Swins 2010 2011 tour, where are we now?: Saturday 15th January, Roquetas and the bikes are out again.

Feeling much better so decided to try another run into Roquetas town so SWMBO can get her plant pots, got there and it appears that they were a Christmas only thing and are not sold any more, bless her poor soul, she was inconsolable but I was better off by a lot of €'s.

On the way back we stopped off at a beach side café for coffee and tapas, absolutely wonderful. Being a Saturday there were quite a few Spanish out with their kids on the promenade but cycling back under a blue sky with the sun on our backs was blissful. Words cannot convey the inner peace of cycling along a beach with the Mediterranean on your shoulder and that stack of worries you had in the olden days, is not even a wisp of a memory. And then some tosser on a jet ski comes roaring out of nowhere and spoils the whole damn thing.

I (we) spent a lot of money on fancy toys, no, no, not toys, necessities, i.e. a DSLR Olympus camera to name but one, but I must admit that up to now it's been used, if at all, just to point and click. Well tomorrow I'm getting up at the crack of dawn, well slightly before actually, because I want to take some proper sunrise photographs using the tripod etc. and if early enough some 30 second shutter speed star shots. I ventured to ask SWMBO if she would accompany me on such an awe inspiring and spirit fulfilling task, the answer was colourful but of a negative nature.

As a practice I took the camera and lenses out onto the calle next to us to get a shot of a gibbous moon that was visible in the early evening. Although using the tripod and a remote control, using a 20 second exposure was perhaps a little too long and the shots were still a little blurred as I was using a rather large telephoto lens. Up pops Rudy and inquiring in fluent German as to what I was doing and how impressed he was with my “equipment”. A little later that evening after I had put the camera etc. away, Ulrika, Rudy’s wife was coming back from the washing up and Rudy began to tell her about my rather large telephoto, using very inappropriate hand gestures. I don't know if she understood any of it but since then she has been giving me some very furtive looks.

Due to the influx of quite a few English we have been inundated with screeching and warbling sounds of satellite finders with little or no hope of finding said beasts in the sky. Mainly because “they didn't cut the trees back last year” and we are more or less, actually more is the word, surrounded by lots of them. Bill, our France living Brit next door, has a 1.2 M dish and gets lots of channels, about 800 of them, unfortunately they are mainly German, French and Spanish. He is dogged, I will give him that and has spent the last two days trying to get a glimpse of BBC or ITV, but no not a sausage, bugger all, niente, nada, SFA. I am going to have one last go with my “proven to get BBC et al, last year in Roquetas” RoadPro 55cm dish, by tying it to the top of the nearest tree thereby eliminating two birds with one stone, does that make any sense?

Sometimes when you are typing, a word you type just doesn’t look right, the word in particular was “tying”, as in satellite dish to a tree, so I asked Tricia how she would spell “tying” and all I got back was, “Oh....it's going to be one of them nights, is it?” Filth for a brain she has.

Sunday 16^th January 2011.

As you can see from the picture, we all know what day this is. This is just before delivery into main bedroom for SWMBO to start her day off on the right foot, or to rip my head off my shoulders if I don't, easy decision to make actually.

Looks like I've got the flu again, or food poisoning, it's literally a toss up as to which, so it's off eating and drinking for a couple of days and not wondering too far from toilet block #2.

Tried again with the RoadPro 55 this morning, zip.

I have finally, and I mean finally, given up any hope of getting British TV via my “expensive” but small and compact RoadPro dish, tied to a pole as high as it would go, got 75% signal and 75% quality, both rock solid and all I could get was the bloody German channels again. So it's now put away for good unless someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong. Even lent the FTA receiver to Bill next door,so he 'll be squealing and warbling for the next few hours I'll bet, it's almost the same frequency of my tinnitus so it will be driving me nuts if it goes on much longer.

Didn't get up early this morning for the promised photographs as 1. it was overcast at 7am and 2. I really couldn't be arsed anyway.

Reading “Winter Moon” by Dean Koontz (watch how you pronounce that name, mind) and he does go in for the horror bits, a lot, don't know about the food poisoning but you don't need laxatives when you read his stuff.

