As I walked home from casting my vote, I felt sad. I live in a solid Labour seat so had no hope of my vote counting. I am used to that. In my life as a voter, I have rarely – under Britain's first-past-the-post system – been on the winning side. The only big win of my democratic life was the vote to leave the EU.

I watched people passing on their way to the polling station and wondered what they were thinking. This is leafy West London. By any logic familiar to the minority of us who live here who were born in this country, my neighbours are not voting Labour from self-interest. Perhaps I should be ashamed to know them so poorly as to have no idea what drives their choice. I am certainly not ashamed not to know the hundreds of them who celebrated on our local streets last October 7th.

credit: Evening Standard | click to enlarge

It looks like Labour will command a majority of about 160 seats in the House of Commons on the basis of a national vote in England & Wales that is down on last time. They've won no votes from the Conservatives - only from the SNP in Scotland.

They have achieved their majority without disclosing what they actually intend to do with it. The Conservative Party has lost the support of its voters so comprehensively that all Labour had to do was sit quietly and wait.

As an experienced older voter, that's not really a problem to me. I know what Labour will do from a lifetime of bitter experience. Their ideology is envy and their policy is armed robbery. They'll waste money, they'll attack and impede the productive, they'll raise taxes, they'll diminish liberty and they'll subsidise (and therefore encourage) failure.

Labour always leaves both society and the economy worse than it finds them so I know the final decade of my life will be poorer and less pleasant than it would have been. I won't be alone in that. Life will be poorer and less pleasant for Labour voters too, unless they are on the state's payroll.

Labour did not deserve to win this election, but the Conservatives richly deserved to lose it. Labour is the accidental beneficiary of the Tories' national vote losses to Reform UK. The Conservatives comprehensively betrayed their principles over the last fourteen years and have been duly punished by the voters they arrogantly thought of as their own. The one thing they did that "their" people wanted was done with obvious reluctance and under pressure from Reform under its former name of the Brexit Party. They should feel profoundly ashamed for delivering us into the hands of scoundrels. They're to blame for what will follow as Britain lurches left just as the rest of the free world turns right.

Are there any signs of hope in today's results? Perhaps. The Overton Window has moved so far left in my lifetime that the entire national discourse now fits within the policies of the Labour Party when I was young. The Reform Party's vote share suggests this is unjustified. Most people in Britain are some kind of small-c conservative. Most of the time they're not just disregarded by the Establishment, they're sneered at and denounced. That's not going to change anytime soon as the political wing of the public sector unions takes office, but Reform has the chance to give them a voice in Parliament for the first time in decades. Farage is a principled conservative and a skilled orator and I confidently predict he will make some of the most listened-to speeches in the coming Parliament.

I don't yet see any sign yet of the Conservatives understanding what's happened. There must be hope that in the weeks and months ahead, they will work out that Labour only won votes in Scotland from the hopelessly incompetent SNP. In England their vote is unchanged. In Wales, where people have a Labour government, it went down. If the Conservative Party is to survive it needs to win votes back from the right. There are none to be had from the left. 

As I type this, I'm listening to Ed Miliband promising to prove to a disillusioned electorate that Government can do good. That's Labour finally making a concrete promise and it's one it can't possibly deliver. Government is a necessary evil, even when confined to reasonable bounds. Our government burst those bounds decades ago and Labour is not the Party to change that. The evils of government can therefore be expected to grow and there'll be no-one but Labour to blame.

Young voters who don't know Labour are about to learn some very painful lessons that will contradict the propaganda they heard in the course of their education. I place my hope in our young people. They've had a bad deal economically and they're about to get a worse one. If they are shaped by their experiences, rather than by their education, there's always hope.

Why the French are so pessimistic | The Spectator.

The most striking thing is the skilled and marvellous way France maintains the public realm. From pavements to lighting, to high streets and motorways and serious infrastructure, France gleams. Frankly, given the choice, I’d rather live in a French roundabout than the average redbrick Barratt Home new-build, with its three-inch-wide windows. The former, the French roundabout, is likely to be prettier, and better designed, and it’s guaranteed to have superior stonework.

