Goodbye little car, I just can't afford to keep you.

Today, is a sad day. I have had to wave goodbye to my little car Pelle.

I have only had him since last October, but this faithful little car has been in my family for quite a few years. I would have kept the car running, because there were no known engine problems, but the increasing costs of fuel, and the sky high taxes, are two of the reasons that I can not continue to keep him going. At the end of this month my road tax is due to expire, and I received the letter requesting another tax payment earlier this month, I can tell you, my eyes nearly fell out of my head. £120 for 6 months, and £230 For a full year. Add insurance on to that (£600+), and then fuel at around £40 every two weeks. That's an estimated £1,900 every year, for a 15 year old car. My car was actually an automatic transmission, so drank a little more fuel than a manual transmission.

Lets compare the costs, Martin's car a Hyundai i20, has a road tax label of £30 pounds per year, and the fuel costs are around £60 every two weeks (with a heck of a lot more mileage), and insurance is around £800 for both of us. That adds up to an estimated £2,130. Which is more but if you think that this car is used much more, then the costs are actually much less. I would get 200 miles from a £40 tank of fuel, whereas Martin's car gets 200 miles out of a £20 half tank of fuel. So if we worked that out it would be approximately £1,350, or £1,150 for me, with my lower insurance because I am a girl. Which is also unfair in my opinion.

Okay, so for someone like me a Hyundai i20, would be a much more affordable option. Fantastic! I have chosen a car!!! Lets just throw a spanner in the works here, and look at the buying costs. My car cost me £200 to buy, Martin's was.... £7,500. So, really it's fair to say that the average young person in the UK can not afford to buy a nice shiny new, or young car. So we are forced to buy a cheaper, older car, with higher taxes and fuel consumption.

Insurance is through the roof, as young people are apparently terrible drivers, who all rocket around at over 100/mph. Yeah right, ok. Most of the accidents that I have ever witnessed, have been caused by an older driver and many caused by elderly drivers. This is because the elderly have slower reactions, and they can have poor eyesight. This being said, I do know of many, very good elderly drivers. The older drivers (from 30 - 70 years) can be awful drivers too, taking chances, and bullying younger drivers, causing more, dangerous situations than all of the young drivers that I know. This may be taken as biased, but I am merely writing the facts of my observations. It may well be a fact that younger drivers are involved in more accidents, but younger drivers are inexperienced and may not know how to react to being cut up, pulled out in front of, sudden braking, pedestrians, etc... In fact I very nearly had someone pull out into the side of me at a roundabout yesterday, and she was a 30 something!

My main aggravation. is that I feel that young people are being priced out of driving, we can't afford the greener cars, so have to suffer the higher taxes, we get driven into by bespectacled grannies, so have higher insurance. It is a vicious cycle.

I am not that angry about the higher taxes, when I think that the taxes are higher for more polluting cars, because I am a very eco-concious person. I would love to walk everywhere, but the fact is that I live in a small sub-urban village, which only has a handful of highly priced shops and only one bank. The closest towns are Rayleigh (2 miles) and Rochford (2 miles), both of which I could walk to, and will, but I couldn't go to the nearest supermarket (4 miles).  For me a car is quite essential, especially for work, because there is nothing in this tiny little village! We have two buses that come once an hour (If we are lucky). A train station, but the train is over priced and doesn't go where I want to go. That is all we have. Not great.

Really, I think that the government should stop pricing young people out of driving, and if they really wanted us to drive greener cars then they should give us heavy subsidiaries and incentives to do so.  I actually read somewhere the other day that around half of modern cars do not pass their first MOT. Food for thought? Insurance companies should not price young people and their parents out of driving as I truly believe that it is the extortionate costs of the compulsory insurance, actually makes people drives illegally without insurance. We are in a monetary crisis, no one can afford to do anything, I can't even afford to get a job. If I was weaker of mind, then I would certainly have checked out of life by now.

