And the lights all went down in Hampshire.......again.

In fact, everything went off.
Having got to the bottom of the "Will they? Won't they?" headlights, and with the full windscreen fitted, the Seven was all ready for some early summer social blatting. I'd also managed to source that most elusive accessory, a Willing Female Passenger. The WFP was a little cautious after the headlight episode, but after much reassurance agreed to a quick blat over to Butser Hill for a charming sunset picnic, watching dusk descend over the South Coast, spotting the landmarks of Southampton and the Solent as they lit up one by one.

The scene couldn't have been more perfect if it had been scripted by Richard Curtis with Hugh Grant and Hollywood's latest lady in mind - the deserted hillside, a warm gentle breeze, no screaming kids to ruin the evening, and an empty sky that blended overhead from an orangey glow in the West to an inky dark blue in the East.

Come home time, the tone changed a little from idyllic al fresco snacking to a chilly roadside waiting game.

Returning to the car, the WFP wrapped up warm as advised, the picnic basket was firmly lashed to the rear of the car, we each squeezed in to our respective seats (with suitable mirth I might add), at which point the car delivered its punchline to the headlight saga.

So...Waggle the gear lever to check it's in neutral, depress the clutch, poke the throttle a few times and turn the ignition key.

But instead of the usual clattering of parts followed by a healthy roar and stink of unleaded, the engine simply whirred pathetically a couple of times then quit, replaced by the sniggering chatter of the starter solenoid.

My shoulders sagged. WFP looked at me. I looked at WFP.

"You said you'd fixed it"

"I did. This is something else"

With hindsight I'm not sure this was such a good idea. What's worse? A recurring problem, or two separate ones in as many days?

Still, bump starting a car is not the sole remit of Verner von Braun, so pointing the car down hill a little, offering WFP a reassuring and perhaps staggeringly confident "Never mind, watch this" I eased off the brake and let the car roll away, gather a bit of momentum then dumped the clutch.

Success. The Crossflow banged in to life and for a brief moment things were looking up, illuminated by the recently renovated headlights, thus supporting my previous claim that I'd fixed them.

But not for long. An entire three miles later the car was totally dead. Completely and utterly drained of any electricity by the effort of illuminating the headlights and sparking the spark plugs, this immediately stank of a dead alternator. Getting to Butser Hill the Seven had survived on the battery alone. The return journey, without any kind of mobile top-up and the added electrical weight of the lights was all too much.
We rolled to a gentle halt in the entrance to a dark and deserted Tesco car park.
As WFP commented, it could have been worse. It could've been raining. It could've been much worse. I could've been with a passenger who wasn't quite as open minded.
A little over an hour later the car was its second recovery truck in as many days.
A little over two hours later it was back in the garage. A quick check of the battery revealed an impressive 2.8 volts left in the battery. I say impressive because the car had soldiered on, squeezing every last drop of potential difference from the cells.

So, a new alternator.
Sourcing parts for a Seven can be either blissfully simple, or a campaign to make King Arthur and his quest for the Holy Grail look like a rank amateur.
For the new alternator, the latter applied.
The conversation with the chap behind the counter at the local motor factors soon turned in to some kind of back-catalogue of classic '70s Fords spawned during the heady days of Dagenham. Cortina, Granada, Escort, Fiesta.....curious, I thought, that Ford adopted names either of continental holiday resorts or porn mags, and I wondered if this was some subtle reflection of the exact nature of the joys of motoring that came with each car.
Most of the compatible bits were, unsurprisingly, unavailable with no known delivery date. That was the case until we chanced upon the parts list for perhaps the sportiest of Dag Dustbins, the most fixed of the Fix Or Repair Daily stable - the slopey-backed Capri, eventually settling on the monster 2.3 V6 as having a suitable alternator.
This was good news on two fronts. First, the car would soon be back on the road, fully charging, but more than that it would have something in common with a Capri, the motoring weapon of choice for iconic covert coppers Bodie & Doyle.
And so it follows, I now have something in common with Bodie & Doyle.
So there you have it. Caterham Seven - the choice of Professionals everywhere.

And the lights all went out in Hampshire......

