Cereal Killer

10. Chump
9. Chumpette
8. Yours
7. Up
6. Pimpmobile
5. Bite
4. My
3. Shiny
2. Daffodil
1. Ass

2007 Race Date/
31 March-1 April

Details/
Brands Hatch Circuit
Fawkham, Longfield, Kent DA3 8NG
Location: off A20 from j3, M25 or j1, M20
Tel: 01474 872331
Ticket Hotline: 0870 950 9000
Website: www.brandshatch.co.uk
Advance race day prices: £21 (children under 12 FREE)
TV Timetable: Live coverage – 4pm-5.30pm (ITV3) / Live all-day coverage – 10am-6pm (Setanta Sports 2 – ch.430 on SkyDigital/ch.539 on Virgin Media)
Highlights coverage – 00.50-1.15am (ITV1), Monday 2 April
Highlights repeated – 7.30pm-7.55pm (Men & Motors), Friday 6 April
* All TV broadcast times given are provisional and subject to change

Length/1.22 miles
Number of laps/24
Distance/29.28 miles

Lap Records/
INDY:
Qualifying: Yvan Muller (FRA), Vauxhall Astra Coupé, 48.942s (90.19mph) on 15 April 2001
Race: Tom Chilton (GBR), Vauxhall Astra Sport Hatch, 49.190s (89.74mph) on 9 April 2006

2006 Winners/
APRIL:
Race 1: James Thompson
Race 2: James Thompson
Race 3: Jason Plato

http://btcc.net/html/circuit_detail.php?id=1

I have a dream. I see a world with happy, rosy-cheeked children scrumping apples. When you ring to book a seat at the cinema you will talk, not to a machine, but to Ma Larkin. And there will be a interval in the film where you eat pork pies and fudge.

No-one will have a mobile phone that plays ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’ and Bernard Cribbins will run your local railway station. Estuary English will be spoken only in the Thames Estuary which, incidentally, will be full of cormorants. And no-one will die of anything.

Now I could publish this in a White Paper but you’d all laugh. You’d know that the Thames Estuary children would shoot all the cormorants and that Bernard Cribbins is already dead.

Well it’s much the same deal with the vision of Britain outlined this week by Mr Prescott in his much talked-about White Paper. I’ve read every one of the 160 pages and it is fantastic. No-one could possibly argue with any of the fat man’s dreams but, sadly, that’s what they are – dreams.

Take point 5.10. ‘We need to improve the image of the bus if we are to attract people who are used to the style and comfort of modern cars.’ And it goes on to say that the bus industry must respond to the challenge with a vehicle designed for the twenty-first century.

Right well if you want me out of the car and in one of the buses by 2000, you’ve got 18 months to come up with a vehicle that can do this …

Yesterday, while making a white sauce, I found I needed some more milk and had to get to and from the shop in less than three minutes. I shall need a service that can handle this.

This afternoon, my mother is coming to Oxfordshire from Peterborough with two small children and their nanny. They don’t want to go via two train stations in London. So, if this new public transport is going to be as convenient as the car, there must be a bus service from Castor to Chipping Norton, 30 times a day.

And on board the bus I want electric Recaro seats finished in the finest hide, I want television, I want air conditioning and I must be able to play whatever music I wish without disturbing any of the other passengers. Also there must be a screen, such as you find in the first class section of a British Airways 777, so I can pick my nose without being overlooked. I shall also wish to smoke.

The bus must also be eco-friendly, so obviously a diesel engine is out of the question. Gas might be an answer, but a big V8 is better. Certainly I shall be looking for 0 to 60 in less than ten seconds and a top speed of 150 or so. And it must be designed by Pininfarina.

Ok. Got all that? Well it gets worse because the service, I’m afraid, has to be free. You see, Mr Prescott has said it’s all right for me to have a car but that I must leave it at home more often. Fine, but I’ll have paid for it and road tax is applicable no matter how infrequently I use it. I therefore can’t afford to spend even more money on a bus fare.

To address this, the White Paper says that I will have to pay to use motorways and that I will be charged if I drive into a city centre. i see, and how will this be done then?

Will there be toll booths on every single road into London, all 10,000 of them? Or will I be forced to fit my car with a electronic device that can be read by road-side monitors? And if so, who will pay for this device to be fitted?

Sadly, the White Paper fails to explain this, in the same way that Enid Blyton fails to explain how Noddy, a wooden pupped, manages to converse with a elephant.

Undaunted, Mr Prescott goes on to say that by charging tolls to use roads, and taxing car-parking spaces, super-efficient dream-world authorities will be able to raise a billion pounds a year. They won’t lose it. They won’t waste it on twinning ceremonies. They’ll spend it on public transport.

Oh dear. I’m afraid that in Mr Prescott’s world, where everyone drinks Ovaltine and Jenny Agutter is 13, a billion pounds is a lot of money. But in fact a new double-decker costs £130,000, and as a result a billion won’t even buy one for each town in the country.