Just as I noted here during my recent road trip!

French taxes are as high as ours, but more of them get spent on things French people need. Their elections are showing however, that good infrastructure, housing and lifestyle are not enough. The French are not becoming politically more extreme in search of a better material life. They are doing it to ditch a treacherous establishment that does not respect them. The Énarques have strutted and preened long enough, while filling France's cities with enemies who openly despise her in order to prop up their state-sponsored Ponzi scheme.

We all care (pause here for leftists to call us racist) about our culture and our way of life and want to see it preserved. In the final analysis we will all – even the relatively pampered French - rise up and fight for it. The French people are saying "non!" at the moment and I wish them luck. Vive la France!

As I recently watched Tucker Carlson tell an Australian journalist,

Happy people have children and a functioning economy allows them to do that.

Rather than import new citizens to prop up the numbers, perhaps our governments should try to make it so young people can both afford to have children and believe enough in the future to want to? If, for example, housing costs and high taxes mean it mostly takes two incomes for young people to afford a home, it's hard to sacrifice some or all of an income to have a child. Importing low-income households while restricting housing supply with planning laws, will never make that easier. So maybe let's not, eh?

Sadly the betrayal of everything they should hold dear by the so-called "Conservative" Party is about to give Labour a five to ten year untrammelled chance to build a massive demonstration – a sort of Leftist theme park – of every vice and folly that has been dragging down the West for decades. I am afraid we're going to be late to your party, mes amis. Do your best without us for now.

When our time comes, however, watch out! By the time Labour has further impoverished us while robbing us blind, denigrating our way of life, rubbishing our values, castrating and mastectomising our healthy children and rewriting our history to make us the world's monsters, we'll be ready.

This is not what I personally want, of course. I'd love a thoughtful national review of the scale and role of the state followed by a slow, gentle move towards liberty. My whole ethic is based on the non-aggression principle, and I despise social division and violence. However it's clear our Deep State parasites will no more remove their blood-sucking proboscises than will France's without weaponising some version of Le Pen against them. The Left's culture wars also dangerously shift focus from rational issues to defending our way of life. Resisting that is more obviously a task for a Le Pen or (God help us) worse than an economics professor like Javier Milei in Argentina.

The Leftist shit-show and inevitable economic car crash we're facing without even an adequate Opposition to resist, makes it sadly more likely that when our Le Pen materialises, she is likely to make cuddly old Nigel Farage seem milquetoast.

As the chairman of my university Conservatives in England, I led my members on a march to legalise homosexuality in Scotland and Northern Ireland. That dates me. The law was not changed for Scotland until 1980, or for Northern Ireland until 1982. It was of course already legal in England & Wales where the law changed in 1967. I’m old but not that old.

We marched neither for self interest nor self promotion. There was no social benefit for us — indeed we were made most unwelcome by leftists on the march, because we didn’t fit their narrative. Already in the 1970s, among student politicians, no one gave a damn about the “content of your character” or even the correctness of your policies if you were not of the Left. 

We were small state, low tax Conservatives. The national party would shortly thereafter close down the Federation of Conservative Students to which we belonged for advocating the legalisation of drugs, for example. We wanted Liberty to reign and people to make their own choices wherever possible — and express them mostly through the economic democracy of markets.

So my rationale for leading my members that day was not to win homosexual votes,  nor to feel cool for being an ally. Their sexual urges were as icky to me as mine were, I assumed, to them but they were of just as little concern as they were of interest.

My objective that long-ago day was to reduce the number of unnecessary laws. What consenting adults did to each other in bed was (like all other aspects of our private lives) none of the state’s damn business. If, as they liked to sing back then, homosexuals were “glad to be gay”, we were glad for them. The “crime” was victimless so should never have been a crime at all.

The legal reform we sought was an excellent one, not least because it was (unlike much legislation since, which actively and anti-democratically seeks to shape thought) driven by changing attitudes. Few people cared if their neighbour was gay as long as he or she didn’t “do it in the street and frighten the horses”. The law opened gays to abuse and blackmail. It did much harm and no good. It was clearly better to restore some Liberty and let people be. 