According to Manx musicians The Bee Gees, the lights all went down in Massachusetts.
Much the same can be said in Hampshire lately, where small aluminium car ownership has proved trying at best and positively awkward at worst.
Ever since taking on the Caterham (I would say "owning" it but one never owns a Caterham, or indeed a Land Rover - you just borrow it from the next person) the headlights have turned out to be something of an optional extra where the car itself determined when this particular option might be available. The headlights sometimes worked faultlessly, other times they'd fool you in to thinking there was a problem by not turning on then, just as the driver's harness was clinked open to investigate, ta daa, headlights on in an automotive "Ha! Only joking!" moment.
The joke started to wear a little thin though, reaching transparency last week whilst visiting fellow Sevener Carrots to retrieve a borrowed windscreen, needed for some social blatting the following evening. Aeroscreens (another of those upgrades that occurred during the blog blackout) aren't appreciated by everyone, less so by girls. Something to do with hair apparently.
And front teeth.
So, upon leaving Carrot HQ, no headlights. We'd tried everything. Twiddled switches, held fuses up to the light, tapped solenoids, wiggled wiring and even stood around talking lots.
But hey, it was a light evening with no cloud cover. How dark could it get? Quite dark is the answer. Lovely sunset, but pitch black roads. Getting as far as a regular blat haunt of the Farnham 24hr BP petrol station, I finally caved in and admitted 60mph on 5watt sidelights isn't funny.
The man who drove the breakdown truck found it mildly amusing though. Great, I thought, a bloke with a low loader and a sense of humour. How little did I know at that point.
So, after peering under the dashboard and admiring Caterham wiring, Recovery Truck Man loaded the Seven on to the sheet steel of the recovery truck and headed for home.
During any journey in a recovery truck, one can learn a great many things. Things learnt during the next hour were:
Recovery drivers who are about to be laid off do not make the best customer interface.
Recovery drivers who have lost their house in a bitter divorce less than twelve months ago make a bad customer interface.
Now you'd think a phone call from Recovery Truck Man's girlfriend might improve things. Over the handsfree loudspeaker she promised to have a bath run and supper ready for when he got home, and signed off with a cheery "Love you babes", something made all the more touching when I spotted a swallow tattoo on the back of Recovery Truck Man's left hand. And just as I was about to comment along the lines of "See? Not so bad", Recovery Truck Man announced "And she's a liar too".
Great. Recovery Truck Man clearly had multiple issues going on, and nothing I was going to say would change that. The last twenty minutes of the journey were uneasy to say the least and I had visions of saying something unwittingly antagonistic and thence being clubbed to death with a traffic cone.
But atrocities carried out using motorway accoutrements would have to wait, as soon enough the Seven was off loaded and rolled in to the garage.
Further diagnosis was carried out the following afternoon, and the fault traced to a faulty relay. Once this was replaced I guessed the Seven's electrical tantrums were over.
But more was to follow......

Horny

In the bleak mid-winter, when the UK was buried under four feet of snow, the Defender, whilst not at all phased by the onset of a new ice age, developed a mystifying electrical snag where the horn, the alarm and various other bits and pieces would immediately and persistently sound off as soon as the key was removed from the ignition. This was eventually traced to the near-side front side light, and a short feed which was sending a spurious signal to the "BCU" or body control unit, a device installed to prove that electronics don't belong in Land Rovers. Even a tiny leakage of voltage at the wrong point and all hell is let loose in the micro-circuitry that governs everything from the fog lights to the rear wiper. Why systems that've survived for decades using simple elementary electrical principles need the addition of silicon is beyond me.
But anyway, since then, the air horns on the Land Rover have never really worked properly. Having replaced the mute horns with traditional old skool electrics ones a few eeks ago, I thought it was about time to see if the old ones actually worked or if it was the tiddly compressor supplied with them that had given up.
Now, in the garage I have a small workshop compressor for powering tools or pumping up tyres and since this had pressure left in it from another job it seemed like a good idea to test the horns.

I'm happy to report they still work really well, and that 40psi really is more than enough to make a noise. Lots of noise. I think I can still hear it echoing off the brickwork of the surrounding houses.

Half moon and half doors

Many great things come in tubes - Smarties, maps, Primula cheese, underground trains and so on.
One of the better things to come in a tube, or rather in a pair of tubes for double the delight, is Araldite adhesive.
Araldite is top stuff, even before you twist off the little caps. The name alone conjures up earthy robustness in the "Aral", mixed with some schoolboy chemistry in the "ite", I mean come on, you have electrolytes, sulphites, and Han Solo was encased in frozen, and possibly fictitious carbonite. So Araldite mixes Olde Englande with contemporary technology. The name also doubles as a verb. The unassuming snot-coloured goo bonds two surfaces with such strength that words have yet to be invented to describe the chemical joinery, hence the act of using Araldite becomes simply the act of "Aralditing" something.
It seems only appropriate then that this Colossus of adhesives was the solution to an irritating problem blighting the Seven since last summer...In keeping with its Less-Is-More design policy, the roof and doors of the car are secured using press-stud fasteners. Lots of them. It's a simple enough solution, obviously, the drawback being that the rivets holding these press studs in place are tougher than the skin of the car, and over a few years of happy motoring they eventually pull through and the press studs fall off. It doesn't stop there though, as the hole in the skin is usually enlarged and simply replacing the rivet doesn't work. So I turned to Araldite and one of their many variants. Araldite comes in several specialist versions now; "Clear", which is transparent, "Rapid", which is quick-setting and "Steel", which isn't steel. It does come in a stylish pastel silvery-grey tube as opposed to the Lego-brick red of normal Araldite, and I can't help thinking a name like "Araldite Platinum Edition" would add a few sales. It's as hard as steel though and can be similarly machined and worked so ideal for plugging an enlarged irregular hole in the ali sheet exterior of the Seven, drilling a small hole and then employing a self-tapping screw to reattach the errant press stud.