Troll

Download Festival and British Weather

Well it has been quite while since I last blogged! Here is my experiences of my first Download Festival.

Okay I normally go to Sonisphere, which i had tickets to, but is sadly cancelled this year. Well This year we were going to go to three festivals as our alternative honeymoon. We used the refund from Sonisphere to go to Belgium and Luxembourg, which incidentally  was the last thing I blogged about. I think.

So Download. We chose download because of Soundgarden's presence, and we were quite looking forward to the festival.

I have been a little under the weather and decided to decorate the inside of the car the evening before we drove to Derby for Download Festival. So I was banished to my bed for the rest of the evening and I had to leave the packing to Martin and John, which I wasn't happy about because I normally pack with German skill and efficiency. Lucky, my greatest fears were soon gone as I discovered that nothing had been forgotten, phew! (Last year John forgot his sleeping bag.) Download festival is a five day long music festival, well the bands only play for 3 days. The weather man threatened rain, but it was fairly dry most of the 3 hour drive, I slept through most of it as I was still nauseous. (I forgot to mention that the only air freshener for the car that the boys could find was a horribly sickly sweet vanilla scent. Yuck.) That didn't really help me feel better. We got to the makeshift car park/field and the heavens opened, so we forgot to check the location of our car. We decided to take the most important equipment first and return for the other items once we had pitched our tent. The walk to the camp site was a 2 mile trek, with copious amounts of baggage and gravel paths, and a flipping road bridge with steep stairs. We got to the camp site managed to find just enough room for us to pitch our tent near some friendly geordies. I was still feeling pretty ill and didn't want to sit about so John and I walked the 2 miles back to the car. Except we must have walked lots more as we spend 2 hours wandering around the car park as we had lost our bright red hyundai. The heavens decided that this wasn't enough and opened again. As you can imagine, the first and last days of festivals are where relationships amongst friends and loved ones are really tested and emotions run high. The physical stress of carrying a lot of equipment and being herded like cattle is not fun. We had our bucket barbie confiscated, even though they were supposedly permitted on the camp site. I got a bit annoyed at the steward, because we had loads of sausages and burgers that we now could not cook, what a jobsworth he was! By the end of the first day we were wet, cold and hungry and the mud had already been trampled on by thousands of people and everyone was a bit cheesed off.

What that steward didn't know is that we had got 5KG of coal through the barrier and  a wok, so I cooked our food in a makeshift wok, coal cooker thing. I did feel like taking the wok to the back of the steward"s head, if I am honest!

Sleeping was okay, but it is always hard to adjust to the level of noise at festivals from thousands of people drunkenly gibbering away. We were camped right underneath the take-off and landing paths of East Midlands Airport. The planes landing were not a problem, but the take-offs made you wake up feeling as if you were under siege!  

Day two was just sitting about in our tent waiting for the rain to pass, this wasn't just rain as we brits know it, it was serious torrential down pour. Due to the rain and cold temperatures our clothes didn't dry out at all! Luckily the boys had packed a sensible amount of changes, and we were putting the wet clothes on in the porch before going outside. 

Day 3 was the first day of music so it was a bit better, but I think everyone was quite fed up. The stages opened 2 hours late, you know everything in Britain stops for *bad weather*. I think this was some serious bad planning on the organiser's part. The first few bands couldn't get into things with half the stage area closed. John went to see Slash who put on a fantastic show, and we went to see The Prodigy, which were equally as good, but I couldn't really get into them, as I was cemented into the mud!

Day four Martin picked up some norovirus and was unpleasantly unwell, so we had to trudge through the mud with a very pale and unhappy Martin to the welfare tent. They couldn't really help and just asked for a sample from Martin which as he couldn't wash his hands due to being in a field, he didn't bother with! I can't say I blame him. John and I were thankfully okay, and the portable toilets were not too bad, I have seen worse. we all made sure we had seperate drinking bottles, and took great advantage of the on site drinking water taps. We decided then to pack up our tents the next morning and leave on Sunday night after the last band, as we had just had enough and really didn't want to stay an extra night. Metallica headlined and were excellent as usual. The played the Black album in it's entirety, the only bad point of that show, was the drugged up loopy miss dancing in front of me the whole show.