Since then my only involvement with the gay rights movement has been to be delayed in traffic by a “Pride” march on a visit to New York City once. If I’ve thought about it at all, it’s been to worry that rights specific to particular groups are dangerously divisive insofar as they undermine the key concept of equality before the law. I’ve advised gay people professionally, worked alongside them and employed a fair few of them without ever thinking about their sexuality. Why would I?

So why am I thinking about them now? Firstly because they are insisting upon it. I’m no more proud to be straight than I am to be tall or white. It’s just one fact among many. Yet activist gays insist that not only are they proud to be what they are, but that I should be proud for them too. That’s frankly nuts.

The Pride march in NYC that once prevented me getting to lunch as quickly as I would have liked has become a global festival that lasts a bloody month. Gays literally want us to celebrate them more than we celebrate our great inventors, poets or the warriors who died for our freedoms. How can that be a good look in PR terms? Frankly, if you think your sexuality is thirty times more worthy of celebration than Shakespeare’s genius, you are off your tastelessly-painted trolley.

Secondly, they're using their bully pulpit unwisely. LGB, a standard TLA (three letter acronym) is getting perilously close to consuming the entire alphabet. The minute a plus sign was added, I wondered why they don’t just settle for G+ and save some trees. 

By adding more and more letters to that alphabet soup and insisting not on a general human right to be harmlessly different, but on category-specific rights for ever smaller and wackier groups, the movement has weakened the consensus that drove legalisation all those years ago. We were with you (or at least benignly indifferent to you) until you embraced people waving their dicks in our faces while insisting they’re women. Or until you advocated life-changing surgeries for confused minors (more than most of whom were on track to be happily gay).

What were you thinking?

The sloppy “born that way” arguments deployed to support that excellent reform back in the day are being stolen and abused. You ignored the risk of reductio ad absurdam until it morphed into reductio ad fastidium. 

Are you looking for trouble? Did you learn nothing from the damaging attempts of the Paedophile Information Exchange (supported by Harriet Harman in her stupid youth) to ride on the coattails of gay rights back in the day?

To try to answer my own question I attended an online Pride Month seminar yesterday. It was not pretty. The three presenters were variously queer. One was — of course — transgender. I knew more history of the gay rights movement than they did. They spoke of decades as if they were aeons and words as if they were cannons. They were wedded (in complete ignorance of the struggles of their pre-legalisation brothers and sisters) to a sense of oppression. They saw no logical conflict between despising heteronormativity and bemoaning how much unhappier and more suicidal they were because they were outside that norm.  

Rather than being glad to be gay and celebrating the world of opportunity opened to them by their oppressed predecessors, they made it clear they could never be happy until everyone else approved of them. They wanted us all to learn the minutiae of their kinks and waste great chunks of our lives proving the depth of our useless knowledge. They want us to respond to them in total sensitivity to a sense of self that one of them said varied from day to day according to his/her/its “vibe”.

These are luxury beliefs no society is rich enough to afford.

If you want to be happy, accept yourself. Most people don’t know or care about you anyway. If you try to force them to look at you and then tell them you can only be happy if they approve of you, you are “cruising for a bruising”.  

It is a recipe for lifelong misery. Pack it in. 

This (republished from four years ago) article from The Cato Institute set me thinking. I was happy to be introduced to a word in ancient Sumerian — ama-gi.

This is the way the concept of freedom was first expressed in writing. Interestingly it connoted (amongst other things) release from slavery, which shows how deep rooted that concept is — despite charlatans attempting to characterise it as the vice of a particular modern race. 

Every step away from Liberty is a step towards slavery. Working most of each year to pay taxes for example, is a kind of time share slavery.  The slave masters here are not just the government enforcers but all those who say, as Lincoln the great Liberator put it

You toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it.

To work for government or otherwise live on its stolen bounty is — morally — to enslave your fellows. It should be as repugnant as working for a gangster. Anyone attracted to it as a means to make a living will be at best naive and at worst a moral degenerate.

Even if you don’t live on money taken by force from fellow citizens you need to consider the morality of your choices if — every time the conduct of your fellow humans offends you — you call on the state to constrain them.

