Back To Phil's Magic Kingdom

Katherine obligingly filled in my meme and decorated her answers with some beautiful photos of a walk she took through her local park near Washington D.C.
All the trees were raging, fiery autumnal colours; the sort of glorious display that we here in Norfolk have to wait until November to enjoy.

It reminded me of how we are still basking in the warm and fuzzy glow of a lazy late summer here in England.
Last weekend, after our trip around Phil's Magic Kingdom (see posts passim), he led us round to the other end of Lotus's test track, across the old wartime airfield to this place:

Welcome to Ketteringham Hall.
This used to be the home of Lotus's Formula One Grand Prix racing team, but is now used for more corporate events. The chapel at the far end of the front façade used to house the testing rig for racing car engines.

So anyhoo … For those of you Colonial Cousins who are already wincing from the first bitter nights of Autumn, this is what it is like back here in the Mother Country at the moment.

On the front lawn of the hall, the local village cricket team was being quintessentially English. This isn't some crap for the tourists - we don't let them near our private pursuits; this is what actually goes on in rural England. And yes, there are cups of tea and plates piled with cucumber sandwiches in the pavilion.
And when somebody plays a good stroke, everybody politely applauds and shouts "Jolly good show, old man. Well played!"

Round the side of the hall are two lakes, which Phil and his chums from the Magic Kingdom are allowed to fish in. As you'll see if you trawl back through Phil's blog.
He's out there today with his merry men, raking back the weed that the sun has brought into bloom.

This is the boat they'll be using. With some freshwater mussel shells plonked on it for effect.
Late summer in England is pretty bloody gorgeous.
Toodle pip!

Meme Time

Hokay. Time for a no-brainer meme.
Maria has provided a couple of these just recently and I would have filled one in earlier but Groover's Pink Floyd Week and Phil's Magic Kingdom kinda got in the way.

So, for meme-haters everywhere: Suffer!

Hi, my name is Dive.

But you can call me Sir or Madam (delete where applicable).

Never in my life have I eaten my own cum … hang on; that's a lie … er … kneed toddlers in the head for fun … er … nope; that's a lie, too.
Sheesh! What haven't I done?
Um … Aha! Never in my life have I been to the USA. And with my past record of somewhat extreme political and specifically anti-American activism the buggers probably wouldn't let me in anyway.
Good thing for all concerned.

When I am nervous I play drum patterns on any available surface.
Intensely annoying, I know, so don't make me nervous..

The last song I listened to was "Shine" by Joni Mitchell.

If I were to get married right now, it would be to my lovely girlfriend. That's a couple of years off but heading toward us like a speeding freight train. Woohoo!

My hair has formed an escape committee.

When I was four, I got my first permanent scar.

Last Christmas I did what I always do: no tree, no cards, no decorations, no TV, no smegging Christmas. What a bunch of over-sentimental commercialised arse.

I should be dead.

When I look down I see the tragic remains of my melted six-pack, topped with an admittedly perky pair of man-boobs. And if I suck in my gut I can sometimes see my penis.

The happiest recent event was Monday morning. I love Monday mornings.

If I were a character in Friends, I'd be totally lost as TV is a foreign country to me. Friends, Grey's Anatomy, Lost, etc. Never watched 'em; never will.
I will only admit to liking three things in the last forty years of TV: The Simpsons, Buffy and Frasier. I've got 'em all on DVD so I don't need anything else.

By this time, next year, I'll be about to hit fifty. Wheeee …

My current distress is that all humans haven't been wiped off the planet by some disease or a vengeful God who realised that we fucked up big time.

I have a hard time understanding America.

There's these girls who hang around 駅のはらじゅくin Tokyo. Hot Damn!

If I won an award, the first person I would tell is my imaginary friend.

I want to buy a teleporter to save me from this insane seven hour a day commute.

I plan on visiting my wrath upon humanity.

If I could spend the night at any house, it would be Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's house. It's a very, very, very fine house, with two cats in the yard, apparently.

The world could do without stupid fucking humans.

The most recent thing I bought myself is lunch.

The most recent thing that someone else bought for me was coffee and breakfast.

My middle name is the same name as my Dad's brother. He was a tailgunner in WWII and got shot down and killed in the last weeks of the war. Tailgunners were the only crew members not issued with a parachute as the gun turret was too small. He was nineteen when he died.