Day 5 was quite nice and the mud which was up to our knees had started to dry out, which was slightly harder to wade through. I don't have any pictures but you can imagine. I am surprised that we all managed to keep our feet dry as I can guess that a few people probably contracted trench foot. The way back to the car which we had now found visual reference points for was quite hard and we did it in two trips again. All that walking! It was 16 miles over five days to and from the car (we went two trips twice) and the stages were a good 3 miles from the camp site, so that was 6 miles for the last three days, through thick mud. I think we walked about 34 miles! We drove through the night after Black Sabbath's show (which was very, very good) and it took us an hour to leave the car park, because some muppet decided to have a crash just outside. (How inconsiderate). It took us 3 hours, which the two of us switching to avoid falling asleep at the wheel and we finally got in at 4 am and just in time for sunrise! I can't say it was an overly bad experience, but it would have been an awful camping holiday without the bands. 

I am not the biggest fan of camping. Although I do love the outdoors. Peculiar.
 

Brussels and Luxembourg. Part 2.

I haven't actually written up the second part of this mainly due to life being a bit hectic and the second half of the holiday being so busy.

I completely forgot that on day 3 we actually went to a musical instruments museum, which was a good few hours. I don't know why I forgot?! It was a really good museum actually, and the instruments were accompanied by headphone jacks that you could plug into to hear a sample of the music made by each instrument.  The only thing that I would say is that the museum wasn't very well maintained and some of the lights were out, and some of the jacks wouldn't work. I also had to work overtime on translating as most of the labels were only in French and Flemish. I can't really complain though as it was really inspirational and really really interesting and as under 25s we got automatic student rate at only 3 euro each!

I wouldn't really write about the evenings in hotels, but I am sure as you continue reading you will know exactly why I am writing about the night of day three.

We were planning on leaving the hotel before 9am to drive the scenic route to Luxembourg city via. Vianden. We had planned the drive and had settled down for an early nights sleep by 10pm. We heard some commotion in the hallway and someone knocking loudly on the door of one of the other hotel rooms. Martin  was annoyed and the guy was still making some noise so we watched some hour long documentary, and then turned off the television after that. They guy was still out there yelling in French, and we heard him say "enough is enough" in English, so we could only assume that he had been locked out of his room by someone else. Half an hour passed, and he was still keeping us awake so Martin, charged out of the door in his cow print pyjamas and nearly ripped the door of the wall told the bloke to shut up. and walked into the room again.

So they guy shut up for maybe half an hour, but he then went and had a cigarette in the damn hallway. We were annoyed as being freaking suffocated and tried to use the ipad to take a video of him under the door! That didn't work and we couldn't exactly march straight past him to reception and complain so I attempted to ring them. They didn't answer. Damn. We heard other people down the hallway complaining to this bloody idiot, and going back to their room. In the end Martin fell asleep by 1am, which was more important as he was going to drive. I remember still being awake at 3am.

Day 4

The following morning as we left our room and went to check out, the bloke was still standing in the corner, looked up at us, and then looked away sheepishly in to the corner. I guess he was ashamed, and so he bloody should be! He was middle aged so he should know better. We complained to reception upon checkout and they just said it was odd, because there should not be anyone in the room next to us. The receptionist did go up to investigate as we were leaving for the car.

The drive to Vianden was pretty good, some nice views. We were a bit annoyed that there was a lack of "Welcome to Luxembourg" signs. I followed on the paper map, so it was pretty easy. We did however nearly end up in Germany due to Martin forgetting to brake for a bend. xD We drove along the German border, and followed the river. The castle at Vianden was pretty easy to find and we stopped of here as planned for a visit to the castle and a break from the car.

