towing

mmm, Sunday lunch hey, mmm, I might stowaway in a certain Westfield this Sunday......

In the morning, we packed up the cars again and drove out of Thessaloniki. The roads there were pretty narrow with steep hills and cobbles. Not exactly what the Westie was built for! We were aiming for Meteora, our southernmost point on the trip, and probably one of the points I was looking forward to more. The weather was looking pretty changeable, so we weren't sure whether we would do the hike that day and move on in the morning, or just find a place to camp and get up early. As we drove down, the weather wasn't looking too promising though. Some of the roads were pretty good fun though, even with a few painted kerbs to kindly show the apex of the corners! Not sure if it had been used for some sort of hillclimb event in the past. By the time we got there, it was 3 o'clock. We had a 4 hour hike, sunset was at 7, and we weren't sure where we were going to camp. My vote was find a campsite, take it easy and do Meteora in the morning, but I was outvoted, and off we set on the hike. The views were spectacular. These gnarly pillars there were once part of the seabed, but were lifted out by earth shifts thousands of years ago. Monks then found refuge in some of the natural caves in them from pillaging Turks. Then the Turks learned how to climb, so the monks built monasteries for extra defences. 6 of the 24 monasteries are still active today. We parked in the town and hiked up through the trails, which I'm really glad we did. There were tonnes of coaches up the top, with tourists all fighting for the photo viewpoints. We had the nice peaceful hike up, and then could wait for gaps between buses to get our photos. Glad I didn't drive up too, as the coach drivers were not exactly careful. Witnessed one properly smash up the front of a Punto, and a few near misses too. We got back to the cars and made plans for camping. Chris had a couple of potential locations saved, so we went for the first one of those about 20 minutes down the road. It was already getting dark, so I was really hoping this would be a success. Some of the comments about this campsite were that there were "sometimes some dogs around" but otherwise it had decent reviews. The so-called "dogs" turned out to be more akin to wolves, and were bl**** aggressive, so as we left there before even getting out of the cars and set off towards Chris's second option. This one was uphill by another 10 minutes or so according to the sat nav. About 2 minutes in, we hit the worst fog I've ever experienced in my life. By the time Chris had realised I wasn't in his mirrors, he was afraid to stop on the road so figured it would be best to continue until he could find somewhere safe to pull in. Trouble was he couldn't see, so couldn't see any safe pull in points. With the not great visibility in the westie, coupled with the dominator lights (which were reasonably ok at the start of the trip, but seem to have deteriorated really rapidly), I really couldn't see much and was in the same boat as Chris. It would have been dangerous to stop, dangerous to try to turn around, and dangerous to continue on. Trapped in that catch 22, I figured it was best to try to rejoin Chris, in the hope that the campsite was suitable. Had Joe not been in the car, it would have been even worse, as generally, only one of us could see the road lines at a time, so when I couldn't, I was relying on Joe's directions. We eventually caught up with Chris after what seemed an eternity. The campsite was a bust. Nowhere to pitch the tents at all, so we needed a plan C. We decided to book a hostel instead of risking another failed camping spot, and set off back down through the fog. It seemed to have dissipated a bit on the way down, but still wasn't a great experience. Lessons learnt: No driving up mountains with low hanging cloud at night time. If you buy Furore Dominators, bin the bulbs and buy some good Phillips ones straight away.

