Stopped by the Police!

Gemma had a bit of an exciting day on Monday. Having been out in the morning with Ellie they were on their way home when they were stopped by the police.

The police were out in force doing their usual vehicle checks. Gemma was spotted by the lead police car, who radioed his mate to stop her to check the tinted windows in the car.

Gemma stopped as requested and the nice policeman (he was genuinely nice according to Gemma!) He checked the windows to see how much light was being let in, and it was found that the windows were letting in a lot less than they should be.

The policeman was quite surprised that we’d not been stopped about it before. We’ve had the car for 3 years now and its never been an issue before.

The limit for the front side windows is min 70% light, but they were actually only letting in 40% light. He also checked the windscreen which has a limit of 75%, and it scraped in at 77%.

Because of that he had to issue Gemma with a ticket. Luckily it was only a non-endorsable fixed penalty, which meant no points for Gemma, but a £30 fine. We’ve got 28 days to cough up.

There was a little bit of humour from Ellie as the policeman gave Gemma the ticket:

“Look Mum, a ticket” said Ellie.

“Yes darling it is a ticket,” replied Gemma. “But not one that we want!”

So when I got home I had the job of taking the film off the inside of the windows. This was not an easy job. Getting the film to start peeling off was the hardest part, but once it got started it pretty much came off in one go. Once the film was off, the next job was to get all of the adhesive off.

A lot of elbow grease and white spirit was required, but eventually most of it has come off.

So all we’ve got to do now is to send off a cheque

Some Parents Obviously Don’t Care About Their Children

You don’t see it very often but when you do, its something that makes my blood boil!

What I saw today is still making me angry, even now, a few hours later as I am writing this.

As I came out of work this afternoon, and was waiting to cross the road to get into my car, my attention was caught by a car waiting at the junction. The first thing that caught my eye was the colour. It was a bright orange Ford Fiesta ST, not a subtle colour by any means.

The next thing I saw has made me angry. Sitting in the front passenger seat was a small boy, who I would guess was probably about 5 years old. Nothing too bad in that you might think. But if I tell you that the boy was perched on the edge of the seat, and not even wearing any sort of seatbelt or in a car seat, you can understand my anger.

What the hell was his mother thinking? Why would someone be so stupid, and reckless? Doesn’t this woman care about her son?

So many questions for her to answer. It’s times like that, that you wish that a police car was passing at the time.

Why would a parent let their child sit in the front seat, without restraints? I just don’t understand.

I really hope that she never does that again. Next time could be bad!

Middle lane drivers

Why do people insist on only driving in the middle lane on the motorway?

The worst type of middle lane drivers are the ones who stay in the middle lane for the entire duration of their journey. They get onto the motorway and head straight to the middle lane, even if there is nothing in the “slow” lane! And there they stay until they want to get leave the motorway.

The thing that annoys me about these drivers is that if they come up behind some traffic in the middle lane, they won’t overtake by going into the outside lane if it is clear, they’ll slow down behind the traffic and wait for it to pull back into the inside lane. They will then put their foot back down and accelerate.

This was the case on Saturday, when we all went to Wrexham, as it was Gemma’s dad’s 50th birthday. Gemma was driving and she is not a driver that will speed, but the amount of times we passed the same few cars was unbelievable! We would overtake these cars that were sat in the middle lane, usually stuck behind some traffic, and then pull back into the inside lane. Then as the traffic moved back to the inside lane you could see them putting their foot down, overtaking us again and then when they came up behind some more traffic they’d slow down yet again, and the whole cycle would start again.

There have also been a lot of occasions recently when we’ve been travelling at 70mph in the inside lane with nothing in front of us for miles, and we are actually travelling faster the the”fast” lane. The cars are all bunched up trying to overtake a couple of middle lane hoggers.

The reason that many people do this, is that they lack the concentration for driving on a motorway. Yes, we all know that driving on a motorway is boring, but that is no excuse for you to switch off and sit in the middle lane. In fact, people should be even more alert as to the dangers of driving at high speed.

I think that this is one of the reasons that the government is sanctioning using the hard shoulder in places to cut down the congestion. There is no need to do this, just make everyone move back to the left hand lane after they have made their overtaking manoeuvre. That would then keep a 3-lane motorway a 3-lane motorway, not reducing it to a 2-lane motorway.

While I’ve been writing this I looked “middle lane drivers” on Google and did you know that there is a website dedicated to these people, and their misdemeanours! It’s called Middle Lane Morons. I also came across another website, How Motorways Work, that covers even more indiscretions on the subject of motorway driving.

I feel so much better knowing that there are other people out there who think the same as me. Glad I’ve got it off my chest!

Kubica’s crash data disclosed - autosport.com - F1 News

I’ve just read on the Autosport website about that the data concerning Robert Kubica’s crash has been released.

It makes for very interesting reading.

Imagine hitting a wall at 230km/h (143mph) in your road car. There wouldn’t be much left would there? It goes to show how strong the modern F1 car is. At the moment of impact with the wall the peak loading on the car was 75G. To think that he came out of the accident with just a mild concussion and a sprained ankle.

The report from the study of the data said that all of the safety devices “worked perfectly”.

I’m sure that the quest for even safer cars will still continue, as accidents will still happen, no matter what the FIA does.

Here’s hoping that Robert Kubica will be back in the car for the next GP in France.

How many speed cameras???

Following on from the post about buying Shaun’s car, we were amazed to see how many speed cameras there are in Preston!

From the M6 to Hutton which was about 5 miles or so, I lost count at the number of speed cameras that were focused on the road!

There must have been in excess of 10 on both sides of the road within this short stretch of road. If you look under Preston on the SpeedCamerasUK website you’ll see how many there are!!!

They were everywhere! If you don’t want to take the risk of being snapped - a couple of them were sneakily hidden - avoid Preston!