I got to speak German for the first time on the the holiday. Weeeee.

The castle was in ruins until it was restored in the 1980's, it has been restored to the point that most of the upstairs rooms, were in the liveable state of the era. So the rooms were decorated and there was music of the era playing in the background. It was so awesome. I kept on landing in my daydream world and therefore walking off. Haha.

There were some epic sets of armour in the museum part, and halberds! check out this guy.

After the castle we didn't walk around the town as the rain was really damn miserable.

We got back in the car and preceded to drive on to the capital Luxembourg.

This part of the drive was quite interesting, as we had to drive on some crappy flyover type thing behind a lorry over the river as they were building some type of hydroelectric dam. Then no less than 20 minutes later we were directed by the Satnav to go on to a motorway that hadn't even been built yet! They were cutting the tunnels through the mountains! Bearing in mind this Satnav was around 7 years old and not updated, that is a bit odd!

Anyway we got into the city and the Novotel was on the Kirchberg Plateau, which had loads of building work and roadworks, so we drove around for an hour looking for the car park, we could se the hotel and not the car park! Frustrating. in the end i ended up asking the parking attendant of the European court. He didn't speak English so I asked in German and he replied in French. Thanks to his help we found the car park very quickly, but ended up parking in the Novotel suite car park instead of the Novotel car park  but they were not bothered.

Our room had a nice view and a bath! yaaaaay! I hate showers that I am not used to.

We walked into Luxembourg centre, which took about 30 minutes, but we had to walk over the pont rouge (massive red bridge) which Martin was not a fan of doing! We wandered around the centre for ages and then walked down to Grund which was the old town that was right at the bottom of the valley. This was really lovely and is apparently a good place for nightlife?! We ended up eating at Quick burger, and waiting 20 mins for our burgers again, and we went to the tourist office to plan the next day. We went for a fairly early night and caught up with emails and blogs etc... as we had had a very busy day.

Day 5

We got up and wandered into the main town. We had pain du chocolat  for breakfast nom! We then went into both sets of Casements, (underground fortresses) and we looked around the Notre dame cathedral and saw (obviously we didn't go in) the burial crypt of the royals of Luxembourg. The cathedral had some art exhibition in it which was quite interesting. I can't remember where I put the card but I will post the web address on a blog when I find it. We wandered some more around the whole city and saw gringotts! Well not really but the bank of Luxembourg which had underground vaults. We had McDonalds and then headed back to the Kirchberg plateau. we wandered over to look at the philharmonic hall, and then found the art museum which we walked past and got some awesome views and pictures. We went past the 3 acorns redoubt museum, which was closed and had a look at the national park type area, ans what looked like a grassy mastaba (step pyramid). We also found ourselves looking at some old fortress ruins. We then headed back to the car, after debating which church was which, that we could see from the top of the step pyramid.

The drive back was unspectacular, and it only got dark as we crossed the French border from Belgium and the roads only got busy as we reached Lille. We did take a few wrong turns, mainly due to the Satnav not knowing the road layout, but luckily we were able get back on the road I would say that we only lost about 15 minutes. We got to Calais quite early and had to wait for quite a while. The crossing was fine, and we spent our time competitively playing angry birds space.

It was pretty damn foggy in Kent, and again unspectacular and we arrived in Hockley with 40 miles left on the tank of petrol. So all is good. Got in the house at around 2 am :D

Trollbyt out!

Pas de mayonnaise! quelques jours à Bruxelles

Day 1:

4 AM Bank holiday Monday: We get up have a rushed breakfast and leave the house for a 2 hour drive to dover in kent to catch the 7:30 ferry to calais. We actually arrived in Dover early enough to catch the 6:40 ferry, hurrah! one hour early! The fery crossing was fine, but unspectacular. I felt sick all car journey, probably due to my eating breakfast, which I don't normally do. I actually felt better on the ferry crossing, despite the fact that I was dreading it as I was already feeling nauseous. I forced myself to eat a few beans and a slice of toast from Martin's plate. We then went upon deck, which helped blow the nausea away hooray! The drive from Calais to Brussells was also unspectacular, although we did enjoy the road signs and scary, aggressive belgian driving.