Bang on from Janet Daley: Our arrogant political class holds the British people in open contempt A few weeks ago even before the latest instalment of this saga at the Supreme Court a member of our family in the North of England rang up to say, with heartbreaking resignation, They don’t care about people like us. There was no question about who she meant by they. The membership of the group she had in mind is presumably now a bit larger, bringing even the objective authority of the law into contention. I wonder if that smug Remain coalition in Westminster has any idea of the terrible thing it has brought into being and is now with every triumphal move determined to consolidate. With the help of the credulous (or colluding) broadcast media, confected rage about over-heated parliamentary language took over the news agenda last week. Can anybody seriously believe that this is the big story? Or, more importantly, the most damaging constitutional outrage that is being committed. In a week in which a foaming, shrieking opposition was denouncing the Government as unfit for office but refusing to permit a general election that might replace it. And the legal commitment to accept the result of a referendum was being undermined with desperate, shameless dishonesty (message to Parliament: nobody in the real world believes that all those lawyers scrambling around were simply trying to prevent no deal, and not attempting to block Brexit altogether.) Mercifully, in the thick of this charade there were some delightful moments. I particularly enjoyed hearing that the shadow Commons leader, Valerie Vaz, had demanded that Geoffrey Cox come to the House to apologise for calling us turkeys. This being Britain, even in the midst of a tragic destruction of public faith in the nation’s institutions, there can be laughter. So no, I do not think there will be violence in the streets even when the people realise the full consequences of the contempt in which they are held by what they see, quite rightly, as a privileged, arrogant political class. They will not riot or attack the police who they will assume, again rightly, to be blameless. The outcome will be far worse than that because it will not blow itself out in civil disruption which is generally counterproductive (just as the noxious Remain protesters who drown out broadcast interviews are counterproductive). There will instead be despair, disillusionment and alienation between the social classes which will prevail for at least a generation. Where once a tolerably affectionate form of snobbery was accepted as a part of popular culture, there will now be nothing but ugly distrust and genuine hatred. This is peculiarly sad because it is such a dramatic shift from the view of working class people, which stood until three years ago, as the true heroes of the last world war. The virtually unanimous enthusiasm for the post-war welfare state and housing renewal programmes sprang from the sense that ordinary people had made such enormous sacrifices for the war effort. The belief that the country owed them a great debt ran through the political consciousness of the second half of the 20th century. But that’s all gone now. What replaces it is open disdain and malignant derision. The worst of this is that the party which was born to defend this class which once carried the hereditary burden of being its official voice has played an indispensable role in its betrayal. And that (broadcasters please note) was the real big story of the week. Labour and its absurd leader, reduced to a hopeless, incomprehensible puddle in the House, are so inadequate as an Opposition that they must prevent a general election at all cost. In their incoherence and opportunism they have made the country ungovernable, betrayed their own history and abandoned their natural constituency. That’s quite something for the news media to overlook. Even the endless reporting of that overblown farrago about nasty language got it (probably maliciously) wrong. The divisive bitterness that has become such a feature of public discourse, for which a Greek chorus of female MPs blamed the threats they receive, did not instantly materialise with Boris Johnson’s ascendancy to the Tory leadership. It grew and festered with great alacrity under the premiership of his predecessor. Please try to remember, through the blizzard of anti-Boris hysteria, that it was during Theresa May’s time in Downing Street, notable for its prissy decorousness and eagerness to compromise in negotiations with the European Union, that this toxic atmosphere took hold. And recall also, when you hear all those Labour MPs complaining about death threats, that the hate-mongering on their party’s side was so ferocious that the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, needed a bodyguard to accompany her at their last party conference. The stupendous irony of all this is that the people are being castigated for their anger by those very public figures who refuse to acknowledge the reasons for it. They are traduced, insulted and patronised when they might at least expect (given that their view was the majority one) to be addressed with courtesy. When their frustration grows and takes a vengeful form, that of course justifies even more righteous condemnation. So they conclude, not unreasonably, that they can’t win. Either they stay quiescent and accept the supercilious judgment of their governing class which did, after all, ask them for their opinion. Or they refuse to accept it and cut up rough. Either they were fools to hold the view they did, or they are wicked for insisting that it be listened to. Any political figure who attempts to speak up on their behalf is a populist (or worse). A political leader who suggests that the only way to lance this hideous boil is to resolve the issue by doing what the country voted for is conspiring with evil. There could once have been a quite simple solution to this problem: let the people speak in the time-honoured way, by voting in an election. But maybe it’s too late for that. The bitterness has gone too deep. It is quite possible that the contempt and the resentment which have driven the country to the brink will not be forgotten in our lifetimes.

Today we showed our true naughtyness didn't we? to our full capacity. It was actually a table for 11 because Tango man joined us for brunch. I would pass up a team of rugby players to meet the cute little orange chap. (Andy took this photo with my camera and I was totally unaware that Tango Man was on it. When I first saw it on the computer screen all Glen heard was a shriek of delight and squeals of laughter as I came running to show him it) Top class entertainment.

A for your “Q plate” question - it kind of works on a points system. So to get a new plate you have to show that all parts are brand new (with receipts) except for ONE major component (like the engine or gearbox - not both) that can be “refurbished to as new standard”. You can get an “age related” plate if you have “major” components from a single donor vehicle (along with the donor vehicle id) - so engine and gearbox, or transmission and engine for example. That’s how many Single Donor Vehicle builds end up with a “P” or “S” reg (again - for example) If you can’t do either of the above, you get a Q. But - in the world of kit cars, a Q is not only acceptable, but often desirable due to the advantages that a Q can give a car come MOT time. Plus - those of us that have kit cars and buy them really do not give a flying fart what letter you have on your reg plate! We buy on condition, build quality and component specification above all other considerations. Hope this helps!

Busy this weekend 😫

Sorry, can’t make this one. Have fun!