At last. Monsoon Season would appear to be drawing to a close.
This evening, an initially cloudy sky gradually cleared enough to make it possible to take the Caterham to the inaugural meeting of the Solent Sevens, a monthly meet for Seven owners around the Solent funnily enough.
All in all an uneventulful journey, and one hampered by a higher than expected amount of traffic on the A272 an A32, our route to the pub. I blatted out with Rob in his Crossflow and by pure coincidence met up with Steve in his, which was handy as we're all heading to France (again!) in a couple of weeks. It's always good to travel in the company of fellow Crossflow drivers. They're not bogged down by fading ECUs, trick carbon fibre bits or cooling issues. They're only interested in one thing - proximity of the nearest petrol station, and nothing else matters.
Whilst owners of other variants of Seven will stand around and talk about all manner of techno-mumbo-jumbo, Crossflowers only ever discuss whose car stinks the most of oil. When run along these lines car club meets become a very simple pleasure.
On the way to the meet, I'd happened to notice a startled bunny cowering in the road with traffic passing overhead. An unusually kind streak in me came to the fore so whilst Rob and Steve pressed on for the pub, I stopped the car and went to the aid of Floppsy. But it was a tragic scene. The rabbit, although fully conscious and clearly eager to scamper away had suffered a bit of a thwack to it's rear end and as such couldn't hop anywhere. It wasn't bleeding, it wasn't squashed, it simply had two badly mangled legs. I guess the kindest thing to do would've been to thwack it's front end with similar vigour and put the poor thing out of it's misery, but then again, I felt it would be a tragedy too far to survive being hit by a car, only to then be thumped off the nearest fence post in a twisted act of mercy, so I helped Floppsy out of the road and under the hedge where hopefully he/she/it will have fallen asleep peacefully and is, right now, digging up the carrots in God's allotment.
But on to car things...
As with any Caterham meet, there were a few old faces and as many new ones, and the pub in question, "The Chairmakers" at World's End, offered some excellent beer and fine wines with some full-bodied fruitiness on offer at the bar. Steve, Rob and I did form something of a clique but this was mostly because we were discussing our forthcoming Reims trip. The conversation evolved in to talk about general blatting and how the British "summer" has all but killed off the sport this year.
It was at this point that I suggested we all blat down to the all-night cafe in Circus Street, Brighton at some stage. This is a simple, traditional market cafe which stays open all night and thus makes a good point to aim for when night-blatting in the summer. What I hadn't quite anticipated was Steve's suggestion that "at some stage" with regard to going to Brighton actually meant "tonight".
Without a decent excuse not to, as the Solent meet drew to a close, little did we know our blat was only just beginning.
With only minor wheel spin we left the pub and aimed for the coast before heading East towards Brighton, a mere 30ish miles away. Not the most inspiring blat but a blat none the less and soon enough we were parked up outside the Market Diner on Circus Street, not far from the seafront, and not far from midnight. Circus Street itself, being a market, looks like the kind of place where episodes of "The Sweeney" could've been filmed. Roller-shuttered premises line the uneven pavements whilst at one end overflowing wheelie bins erm.....overflow. There's also a nightclub at the end of Circus Street so there's always a perceived danger of damage to the cars but the revellers are mostly well behaved and besides, when we were there it was still early in the grand scheme of things. That said, whilst we partook in tea and bacon-related fare, a young lady strutted past looking like a cross between Catwoman and Fred Astaire for she wore top hat, tails and thigh length PVC boots. Which was nice. It transpired she was a Burlesque entertainer headed for the club at the end of the street although she obliged in enhancing the appearance of the cars briefly for a photo and informed us of numerous Burlesque clubs and venues in London. But London was too far for that night considering our lengthy blat to the coast in the first place.
As the nightlife started to arrive, this was our cue to leave but Rob's car decided to throw a hissy fit in a way only Caterhams can, and not start. After a bit of non-descript and inconclusive waggling of leads, flexing of hoses and general prodding and pondering the thing started and we headed sort of home.
Blasting up over Ditchling Beacon in the dark I experienced something of a first and actually caught up with an emergency services vehicle on a call, although it was a fire engine so hardly the most rapid of rapid repsonse vehicles. They stopped to attend a burning car, we contined to see to burning rubber and fossil fuels.
As Rob commented at one point way past midnight, as we clawed our way back across all of West Sussex and a large chunk of Hampshire, "This seemed like such a good idea three hours ago when we started"
And it was still a good idea.
I'd been knighted with an enormous sense of good for having helped an injured rabbit find a nicer spot to die than between a few cat's eyes, then talked car-related bollocks for a bit before blatting to Brighton where we indulged in real tea in proper china mugs before randomly but successfully tinkering with Rob's car whilst a girl dressed as a ringmaster with big but nicely proportioned PVC-clad boobs told us where she would next be swinging her semi-naked tassles in public.
All worth staying up for.