In the morning I leap out of bed at 4:40 and scream.

Last night I was having a riot of fun at Japanese class. おはいよございますまゆこせんせい。

There is this guy I know who is convinced his trousers were made on Venus. He also reads this blog. Hi, Mikey!

If I was an animal, I would be … who wrote this crap? A fucking nutjob creationist? I AM a fucking animal. I'm an ape. A mammal. Anyone who thinks they're not deserves to be slapped around the head until their brain starts working.

A better name for me would be Dive.

Tomorrow, I am having breakfast in Norwich, then trawling the bookshops. On Saturday mornings I am a creature of habit.

Tonight, I am cooking tagine and probably drinking too much.

Thank you, Maria. I don't know why people hate memes so much. I can't resist the little buggers.

Phil's Funny Farm

For the last visit to Phil's playground this week, we shall discover what happens when a team of boys and girls from Norfolk get distracted from making hand-built racing and sports cars and let their minds wander.

Some of the stuff that comes oozing out of their brains is fantastic and even sane … some of the other stuff, however, makes you nervous when they smile at you.

Let's start off though with a treat for Rich.

Rich, you wanted a candy-apple red Elise; here's a sweet little Mark I with your name on it.
It even comes with free balloons.
What more can a man ask?

This is one of the saner projects, and will be whizzing noiselessly past you fairly soon.
It is the Tesla.
The first real electric sports car.
Marketed out of San Diego to catch the Schwarzzenegger Green Wave, these little beauties are made here (that's Phils' "Chrome Orange" paint job).
If you want to go from 0 to 60mph in 4 seconds without any engine noise this is the baby for you.
A usable range between recharges and a top speed to take your head off, married to Lotus's worldbeating handling gives you a pretty groovy package.
Currently only available in California but coming to Britain next year.
Expect to pay around £48,000.
And you can park 'em for free in Westminster, which, if you work here like I do will pay for itself pretty bloody quickly.

This little cutie was up for grabs as a kiddies' prize.
Cool!

This is your standard Yank package: the Elise "California".
It's basically an Elise with pretty leather door trim so Americans can pose when they get in and out.
Rumour has it they're making one twice as wide for fat American butts.

If you want a sane, family car, this is as close as you'll get: the current model Europa S.
Watch out for the Eagle though; coming soon.

The Europa's smiling face.

Every year at the Goodwood Festival of Speed they have a "Soapbox Challenge" where anybody is welcome to make an unpowered go-kart to race down the twisty hill-climb course.
There are always some spectacular wipeouts.
Lotus used to make a different kart each year but as they always won they've been kinda banned from taking part.
This is one of them. Sweet, huh?

This makes my nose hurt.
The "head impact test rig" in the "smashing cars into walls" department.

This was Lotus's cool 4WD concept car which they stupidly never put into production.
It wipes the floor with the Porsche Cayenne.
And is considerably prettier.

Still in the Design Team building, this is what happens when little fingers play with clay.
These things get modelled up in mud for wind tunnel testing and for making the moulds for the real thing.

Meanwhile, in the rubber room …
Some idiot is about to try to race across the antarctic in this.
It's got an open cockpit fer Chrissakes!
He'll be dead before he's gone a mile.
Hey ho.

Back to Coolsville and the massively wonderful Lotus 340R.
They only made 340 of 'em so you'll have to scour eBay.

Fucking sweet though, eh?

Sweet but yet somehow insane.
This is the Lotus Exposé.
A totally see-through racing car which holds several hill-climb racing records and can be seen going nutjob at races all over the world.

And here's the car I want the most.
Lotus are pretty hot on their Green credentials; they are about to put up three massive wind turbines to power the whole factory.
They make hybrid cars but this is their biofuel Exige.
Note the in-joke of the green leather seat on the green stripe side and the yellow seat on the yellow side.

The 265 E.
I want one.
Badly.
You can fill it up with vegetable oil down at Morrisons' supermarket and it is actually FASTER than the petrol-fuelled Exige!
Cool!

Thus endeth this little trip around Phil's Magical Kingdom.
We hope you enjoyed it. Please come again.
Toodle Pip.

More of Phil's Day Job

More car porn, girls and boys.