Our hotel (Best western) was easy enough to find, our satnav decided to work with about 10 miles to go! I forgot to mention earlier that our satnav was a complete upstart. It's a pretty good jobthat we already knew the route... mostly. We already knew we were right beside the national stadium, and it turns out that we can actually see one of Brussels' best attractions from our hotel window The Atomium.

We parked up in the free street parking immediately outside the hotel, and we had got here at 11AMish. We were able to check in straight away, so we dumped our bags in the hotel room and went out to Mini Europe and The Atomium. We got grabbed by a giant orange tortoise, and had to pose for a picture. After that we took a good wander around the Mini Europe exhibition, which was very good, but it started to rain midway through... this rain was set to continue... and continue... After Mini Europe we headed to The Atomium, which was quite interesting, and there was an exhibition on architectural concrete. TERASBETONI. Just had to throw that in there. it also looked from the inside like a space station of some kind. DEATHSTAR :-3 At the top most "museum ball" they told us that the atomium was only meant to last for two months after the Expo in the 50's, vote of confidence right there. After wandering around the museum areas, and going down an escalator with some funky lighting, w then had to queue for 30 mins to get the lift, 102m up to the viewing platform and resturant area. The resturant wouldn't let us in *grumble* but we got a decent view of brussels, it would have been better if not for the rain. After that, we had  bit more of a wander in the rain, and managed to find a resturant, and after trying to recover my knowledge of the French language from my brain vaults, managed to get a very nice dinner. We then retired to the hotel and watched whacky French language cartoons, because the weather was rather British.


Day 2:

Unbeknownst to us the entire public transport service was disrupted by strikes, due to a colleague being killed on Saturday. We got one of the buses running the skeleton service, and then went on to wander around Brussels center... in the rain. We found the Mannekin Pis statue/fountain near one of the Tintin tour murals (the only one we saw). The Mannekin, was surrounded by hundreds of Japanese tourists, seriously they must come by the truckload! We got yelled at by a Belgian man for some reason? haha. We found a shopping mall by accident, and ate there which was rather nice. After this we walked towards gare du nord, but missed the station, and ended up in Algeria. Well not quite but it very much felt like mini Algeria. After a brief stint here, we found our way back to gare du nord, and a kind Belgian man pointed us back to the main city centre. We did a bit of the touristy thing and some shopping, becaus ethe rain was getting us down a bit. We found our way to Dellerium, a very nice bar. In Dellerium, they had pink elephants on the ceiling, and a very drunk Japanese girl, who proved to be the highlight of our daily entertainment. In Dellerium I managed to drink 500ml of beer without feeling like dying from awful tastes. I tried the Kreik (cherry) and Framboise (raspberry) and Martin tried various Belgian beers. We the decided to pop in the tourist info office to get a decent map, as the one we had was absolutely rubbish. We then got the bus back home, which took 1 hour to travel 100m, and 2 hours to get home which took only about 30mins on the way into town.

Day 3:

Today the metro was running hooray! The first glimmers of sunlight! There were still disruptions but we managed to get about much easier toda, and visit many more places. We visited the botanical gardens on the way out and then we went to the European parliament buildings, and went around the visitors centre which was jam packed with audio guide activities, we coud have spent all day in there, in fact I think we spent two hours in there and we skipped half of the info out. After this we wandered towards the palace, and then to the cathedral. After this we wandered back towards the grand place, and had a drink in a bar, the ate in a place called quick burger, which proved to be really damn slow. This is where the title of this entry comes from, why the hell to they put mayonaisse on everything. I can eat it, but I tend to feel rather ill afterwards. Pas de mayonaisse s'il vous plait! I still haven't had Belgian waffles though, I hope to fit that in before Luxembourg tomorrow.

