The heading to this post seems completely un-book-related but I’ll tell the story anyway.

This year I changed to a diesel car after a life-time of driving petrol engined cars.  I have been warned so often of the terrible damage that ban be done by putting the wrong fuel into the car that I’ve become quite OCD about filling up the tank, constantly checking that I’ve got the right pump and then pulling the trigger with great trepidation.  I would say that filling up has almost become a time of anxiety – getting it wrong can mean stripping down the engine and its components, with a huge bill at the end.

So (you know where this is going), yesterday found us driving 400 miles through France back to the ferry port at Dieppe.  I made a wrong turn at Rouen because my sat -nav maps are three years out of date and the French are always changing their road systems. Rather than going across the new bridge over the Seine I found myself in the town centre.  One benefit of this was that I saw a really cheap petrol station and thought I’d fill up before returning to Britain where diesel prices are much higher.

St Martin - Ile de Ré

I pulled in at a free pump and got out, selected the diesel pump and put the nozzle into the car filler cap.  For some reason the pump wouldn’t clear from the previous customer and so I put the  fuel line back into the pump and waved to the man in the shop and he came out and  pointed out that I had to put my credit card in first, and he went away again. The instructions on the card machine were all in French and when I entered my PIN number, I got confused about what button to press to get it accepted.  I managed to sort this out and was pleased to see that the previous customer’s amount had now cleared and that the pump was humming away.

I filled up the tank and as I put the nozzle back into the pump I saw to my horror that I’d filled up with unleaded petrol!  I had no idea whatsoever how this had happened. I had been so keen to get the diesel nozzle out earlier it seemed inconceivable that I’d taken the wrong one out now, but there it was in my hand, with a full tank of unleaded petrol now in my tank.  As the reality of what I’d done dawned on me I had a total panic attack – we’ll miss the ferry, how will we get home, the tank has to be drained, our car is full of our stuff.  A nightmare scenario.

My wife calmed me down somehow.  I went into the shop and the young man kindly came out and helped me push the car away from the pump (if I’d started the engine the engine would have needed to be stripped down and rebuilt) so other customers could use it.  We rang the rescue service knowing that we had to be in Dieppe in 3 hours time to catch the ferry – a 45 minute journey, now surely impossible.

A rescue vehicle arrived within about 45 minutes and loaded the car onto the back and drove it and us round to a local garage.  They downed tools and set to helping me out.  It took two hours to drain the tank and put some new diesel in it.  The mechanic started the engine and my sense of relief when it started knew no bounds.  It was now 4:45pm and we were supposed to be in Dieppe ferry terminal at 5.00pm, but I knew from of old that they’d usually let you on late.  I paid the very reasonable bill of €60 and we drove off, fortunately meeting no hold-ups on the road and completing the journey in 39 minutes.  We were last but one car on the ferry and I have never felt to happy to be driving on to the ship and to know that we were nearly home.

For someone who is an obsessive checker of important stuff with a reputation for reliability, it seems almost inconceivable that I could have made this mistake.  I’ve gone over and over it in my mind and can only think that it was the confusion about operating a new type of pump.  Apparently filling up with the wrong fuel is one of the most common reasons for calling out rescue services, but I really don’t do this sort of thing!  The Automobile Association say that “It is estimated that at least 150,000 drivers mis-fuel each year – one every three and a half minutes – generating around 7.5 million litres of contaminated fuel or the equivalent of three Olympic-sized swimming pools”.  So evidently I’m not alone.  I can only hope that eventually the petrol stations designers find a better method of separating diesel from petrol.

Enough of that.  I’ll return to writing about books before too long.

I apologise to all those who’ve commented on my blog over the past three months.  Although I’ve read them all I don’t think I’ll be able now to reply to them so if you don’t mind I’ll start with a clean sheet now and reply to comments from today.

I’m part way through two books and have finished another which is embargoed until the end of January so can’t post any reviews at the moment.  I’m enjoying the new Kindle very much and love the way I can carry around various books and documents with me.

The Kindle PDF convert system is really useful as I’ve been able to load a camera manual on it, and also a few reference documents which I had in this format.  The convert process converts them to Kindle format so you can go to particular locations and add notes etc -  seriously useful.  You can do the same with html files, so if I see a long article online which I want to read later I can just mail it to the Kindle and it appears a minute later all set up for me to read.

As I’ve no book reviews to post at the moment, I ‘ll post this video I made this afternoon of my playing the guitar. I hope you enjoy it.

Why not send it to friends and relatives and see if they can complete it?  If you want to print the quiz you can click here to see it on a single page.  The answers can be found here.