This - as I'm sure you know by now - is my baby brother Phil.
He's worked at Lotus Sports Cars for twenty-one years now and has reached the rank of senior shouty person.
Carrying on from Sunday's Lotus porn-fest I'd like to fill you in on a bit of history. If you hit the "Cars and Girls" link in my sidebar you'll find that Phil and I like to dress up and watch vintage racing cars going apeshit.
A lot of the original cars (and - like Stirling Moss and Carol Shelby, the original drivers) still race, and it's a whole lot more exciting to watch than the modern stuff.
Cars like this …

Jim Clark's wonderful Grand Prix winning Lotus from when I was a little boy.

Those evolved during the sixties and seventies into these.

And then Lotus ruled the world.
This is one of Ayrton Senna's JPS Lotus formula one cars, in which the late, great Brazilian ace won multiple world championships.
With him came Emerson Fittipaldi, whose JPS can be seen screaming round Goodwood circuit in my last "Cars and Girls" post.

This is a later Senna car, also a multiple winner.

Alongside the formula one racing cars, Colin Chapman (the engineering genius behind Lotus and no mean racing driver himself) developed sports cars; primarily to raise money to go racing.
The yellow and silver open-top to the left is the classic Lotus 7. You can still buy and race these.
Way in the background is the Lotus Cortina, beloved of getaway drivers in the sixties and being driven like a maniac by Stirling Moss in my last "Cars and Girls" post.
In front is Colin's first real big seller, the Lotus Elan. Decked out in the racing colours of the time, this one is about to be let loose on the test track at the factory.
It set the standard for all the best Lotus's since: small, very light, VERY fast and with incredible handling.

This is the latest Elise to come with those famous racing colours.

Sticking with racing cars today, this is the original Motorsport version that took the sports car world by storm.
Incredible speed and agility with mind-buggering handling earned it the title of best drivers' car in the world many times over.

You can buy many versions of it now.
This Exige is particularly sweet; Phil re-created the classic 1960's Gulf Racing Blue for the Exige Club Racer.
I've got a serious Jones for one of these babies.

This is one of Phil's favourite stripe-jobs; the current Motorsport Exige.

And the same from another angle because it's beautiful.
Sparkly black and nasty yellow like the wasps from your worst nightmare.
Several police forces use Lotus's as pursuit cars. Yikes!

The next generation of curcuit cars, the superb 211.
Buy one and race it.
Go on … You know you want to.

This is the monstrous GT3 Le Mans Racer in yummy banana custard yellow.

And I'll finish today with the prototype for the road going version of the GT3.

This is one of Phil's hand-painted jobs. That's him in the stripy shirt in the doorway.
More porn tomorrow, including a little candy apple red one for Rich to play with.

Moon Cake and Green Tea

A message pops into my email inbox from Spring, our lovely China liaison officer:

"Such a lovely morning brings us the Chinese traditional Mid-Autumn Festival today! It falls on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month of the Chinese calendar, a date when the moon is at its fullest and brightest for people to celebrate the abundance of the summer’s harvest.
In China, it is also known as the Moon Festival, dating back over 3,000 years to China’s Zhou Dynasty. It is one of the three most important holidays in Chinese tradition: the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), the Mid-Autumn Festival and the Lantern Festival.
Traditionally, on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival, Chinese family members will gather to admire the bright mid-autumn harvest moon, and eat moon cakes together.
Moon cakes are usually round-shaped with many different varieties of fillings. They refer to peace, harmony and perfection.
Chinese people believe that viewing the full moon delivers the best wishes and love to their separated family members and eating moon cakes brings good luck to themselves."

Spring also brings round moon cakes for everyone. Hoorah!

So, Happy Moon Festival everyone.
Make sure you go outside and view the full moon tonight.

And no howling.

What Phil Does All Day

If anyone felt the slightest drool over those yummy cars I posted on Sunday, here is the first part of this week's decidedly pornographic series of posts on what little brother Phil gets up to in the Peter Pan world of Lotus Sports Cars.
Who needs to grow up when you can play with this stuff?

These usually sit in Phil's office (as does the table, which was nicked for the display as we found out when we sneaked off to his office to snaffle chocolate hob-nobs).
Among other things, Phil develops all the flashy paints on the sports cars and hand paints the flashiest ones himself (like the orange GT3 racer in Sunday's post).
These cute little models are used to check the paint mixes on the finished cars.
Cool, huh?

Right, before we get to the real porn, which will start tomorrow, pay attention while I go through the process which ends up with the most exciting drivers' car in the world going nutjob round the test track.