Sorry if my typing is terrible, my laptop keyboard is awful.

Freedom to do as I please!

Ahhh tomorrow is a week since our wedding! It's gone so fast! I have been awful at working on my clothing business www.plutoniumforge.com in recent months, but now the wedding is out of the way I can get cracking.

So today my first port of call was to answer loads of unanswered emails from suppliers, well I say loads ( I mean like 10). I then went on begin restyling my website, I spent all day pretty much on the first page, so hopefully the time and effort will pay off! I hope to have new stock and a new and improved website up and running in two weeks.

Why today? Well today is the first day that my energy levels have been good enough since the wedding to do anything more than mope about. Also it's the first of the month, and I love nothing more than turning over a new leaf on the first day of a month!

So March 2012 is set to be quite exciting! I have also started a new food blog, and I hope to start blogging more frequently in general. So here's to making my first whole month as a married woman, a successful one.

Presumed consent -Organ Donation-

I have been reading a lot recently about discussions in the welsh government about introducing a new law, where, when a person dies then their organs are put up for donation unless they have opted out. If this is introduced in Wales, there is a chance the rest of the UK will follow. I am definitely leaving the UK if presumed consent becomes law. I have no issue with people donation or receiving organs, however, I am against my own organs being harvested, this is mainly because I would not take organs myself. I feel that if the opt out law was passed, then we would have endless lawsuits and cases where an opt out request has been misfiled or lost! Can you imagine?!?!

I would also find it really hard to donate the organs of a loved one as it freaks me out, I just feel that we are artificially prolonging life, it just seems really ... against nature. I mean I am quite against a lot of medical intervention, I should have died as a baby, and I am still annoyed about the way I was brought into the world. (It's not like I asked to be here) I think we as a race have become greedy for life, I have worked with the old, and I think that we should be allowed to slip away gracefully, and not like one of Frankenstein's creations. My views are probably "controversial" but I can not and will not change them. Why should I? The only medicine I really agree with is to improve quality of life, not prolong it. I am going to wait in my cave for the torches and pitchforks....

What I want this year.

Well it's a new year and I have always made myself empty promises every new year recently. This year though, with the days until the wedding falling off the edge, I have realised it's time to really step up and dance with the devil.

It's been five months today, since my foot operation, and I seem to be healing well. I have previously been scared to re-break the bone in my foot, but I need to put that behind me now. With a new foot, comes a new me, I need to exercise more, I was always active, but in recent years it became rather painful to do the normal activities I enjoy, such as walking and running, and more bloody expensive to go swimming. I think I'm the only one with an interest in Hockey, and basketball. and I rarely go ice-skating (My favourite). It all needs to change now and I'm going to start running again and using the kinect to get a little more movement that way.

As well as a fitness goal I have a goal to learn to play the bass guitar I have had for years and step up on my lazy approach to learning languages.

I have decided to keep everyone updated on my progress of my yearly goals, as it is so much better when people expect things of you. You make a better effort for others rather than yourself!

so what do I want to get from this year?

1. I want to be more positive, the wedding planning has installed really really negative feelings to society in me. I want to look on the wedding as a positive step up in my life, It's really I hate being the centre of attention and that has made me resent the whole process. I have decided to write a blog about the wedding and the planning process.
2. I want to find a proper job, I want to work at least 35 hours a week, preferentially in an office in London. However if I do not succeed by July I will look at becoming a midwife.
3. I want to increase my fluency in German, Finnish and Swedish.
4. I want to take more pride in my physical appearance, the last few years I have been feeling a little dumpy and I have shied away from that.
5. I want to grow my business and make myself successful.
6. I want to be able to afford to move home.

This all seems a bit odd to post this on the internet, but as i said before, I feel it will motivate me that people know my intentions and will be watching if I fail. (Which I won't!)