MICHELHAM PRIORY VOLUNTEERS CHRISTMAS QUIZ 2010

1. Where is Father Christmas buried?

2. Many herbs & spices are used in the preparation of Christmas dishes. What is the difference between herbs and spices?

3. If Father Christmas drove his sleigh, without hold-ups, at 20 mph around the M25 how long would it take him to complete 1 circuit?

4. The following lines come from the carols “Ding dong merrily on high” and “Hark the herald angels sing” respectively. What do they mean?
a) “And Io,Io,Io by priest and people sungen”
b) “Jesus our Emanuel”

5. What did “my truelove” give to me on New Years Eve?

6. What was the result of a German church organ breaking down on Christmas Eve in 1818?

7. What is the connection between; Nuts, Christmas and Bastoigne

8. What is the opening line of the Coventry Carol?

9)The Owl & the Pusasycat “dined on mince & slices quince of, which they ate with a runcible spoon.” What is a runcible spoon?

10. What date is Epiphany? What does it commemorate?

11. Why was the Glastonbury Thorn of particular interest at midnight on 5th Jan 1753?

12. A family of 6 sit around an oblong table for Christmas dinner. Father always sits at the top of the table and mother always sits on his right hand side. The four children are then free to sit in any of the other 4 remaining chairs. How many different ways can the family sit around the table?)

13. Why is Christmas Eve (i.e. the evening of Christmas) on 24th & not 25th December?

14. What connects Al Capone, Joan of Arc & Cologne cathedral?

15. In which decade did Dickens publish “A Christmas Carol”?

16. “It is Christmas day
And the cold bare walls are bright
With garlands of green and holly
And the place is a pleasant sight”
Where?

17. Which carol carries the following line in the chorus;-
“Giving due praises to the Lord”
but not in English?

18. What was special about the Queens Christmas speech of 1957?

19. 28th December is “Holy Innocents Day”
(a) What does this commemorate?
(b) What tragedy, immortalised by the poet William McGoonagall, occurred at 7.15p.m.on this day in 1879?

20.A common Christmas Bible reading starts “In the beginning was the word…..”
(a) From which Gospel does it come?
(b) What is the symbol for this evangelist?

A friend had told me to watch out for the products of the St Austell Brewery, and I can heartily recommend their Tribute ale, of which the Good Beer Guide says,

Tribute is a magnificent example of a bronze coloured English bitter, with a rich aroma of biscuity malt and tart citrus fruit from the Willamette hops. Juicy malt, hop resins and tangy fruit coat the tongue, while the finish is long and lingering, with a fine balance between malt, hops and fruit, finally becoming dry and bitter.

I spent some time with the new Gerald Seymour novel The Collaborator and for once I was disappointed with this writer of usually gripping novels. However, Nicholson Baker’s new novel, The Anthologist, has been a wonderfully inspiring read and has resurrected my spasmodic interest in poetry. A full review will follow later this week.

I’ve also been reading two books of last century German short stories – Boys and Murderers by Robert Ungar and The Selected Short Stories of Robert Walser.  Both of these have been strange but engrossing reads and I will review them both together in a single article next week.

I’ve had no Internet connection while I’ve been away and was surprised to find that I didn’t miss it at all.  Probably something to do with being in a remote village by the sea, cut off from the world (except for a giant size flat-screen television equipped with digital channels).  Now I’m home I seem to have spent hours on the PC sorting out photos, answering emails, paying bills and dealing with voluntary work responsibilities.  So, now I’ve done all that, its time to start writing about books again . . .

Padstow (image from Wikimedia Commons)

I am away in Cornwall for a few days and will return to resume reviewing books next week.

I’ve taken Gerald Seymour’s new book, The Collaborator.  I’ve read all Seymour’s books as they come out, ever since Harry’s Game which was published in 1999, and I’ve never been disappointed.

I’ve also taken Dostoyeveky’s Notes from the Underground and The Double in the new Penguin edition translated by Ronald Wilks.

There is no wireless Internet connection where we’re staying and I wrote this post before I left on Friday.  I’m not accepting comments on it as I can’t reply to them for a week or so.

I’ve had a long period of reading a couple of books a week, but recently a few longer novels have been arriving on my doorstep and its not quite so easy to keep up the flow of articles here.  I’ll finish The Water Theatre in the next couple of days but then if I read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and perhaps another Balzac as I intend to then review posts to A Common Reader may dry up for a week or two.

A brave man . . .

Anyway, to get back to our river trip, we were moored up at the end of the day when a boat came towards us carrying a rather unusual passenger on the prow.  Fortunately my camera was suffering from what is known in photography circles as “blown highlights” otherwise I may have had to be more careful about posting the photograph here.   The boat was coming into the outskirts of Reading so we were wondering whether the man would continue his voyage in the same state of undress.