A good friend of mine has a habit of leaping from a valid moral position to seeking its enforcement by “society”. That can of course be a thing. The most complicated technology we use every day — our language — was developed freely by society without any enforcement mechanism. It’s one of the best examples of spontaneous order. 

But that’s not what he (or other would-be society enhancers) means. In practice, he means enforcement by government. The very idea that the crooked timber of mankind can be shaped into something beautiful by the worst of us; people attracted to living as parasites on us while bossing us about is naive, given all the history on the subject. It would be funny if it were not so lethally wrong.

I am happy that Americans celebrate Juneteenth. Slavery is the absence of Liberty and therefore wrong. I just wish we could learn to celebrate — and trust — Liberty itself. 

My journey got off to a bad start when a group of us were given the wrong directions to our section of the car deck on our ship. Speranza was right at the front of deck 4 and my late arrival held people up. How embarrassing,

The drive from Plymouth to London  can be summed up by this screenshot of Speranza's trip computer. Over five hours to cover less than 250 miles is a disgrace. My average speed was 40 by the time I made it to the M4, after encountering endless delays. It was stop/start driving all the time on the A roads from Plymouth and the M5. I managed to improve my average on the M4, despite a fair amount of stop/start and many miles of average speed monitored road works (with not a single worker visible at any point). 

The final run back home on UK soil is often the worst part of my continental jaunts, because our roads are so depressingly bad and overloaded by comparison with those of our continental neighbours. We used to have the excuse that we paid less tax than them. That's simply no longer true. Is it because their engineering skills or industriousness are superior? Perhaps so in Germany, but their roads aren't as good as France's. In my view it's entirely because of the ideological capture of our public services.

Whereas we pay public servants to be just that – servants – they decline these days to serve us. Rather than do a good job of public infrastructure works and their maintenance – a sort of blue collar, essential job in the national enterprise – they prefer to be our HR Department. They cajole, they threaten and above all they try to shape our thoughts and behaviours into conformity with their own.

They're neither rewarded for pleasing us nor fired for failing us. Their employment arrangements are Soviet in that sense. Unfortunately if you want the Soviet apparatchiks' opportunities for idleness, irresponsibility and superior benefits to the productive proles, you also need the Soviet discipline of the gulag and the firing squad – and ours don't have that. 

That said,  Speranza is back in her parking spot having brought me safely home. I thoroughly enjoyed my little adventure – even some of the unforeseen parts. I learned a lot about myself and at least one of my friends and I will certainly always remember where I was when I learned I am going to be a granddad! My final Track My Tour map (from which the above is a screen shot) is here. 

Without the late Mrs P. to edit me, I worry that I may over-share. If so, I am sorry, I hope that, despite that, you enjoyed riding along in imagination. Thank you.

If it were not for my worrying about Speranza’s wellbeing I might have enjoyed my Santander hotel. The bed was comfy, the shower was so good I’m thinking of having my own restyled to match it and the air conditioning eventually worked.

They also provided a nice breakfast though such service as there was, was as surly in English as it was elaborately polite in Spanish. For a tourism-driven economy, I can’t help feeling that Spain hasn’t yet raised the art of the insincere welcome to French standards.

I delayed checkout to the last moment as the ferry port was less than a mile away and I didn’t want to toast in the sun too long. I arrived two hours before the last check-in and sat patiently in the bright sun with the roof down, apart from a break for lunch in the cheap and cheery port café.

A good 30% of waiting vehicles were madly uneconomical and anti-environmental RVs and caravans. I just don’t understand why anyone would travel in a flashy gypsy van when the art of the hotelier is so widely (if variedly) practised in these parts. I’m pretty sure they’d get quite a few four star nights at least for the annual capital depreciation and excess fuel costs of their fugly, view-obstructing trucks.

You may think I have no moral ground to stand on with my 4.2 litre V8 but Speranza is a delicate fairy among such dinosaurs and most Ferraris never make it to landfill so her embodied energy (an important element of the lifetime consumption of any artefact) will likely never be wasted. Also her fuel consumption, at about 24mpg, is the same as my first car, which had a 1.5 litre BMC B-series engine and could barely do 60mph downhill with a following wind. Science has made advances in this field. That first car is still running however. My late father managed to restore it enough to make it into a lasting classic and it's in the hands of a Dutch collector and still running. So that embodied energy was never wasted either!