With all studs now in place I could at last put to use something that's been rolled up and poked away on a shelf in the garage for a couple of years (yes, years) since buying them via the For Sale section of BlatChat - a pair of half doors, which allow screen-free (and therefore by default full door-free) motoring without losing the critical driver protection from stone-flick from the front wheels.
As with all satisfying jobs on the Seven, this one was completed after 9pm, but with doors fitted, and a lazy half-moon peering down from a slightly misty sky I grabbed the keys and set off on something that's been missing for too long - a quick night blat.

With the half doors fitted, in body-matching BRG, and recently installed Brooklands aero-screens, from side on the car has a Bentley-esque look, a solid slab of automotive engineering. It seems to be maturing with age too, like fine wine, or perhaps grotty cheese I don't know, but where it once snarled and snapped it now has a fluttering purr, and the Lasham bends were all the more smooth for it. This wasn't an ambitious blat, just a refresher, so the Farnham BP petrol station was far enough. The moonlight flicked through the trees and hedgerows of Hampshire, reminding me of the giga-blat of last July when I set sail for Stelvio and cracked it in one very long but indescribably satisfying blat. On that occasion, the lunar illumination set the moody, silent Alps aglow, a magnificent scene and one I need to revisit soon. But for now, hot chocolate and a donut (of the baked variety) is reward enough.

Besides, we were being watched......

The blog is back.

Take That, Doctor Who, Tony Blackburn......they have one thing in common: In order to make a come back, first you have to go away.

And so it is that The Blog is back.

The previous entry detailed the blatfest that is the Taffia fish and chip run, and since the 2010 event has just closed, this seemed a good trigger to resurrect the on-line on-going journal of the ups, the downs, and the occasional sideways of Land Rover and Caterham ownership.

With any comeback, there's never a one-shot disclosure of what filled the gap. To do so would erase the enigma, replace the question mark with a full stop. Instead, there's the trickle of information regarding the wilderness years, a steady drip-feed of snippets giving a tantalising glimpse in to what's gone on behind closed doors. And Both My Cars Mostly Aluminium (other blogs are available) is no different.

The full detail of the last ten months will out in due course, in chunks large and small as the topic at the time dictates.

There have been near-catastrophic electrical failures, there have been broken windscreens. There has been Stelvio and snow.

Untrue Grit.

Grit belongs in two places only. At the bottom of a budgie's cage and in Westerns starring John Wayne. The presence of grit anywhere else is unwelcome.
The first example is on the A339 near Thatcham.
Carrots, Wilto and I had just finished such a lovely weekend, which may come as some surprise when one learns that we were in Wales. Despite a reputation for enhanced precipitation, the various valleys and hills failed to deliver any rain, despite looking threatening at times, and we had a top weekend weaving our way along near-deserted mountain roads and passes. I won't succumb to worn out cliches about ribbons of tarmac unravelling across the countryside, no.....I'll come up with my own version....the roads were like an unfurling piece of asphalt string, very flat smooth string at that.
Utterly fantastic despite the intentions of occasional suicide sheep, with some top company too.
In true Seveneering style we stopped overnight at a simple campsite with minimal equipment, making for a reasonably easy get away in the morning, and our minimalist approach had the advantage of giving us a good excuse to make for the nearest cafe where tea and breakfast awaited without, apparently, any sense of humour on the part of the cafe owner who looked a little bemused when Carrots joked that we wanted a table for three hundred in the deserted early morning eatery.
Making the most of our Taffian weekend we retraced some of our route from the previous day, with the Seven proving a frequent claim that when it comes to bikes it can more than keep up. Towards Monmouth I did battle with a biggish sports bike ridden by a fat bloke who blasted along the straight bits, then petered out in the bends. And his bike looked like it was inspired by Batman's iPod.
Then we gently wove our way home over more unfurled string of asphalt although being Sunday afternoon, the closer we got to London, the slower the traffic got.
Our target for the afternoon was Nelson's Diner, near Thatcham, which is showing considerable promise in becoming a favourite haunt to rival the Market Diner. Late afternoon tea in an American diner.....surreal, but great.
After the Market Diner though, the grit set in with heavy gravel scattered liberally across the A339. Utter rubbish and, typically poor slap dash road repair. It was everywhere, literally lying loose on top of the old road. And I simply cannot see how this lazy "refurbishment" can be considered an improvement. The surface is not only rougher, it pebble dashes passing cars and, for those who dare to give it some beans, the small stones give all the grip of marbles.
Once home, I de-gritted the car and with the surplus creating a small rockery in the garage.
Then on to some maintenance. heavy cornering in Wales had taken it's toll on the wheel bearings with a noticeable clonk coming from the front off-side. But this wasn't normal wear and tear.
A little disassembled investigation revealed the felt washer that seals the back of the hub had come adrift, effectively opening the innards to grit and corruption, the worst the Welsh roads had to offer. The real irony is that it was a felt seal that gave way, a wool derived product, as though the sheep of Taffialand were getting their own back.

Words don't come easy.

Words fail me, not out of disbelief or disgust, but out of the simple, overwhelming feeling that remains after a full weekend of blatting through mid-Wales in brilliant sunshine, not a cloud in the sky.