MEDIA CENTRE - Off The Wall

Phil’s Travels – Nottingham, England (06.25)

Phil’s Travels – Nottingham, England (06.25)

…continuation.

No sign of malaria the day following my return from Cameroon and I walked to Paddington to collect our hire car for 10.00 am on the morning of the hottest day of the year so far. I was given a Citroen C4. It looked pretty good, until I got inside and started to use it in earnest.

Citroen are well known for being quirky and the one-stalked, virtually square steering wheel was testament to that quirkiness still prevailing. However, the rest of the cabin was madder than a box of claustrophobic frogs. The information screens were black-on-black and I could not see a thing with sunglasses on. The dials were tiny. The heads-up display was not viewable (I was too tall) and created a distracting shadow on the windscreen itself. The cup holder was too narrow and squeezed any takeaway cup to the point of flipping off the lids and squishing the drink to spilling. The climate controller did not show the temperature nor the intensity, and the whole system went into hurricane mode when the AC button was pressed. The indicator noise was too quiet and impossible to hear at any material speed. No view out of the rearview mirror.

And the issues did not end there. The boot lid did not close properly and the car would not lock (it took me a while to figure out why the darn thing did not want to lock at the service station). The boot was puny (especially for an SUV).

But the most bonkers and dangerous feature of this massively flawed vehicle was the footrest next to the clutch pedal. They were so close that you needed the precision of a ballerina on point to operate the clutch. In moments of urgency, I kept hitting the footrest and not depressing the clutch, then overcompensating and hitting my other foot trying to press the brake pedal. Altogether a very dangerous footwell.

On the other hand, the engine was smooth and the suspension smoother.

There was lots of northbound traffic, especially trucks and motorway maintenance vehicles. We suffered many stop-starts and 40mph restrictions. Despite the chunky traffic we made it just in time for my third WC visit of the day. I suspect in may have been a combination of pent-up Cameroon meals, Brussels Airlines beef stew and yesterday’s hotel inspection pepper steak. Or maybe it was malaria. We will never know.

We emptied the dorm room in less than an hour and filled the C4 to bursting. Thank goodness it had a back seat to compensate for the puny boot (capacity for two suitcases only). It lacked height, depth and girth. In fact, the whole C4 was not much taller than the Polo parked next to it. The Skoda Octavia opposite took a whole lot more uni stuff that our puny C4.

The university itself was very quiet. A clutch of young lady students sunbathing on the lawn nearby was the only sign of life (aside from the chap stuffing his Octavia). Not surprising really. I would have been in the south of France by now in my uni years.

As we had made such an efficient job of packing up, we took a quick drive to Wayne Manor (aka Wollaton Hall). We parked up, walked through the parkland, up the hill, dodging the deer poo en route, to the Hall’s front door. Batman did not appear to be home. Wollaton is an Elizabethan manor house from the 1580’s and was Bruce Wayne’s home in the third of the Batman trilogies (Mentmore towers having starred in the first two and being a loose copy of the much older Wollaton). As Batman was out fighting crime, we left (avoiding the deer, much larger than those of Powderham Castle, Red Deer v Fallow Deer respectively) and drove home.

We saw no sign of the promised thunderstorms on the return and at home. We brought all of darling daughter’s stuff into our apartment and wondered where it was all going to live for the next three months. I am sure solutions will present themselves. Especially whilst milady holidays in Azerbaijan, Devon and Cyprus this season. Bon voyage ma fille!