I am not eating and now I'm very hungry and of course SWMBO is cooking her lunch of vegetable soup, which since she started to add a tin of chopped tomatoes in it, is very nice, before it was just semi edible vegetables floating around in tepid water. So it also now smells nice and did I tell you that I'm hungry? It doesn’t take much and she is not helping at all, to grab a handful of salted nuts and then of course dash to the loo.

She had bought fresh fish from the market and is cooking it tonight along with roasted vegetables so I'm going to give that a go and hope, no booze though.

Watched a few episodes of “The Likely Lads”, brilliant! Took me back to my upbringing in the north east, unfortunately I was the Bob Ferris character and Derek Dooley, my best mate, at the time, and partner in the “Swindools” car repairing racquet, was Terry Collier. The picture is of us in the early days.

"Repairing" a Triumph Spitfire

Swindool, garage

“Swindools” was probably not the best name but we had cards made up and we got by, and made a little money in the process, all the time learning how to take various bits of cars to pieces and put them back together, working mind you, with less and less “spare” bits left over, usually nuts and bolts that did not seem to fit anywhere.

We started off as “Curb Side Motors” or CSM (a driver training firm at the time) as that's where we initially did most of our car repairs, at the curb just outside my mother's council house in Thorney Close, Sunderland. I remember one night it got dark (as it does!) and we ended up fitting a bypass hose on a Mini, with my Mum holding her cigarette lighter to see with because the batteries had run out on our torch, ah...those were the days.

As we grew more proficient, by nicking, sorry “borrowing”, Haynes car books from Halfords and “genning” up on the car we were about to “repair”, we started making less mistakes and some people actually came back again! Mind you when we got a job that Mr Haynes could not help with, we used to go to the nearest scrap yard, find the same car or similar, and do a practice job on that first and/or getting any of the spare parts as we went along.

By this time we had a garage with a pit!

The deal was for our prospective customers to get a quote for the work from a real garage and we would do it for 2/3 the price cash in hand, turn up at their place/work take the car and deliver it back fully repaired. We even started to give receipts and 3 months guarantee on the labour. We were actually doing this, however, because at the tender age of 23 and 22 respectively we were made redundant (my first of, as it turned out, 6 redundancies over the next 35 years) from our Electrician's jobs at Thorns Radio Valves and Tubes. Therefore we were drawing dole and doing the car business as a side affair. Trouble was when we used to turn up once a week, usually in a different car i.e. one that we were fixing, to sign on, we were often given the full “are you sure you're not working?”, swear by almighty God and sign this piece of paper to that effect, procedure. Of course it did not help that our hands and overalls were still covered in grease.

There was this one time when we were repairing Don Clayburn's (A foreman still working at Thorns) Peugeot 504, in his front garden, a type of car we had never even seen before, it had a fan belt that went round corners! It had knackered dual overhead cams (?) which we replaced and the car was again fully serviceable. But during the “repair” as I was screwing off the last main cylinder head bolt and Derek was reading from the relevant section of the Haynes manual as we went along. Derek says “now we need to fit two 2 foot long pieces of 2”x 4”wood braces under the engine”, “Why?” I said, giving the ratchet a final turn. “The engine falls out, that's why, it's held by the cylinder head bolts”, he said, and it did. At other times during this repair, we would see Don coming out with cups of coffee for us and we would start saying, “WTF is this bit? I haven’t a clue where it came from, what it does or how to put it back?” He did get a bit agitated at times, did Don. No real damage but we didn't get paid for months.

It all ended, in tears, after about 18 months when Derek finally found true love, i.e. a girl who would actually go to bed with him, and stopped tuning up to finish the jobs. He left me stranded at some punters house after I delivered a Ford Consul with useless, but now fixed, brakes, about 2 miles out on the borders of Mowbray Park. I never forgave him as I had to get the bus back still filthy in my dirty overalls. Ownership of the 3 ton trolley jack has been hotly contested ever since.

From starting out not really knowing one end of a spanner from the other, we could both, strip engines, gear boxes, rebuild and re-fabricate brakes, suspensions and chassis, electric wiring, weld, spray paint and put everything back in the right order, just, and in the precess amass just about every tool a car mechanic would ever need. Clutch guides, valve grinders, emission gas analyser (yes, we even had a Sun analyser Mk III and a full on Crypton tuner!), imperial and metric tools, and a 3 ton trolley jack, that is still in my garage.

Monday 17^th January 2011.

Now a long awaited Camping Roquetas tour, pictures tell the story.