I’m embarrassed to admit that it was only during the boarding process that I realised the ferry docks not in Portsmouth, but in Plymouth. So tomorrow’s journey on ill-maintained British roads will be about twice as long as I thought. Entirely my mistake. It means I’ll get to drive on the only British road I had anything to do with building, when I was briefly seconded as a boy lawyer to one of Mrs Thatcher's development corporations intent on urban regeneration. It’s had plenty of time to degenerate to Britain's pathetic standards since then. If only our deep state apparatchiks were as interested in shaping our infrastructure as they are in shaping our thoughts, eh?

The voyage was uneventful enough. I spent the evening reading and watching Netflix. The onboard wifi was expensive and adequate, thought slower than I'm used to these days. The big disappointment was the sleeper seat, which did not recline and was uncomfortable. I had to draw on my experience of rail commuting and business flying to get some sleep. To my surprise I got an uninterrupted eight hours, though I woke feeling a little achey. 

All I have to deal with now is the drive from Devon. My Track My Tour map has been updated here. 

Breakfast in Bilbao was a noisy affair. Out on the hotel terrace, enjoying the cool air and views of the river, my ears were assailed by the horns of cars driving up and down the opposite bank with red and white balloons. I know those are the colours of Atletico Bilbao but their last match was the day I set out last month. Whether it was a political protest or a wedding I have no idea. It didn’t seem to attract any policing and passers-by on the street paid it no attention, so I suspect it’s just some tradition I don’t know about. 

Bilbao from my breakfast terrace

I thoroughly enjoyed the short drive to Santander. The Spanish motorways I've experienced have lower speed limits, but are well-surfaced and more curvy than those of the other countries on the tour. My roof was down the whole way. The sunshine was pleasant and the temperature was perfect. The drive inside the city to find the hotel however, was unpleasant down narrow teeming streets. A key one was closed for road works and my sat nav kept bringing me back to the amused chaps working there, who may have learned quite a bit of less polite English vocabulary as a result. Eventually I found a place to pull in and work out a different route, targeting the public car park, which the Santander hotel informed me at the last moment was where I should park. 

I’m not really sure why I booked an hotel in Santander anyway. My ferry doesn’t leave until 4pm tomorrow and the port is a short enough drive from Bilbao. I checked and I could have extended my stay in the very nice hotel there, but I would be charged for the Santander hotel anyway so decided it was too late to change.

I wished I'd let them keep their money when I finally reached the place. I might have guessed from the tone of the imperfectly informative last minute (after it was too late to cancel without 100% penalty) email, which finally confessed that the hotel has no parking of its own. The sneery words "should you have chosen to come to Santander by car" should have warned me I wouldn't feel at home. Do they think their guests have teleports?

I fixed their Booking.com info for them

I am scrupulous about secure parking on my road trips. It's not that I care more about Speranza's safety than my own, but I don't care very much less. The grim public car park they'd suggested had one space free. When I neatly slotted Speranza into it, there was no way for me to get out – even if I were Hollywood-slender. This was a place for SEATs their owners care less about than their least favourite T-shirts. I had no choice but to reverse out and circle again. I got lucky and another car pulled out. By reversing in and parking millimetres from the passenger side of the neighbouring LHD car, I managed to leave just enough room to open Speranza's long door and squeeze out. The LHD car on my driver's side had gone in forward, so whatever problems he will have getting in are of his own making.

The hotel's snooty email had warned me there were two entrances. It hadn't told me that only one of them had a sign on it. Actually, that's not quite true. The entrance I arrived at did have a sign on it - for a completely different business. After wandering up and down the square for a while, asking nice Spaniards for directions (none of them had heard of it), I called the hotel and someone emerged to lead me in. I rubbed her up the wrong way by pointing out the misleading signage. She told me that there was "no problem" and that they'd sent me a helpful email, which I clearly hadn't read. Judgemental commentary on the intelligence, or diligence, of a paying customer is pretty poor marketing, even in these less polite times. 

