Festive days.

Today we awoke in a festive mood. Th management god bless her has added yet another year of bliss to her already blissful life.

Her little cup runneth over well if would have had she not been careful with the coffee delivered to her in bed this morning.

She did eventually get out of bed and off we went for a festive day out.

Management loves the garden and so that's the direction we took. The Welsh Botanical Gardens near Carmarthen. A recomended day out for anyone in the area. Lovely it was too, though of course the rain was a bit of a dampener. I would imagine the flower beds are pretty good too shame that in March they are a sea of mud with the odd sprouty bit.

Daffs are starting to appear and they made a sea of yellow dancing in the breeze.

From there the romantic day continued with a lovely pub lunch, had to think of something to do for the hour that the scrap merchant was closed for his.

You see it turns out the fault with the cheap 806 was somewhere inside the fuel pump and it's attendant electronics.

Easiest thing; remove all the electronics and find a car from the previous model year replace everything with mechanical pumps and old type injectors.

End result - very cheap car.

For those who have started to doubt my romantic streak, I didn't vannish into the scrap merchant with spanners for an hour. No, I went and spoke to the man, explained my predicament and, he was so smitten that he offered to help and remove it himself so I could spend more time with herself. Well it was either that or the money I pushed into his hand that changed his mind.

All was peace and light and children from then on, children collected and back over to collect the 806 from the garage so it can be home for the weekend.

Unknown to me my mate the grease had been called out but the car was there and ready to take away as he said.

Also unknown was that he had in his interrupted haste left a spanner quite litterally in the works.

So when I hit start all hell broke lose.

I thought he had installed the seismic engine running indicator.

The car was shaking itself to pieces, surrounding buildings were starting to sway.

Revving the engine made me think that the ground might crack and swallow passing buses.

It was an interesting reminder that diesel engines are not much smoother than they used to be, it's just the clever engineers with their rubber blocks and bits of felt that have changed that.

But enough of that.

This weekend the "Pink Panther II" hits west wales and we are going to be there.

I am logging off to go and buy tickets.

For the back row.....

R