The chances therefore, of getting a service from Castor to Chipping Norton 30 times a day are somewhat remote.

But that’s not the end of the world. You see if car travel were as bad as everyone says, no-one would do it. And things are going to get better and better.

Already, we have the same number of cars on the roads as we do people with driving licences. So unless we perfect the art of driving two cars at once, the projected 30 per cent increase in traffic volume just can’t happen. In fact, as people start to work at home more often, it’ll probably decrease slightly.

I do, however, think that Mr Prescott’s White Paper has a place. If it were illustrated with attractive drawings, it might even supersede ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ as my daughter’s favourite night-time story.

JC – 1998

The driver of a £96 Mercedes SL500 had a lucky escape after her satnav directed her down a winding track and straight into the River Sence in Sheepy Magna, Leicestershire, the Leicester Mercury reports.

The 28-year-old woman – apparently on her way to a Christening on 3 March – ignored signposts indicating the track was unsuitable for motor vehicles and gamely ploughed into the watercourse. Unfortunately, the river was “swollen after heavy rain in recent floods” and quickly overcame the Merc, “gushing through the car” and sweeping it 200 metres downstream “bouncing from one river bank to the other, as the woman frantically tried to smash the windows with her feet”.

Eyewitness Alice Clark recounted: “I was in the field feeding the horses when I saw the car enter the river. I think she saw the water and tried to get through it by putting her foot down. Her car then just pinballed from one side to another and she was screaming for help and you could see she was trying to escape.

“She was trying to kick the windows in but she couldn’t because she had trainers on. Then the windows opened and she squeezed through on to the top of the car. I managed to pull her to the bank. A short time later the car became completely submerged as it filled with water.”

Clark’s boyfriend took the victim, named “Hayley” and from London, to a motorway service station where, rather splendidly, she was collected by a chauffeur-driven Bentley. Clark later received a visit from Hayley’s grateful parents, and chocs and flowers as a thank you.

As for the subaquatic Merc, it stayed in the river for a week until a tow truck could extricate it from its watery grave.

In disturbing related news, Italian tech outfit Il Village has developed “a GPS satellite system that will give blind people greater independence and mobility”, according to the BBC. The “Easy Walk” system uses a “mobile phone that runs the Symbian operating system, a small Bluetooth GPS receiver, text to speech software called Talks…and a call centre that will operate around the clock seven days a week”.

The system utilises just two keys on the phone – one which offers the user his or her exact location, and another which “alerts the call centre that the person needs assistance with navigation”.

Easy Walk is currently being put through its paces by 30 members of the Italian Blind Union. Guinea pig Federico Borgna said: “Easy Walk is very important to help me to go to the places that I don’t know. It gives me more confidence because I usually walk by myself but I have to know the way – Easy Walk helps me to go where I don’t know the way.”

Yes, we can all see where this is heading. A tenner says we’ll be writing the headline “Satnav directs blind Italian into Milan brothel” before the year is out.

For 2 People

Bus to train station
2*£2 (Return)
Train
2*£35 ‘Super Saver’
Bus to destination
2*£2 (Return)
Total = £78
Time = 3.5 hours (Without delays)

2.5l turbocharged 4×4:
Fuel
£25
Coffee
2*£1.50
Your own music/radio
£0
Total = £28
Time = 2 hours

Choose one.

Muggers may now have to steal £100 to pay for their crimes as new on the spot fines are to be introduced in a bid to keep certain offenders out of court. Criminals will have to shell out a ton for misdemeanours such as theft, assaulting a policeman and drunkenness, but seemingly not for admitting to driving naked at 186 mph on a public road. Deal or no deal eh Noel?

John Prescott boasted of his love for fish and chips, claimed to be ‘fat for purpose’ and apologised for his recent behaviour in an emotional Labour conference speech in Manchester. As expected, the Old Labour bruiser announced he would stand down as Deputy Prime Minister as his wife Pauline wept in the front row, no doubt thinking of the long winter Hull nights that stretch ahead…

UK prisons are full, so what better time for Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips to pose as a drink driver and help other criminals paint an underpass whilst dressed in a yellow vest, jeans and t-shirt. The exercise was designed to show that ‘community sentences’ were not a soft option. Indeed the scheme might not only offer a solution to prison overcrowding but also might provide the homeless with refurbished underpasses to sleep in.

162 years after beheading their king, the French wanted to share ours, according to secret documents released from the National Archives. In 1956, French Prime Minister Guy Mollet visited London and said he wanted his country to enter a ‘union’ with Britain. British PM Eden said “non”. Undeterred, Monsieur Mollet changed tack, and when Eden visited France weeks later he pleaded for Britain to admit France into the commonwealth, saying his countrymen would have no problem accepting The Queen as de facto Head of State. Whether the Queen was as keen on the idea remains a mystery, all we know is that it never happened.