It's an hotel with ideas above its station, run strictly by stern ladies of a certain age. No checking if the room was ready– just a curt "check in is at 3pm, can we hold your bag for you?" Babička would have gone to town on them, but I elected for peace and quiet. Even I was tempted to go babistic when, after lunch at a nearby restaurant, I was finally admitted to my room. It has a view of other rooms with no views. The curtains were drawn to prevent heat from the atrium making it even more unpleasant and it took a while for turning on the air-conditioning to make a difference.

Booking.com rates it as "fabulous" and among the "top picks for solo travellers". The room is clean, the bathroom is excellent, the wifi works and I don't have to deal with the harridan until I check out tomorrow so I'll forgive myself the error. Gentle reader if you like public transport or your mum was a bit fierce with you when you were growing up, you might like the Soho Boutique Palacio de Pombo. As for me, I hate public transport and my mum is lovely. 

My Track my Tour map is updated here. 

I rose at a sensible hour; showered, dressed and loaded the car. My remote room left me out of the way of early-morning childcare so Babička's grandchildren were up, fed and dressed by I appeared. Young sir remembered my name from yesterday and politely asked if he could drive Speranza. I led him by the hand and put him in the driver's seat where he looked very much at home while Babička took photos of him turning the wheel and pushing all the buttons. Today's childhoods are so well documented! He is probably photographed more per week than I was to age 18! Unlike his grandmother, he was suitably impressed with Speranza and offered no irritating observations about Man's greatest invention just being for "getting from A to B." I think he and I are destined to be friends. 

While saying goodbye to his Mum and other grandma, I asked if I could hold his little sister. She looked sensibly cautious as I took her in my arms, but was soon reassured. She rewarded my one-sided conversation (the late Mrs P. abhorred baby talk and insisted our children were spoken to in real words arranged into sentences) with friendly smiles. Given how long human children are dependant, the more big scary-looking guys they have in their friendship group, the better. I personally think they know that and that's why they usually like me. I am a gentle soul, but given my height and weight, I look like I might do serious damage to any threats and children find that subconsciously reassuring. 

Babička took this rather poignant picture of me disappearing off into the distance with Speranza's roof down. It remained down for most of the way to Bilbao, where I am staying tonight, though I did have to put it up due to heavy rain at one point. I just pulled into a truck stop and she did her 14 second party trick of becoming a coupé again. The weather had cleared by today's single refuelling stop though, so the roof was down again on the final sunny approach.

My hotel —  opposite the Guggenheim – has underground parking accessed by lift. She barely fitted in (her rear end is quite wide) but by folding in the wing mirrors I just managed. The lift was so smooth I thought it wasn't working and was frantically pushing the button the whole time. Considerately, the hotel had installed control buttons on both sides so her being RHD wasn't a problem for once. Since I set up telepeage accounts years ago for the French and Spanish motorways, actually it's rarely a problem now. 

As for today's drive, Speranza was in fine form and the air-conditioning was not an issue with her roof down, My first 100km+ were on country roads. It took ages to reach an autoroute but I still averaged a good speed. The country roads gave me a sweet Ferrari moment – an overtake no lesser car could manage. Ten cars had formed a tail behind a slow moving truck on a winding road in Armagnac. None of them could pass, even though they were sitting on the correct side to have visibility for an overtake. I spotted an upcoming straight on the navigation map that was preceded by a right hand bend that gave me the visibility. The way was clear and before any other driver could take the chance, I roared past the entire convoy in one go. I couldn't hear the oh la la's over the V8 roar of course, but I know they were uttered. That moment will account for the trip computer's recorded maximum speed for the day. 

For the rest of the ride I broadly complied with speed limits - keeping up with local traffic. I was in no rush and I liked watching the French and Spanish countryside flash by with the sun on my forehead, the wind in my baseball cap and Speranza's V8 in my ears. I didn't turn my music on at all.

I had hoped to visit the Guggenheim and arrived in plenty of time to do so, but my mum has received a nasty letter from her county council about the fencing of some leased fishing land held in my late dad's trust. So I shall use the hotel's excellent wifi connection to attend to that instead. Ordinary life is intruding it seems, even before life on the road has quite ended.