It all starts with good old fibreglass moulds. We used to make our canoes the same way at school. None of your crappy robots here.
Hand built means hand built.

Once out of the moulds you get racks full of sexy looking - but decidedly naked - body panels.

These get assembled on these cool racks and sanded until Phil's happy, then prepared, primed and baked.

Then they go through the spray booths and have lots of complex layers of shiny, metallic, reflective, chromatic, arty-farty hi-tech paints splattered over 'em.

After that, the front and back sections are sat on this rack for a bit of a snooze.

While the middle bits get stuck on to the chassis.
And then the engine gets dropped in at the back.

The whole lot is then assembled and finished.
These are not the actual wheels they'll be wearing on the road.
That would be silly.

And "Hey Presto" or whatever Harry Potter says these days (or Hermione in the bathroom shouting "Chlamydia Disappearum!") …
Out the other end pops a sweet little Elise.

Or a snarling beast of an Exige.

Of course it's a whole lot more complicated than that but I just like looking at the finished article.

Monday Melee

Before we start, let's have a big round of applause for Vic for Pink Floyd Week.
A great excuse to play shedloads of old music I'd not heard for years and have a laugh into the bargain.
Cheers, Vic!

Tidying up a Floyd loose end, nobody spotted that "Hey ho, huff the talbot" came from Syd Barrett's marvellous song "Octopus"; a song with many great and slightly strange lines. The post title was a toss up between "talbot" and "the old original favourite gran".

It seems strange going back to a non-Floyd Fracas Monday Melee but I'll stick to lyrics as I'm kind of addicted to them now:

1: The Misanthropic.
(Name something - about humanity - you absolutely hate).

"Where have all the young men gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?"

Pete Seeger: "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?"

Judging by my post a couple of days back, we will never learn.

2: The Meretricious:
(Expose someone or something that's phony, fraudulent or bogus).

"Sometimes its hard to be a woman
Giving all your love to just one man
You'll have bad times
And he'll have good times
Doing things that you don't understand
But if you love him you'll forgive him
Even though he's hard to understand
And if you love him
Oh be proud of him
'Cause after all he's just a man
Stand by your man
Give him two arms to cling to
And something warm to come to
When nights are cold and lonely
Stand by your man
And tell the world you love him
Keep giving all the love you can
Stand by your man"

Tammy Wynette: "Stand By Your Man"

Bugger that. Leave the bastard and get a life.

3: The Malcontent:
(Name something you're unhappy with).

"This town, is coming like a ghost town.
All the clubs have been closed down.
This place, is coming like a ghost town.
Bands won't play no more,
Too much fighting on the dance floor"

The Specials: "Ghost Town"


4: The Meritorious.
(Give someone credit for something and name it if you can).

"Don't it always seem to go,
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?"

Joni Mitchell: "Big Yellow Taxi"

I'm giving credit to Joni for coming out of her stroppy retirement and singing for us again. Though why she chose Starbucks' record label is beyond me.

5: The Mirror.
(See something good about yourself and name it).

"I've been mad for fucking years.
I've always been mad.
You know I've been mad,
like the most of us have."

Jerry the Irish doorman at the start of Pink Floyd's: "Speak To Me"

Yes, I know Pink Floyd Week is over but it kinda crept in anyway.

6: The Make-Believe:
(Name something you wish for).

"I wish they all could be California girls."
Not strictly true but a nice cheerful song for a Monday.

The Beach Boys: "California Girls"

Welcome To The Machine

Wheeeeeeeeee !
We've just got home from Lotus sports cars' 40th birthday party for the factory at Hethel.
This is where little brother Phil runs his kingdom.
Over the next week there will be several days posts of either boring car stuff or pure automotive pornography (depending on your point of view).

But to tie this - somewhat tenuously - to Pink Floyd Week, "welcome to the machine".
This somewhat insanely complex piece of pretty coloured metal is just a tiny part of the huge operation that makes things like this:

The not entirely un-sexy 211 track car. These are for circuit racing and hill climb races but if you're insane you can buy a road version.

And this piece of pure orange gorgeousness is the prototype for a roadgoing version of the GT3 racing car I will post later.
Phil (you can just make him out in the green rugby shirt, behind the two suspiciously gay guys) hand sprayed this car himself.
I want one.