I shall transition back to my old intermittent fasting breakfast/lunch regime today by having only the one (rather banal) meal I had at today's petrol station.

My Track My Tour map is updated here.

This trip came about because Babička told me her plans to visit Czechia for an arts course and then rendezvous with her daughter in Aquitaine to meet her new granddaughter.

I was looking for a road trip to celebrate passing 100,000 miles in Speranza. This is sadly not something that happens to most Ferraris. They are far too often doomed to live unfulfilled lives as trophies. I resolved when I purchased mine to use her as designed. She's a grand tourer and has done many thousands of miles of grand tours - not least the great American road trip of 2013, which was 14,500 miles through the Lower 48 states. 

Enzo Ferrari was famously contemptuous of those who bought his cars for any other purpose than racing them. I am no racing driver but I thought il Commendatore’s shade might smile on me if I bought a GT and actually toured her. 

So in this spirit I offered to drive Babička to Prague and beyond. Plans changed when she had to fly to Prague to take care of her sick mother. We agreed to meet and continue from there. Either way, our mission was therefore to introduce Babička (grandmother) to vnučka (granddaughter) by mean of my motorové vozidlo (motor vehicle).  Today was that day.

Vnučka and her nukefam landed at Bergerac airport and were with us by late afternoon. I introduced myself to Vnučka's two year old big brother, of whom I have heard a lot in the last few days. He shook my hand politely and then was off to play with the new toy ride-on Bentley his grandparents had bought him, complete with personal number plate spelling his name. My kind of people!

I took a lot of pleasure watching the two grandmothers meet their new granddaughter and noted the care with which they included their grandson in their attentions so he didn’t feel left out.

I stayed out of the way, folded my laundry, packed and then read The Spectator as the ancient home was taken over for the children. I pondered a little what it will be like to meet my own grandchild later this year. I can’t imagine it will be anything but great. I like children and usually, once they get used to me, they like me back. I’m intimidating on first contact but once they know I’m on their side, I seem also to be reassuring.

Once the children were in their beds the adults ate, drank and chatted. In the morning I must say goodbye to all this and to my travel companion Babička, who was still trying to tell me over dinner that Speranza is just a means of getting from A to B. The poetry of fine engineering is entirely lost on her alas and the loss is entirely hers. She’s still my friend, heretic though she is, and I pity rather than condemn her! 

Today (Sunday) we ventured to the Dordogne to visit a favourite lunch spot of Babička and her late husband. It is a pub associated with an artisan brewery run by two Essex refugees from Brexit (according to the Daily Mail). The brewery is called Biere de la Bastide and the pub is as un-French as could be conceived.

To the accompaniment of the songs of a fully-mulleted Rod Stewart wannabe, I had a blue cheese burger and fries, before setting out to photograph one of France's most beautiful villages, a bastide town called Monpazier built by Edward I (Longshanks). Ted 1er may have been the Hammer of the Scots but it seems he was a benefactor to French architecture.

There's an hotel in the village named in honour of him. He's one of history's most vicious (if effective) monarchs, who defenestrated his son's lover and eviscerated William Wallace among many other acts of violence. I guess it goes to prove that there's someone other than his mum to love every man.

More of my photographs of the village are here if you are interested. I am particularly happy with this 360º panorama I made of the medieval market square from ten original photos stitched together in Adobe Lightroom.

The other highlight of my day was taking Speranza for a much-needed wash at an automated facility near where I am staying.

As is inevitable in a high-wage regulated employment market, where virtually no-one can be fired for underperformance, the French are becoming specialists in automation.

The task was performed by a robot haute pression sans contact with detergents and high powered jets.

I just had to park, stand clear, select my program and pay by credit card.

It did an excellent job done without dodgy brushes touching her precious paintwork.

I scrounged a couple of euros from Babička to pay for a vacuum cleaner that wouldn't accept my credit card and the job was done. She was ready once more respectably to represent her illustrious brand – consistently ranked the world's strongest – on our journey home.