A light dusting of snow
It’s been quite a while since I wrote about Annie because, for the most part, she’s been extremely well behaved, happily carrying us from A to B and back again, trundling along without a care in the world. All through the lovely long hot sunny weather last year, she never put a wheel wrong, passed yet another MOT without issue and basked in admiring glances wherever she went. Continue reading
One of my rescued Bronze Fennel seedlings.
If there is one thing guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of a Land Rover owners partner, it is the words ‘We need to bleed the brakes!’ and it was those words that Mud uttered yesterday! My heart sank because bleeding the brakes of a series Land Rover is never easy, is never a quick job, always involves much cursing and swearing and invariably results in mutterings about rusted bleed nipples, located in nigh on impossible to reach places, due to the nonsensical design whims of the Land Rover engineers of by-gone days. Continue reading
Keeping dry(ish): knitting in the Land Rover.
August Bank Holiday Monday dawned and, what a surprise (not), it was raining. To be fair we weren’t in much of a position to complain because for most of the previous week, the weather had worked in our favour, with sunshine during the day and what rain we got, occurring, for the most part, overnight. Mud had been able to get a whole raft of jobs on our Series 3 Land Rover done and I had been spared hours of watering duties. Continue reading
Humber Bridge from the river bank walk
Back in February we decided to SORN Annie (our Series 3 Land Rover) because she needed some substantial work doing to her brakes and Mud, who isn’t getting any younger you know, decided that trying to get her ready for an MOT (annual road worthiness test in the UK), in mid winter with only the hard gravel drive available to work on, was something he simply couldn’t face …… especially when getting her through the MOT meant sorting the aforementioned brakes out, a bad enough job with a warm, dry workshop at your disposal, never mind sub-zero temperatures, rain and a gravel drive. So we declared her off road, parked her up on the drive and left her there for six months, with Mud regularly idling her on the drive to keep everything lubricated in the engine. Continue reading
Our new garden feature
Back in December 2009, with the Jap’ pick up, Thomas, aging fast and the cost of maintenance and repairs of said vehicle escalating at a rather alarming rate, Muds’ Land Roverless status reached breaking point and he set about persuading me that an old, battered classic Land Rover was the only sensible solution to our vehicular needs. The ease with which he could repair it, the much lower cost of these repairs, minimal historic vehicle insurance costs, not forgetting the taxed exempt status of such a vehicle, were all tools used to persuade me that a Series land Rover project was the way forward and I fell for it!
Little Mudlet was dwarfed by a waterwheel.
The Mudlets were playing quietly and peacefully on the rug and I was watching something on the television, when Mud, who had been engrossed in his most recent copy of ‘Classic Land Rover’, with an air of assumed casualness, suddenly announced to no one in particular “Oh look, it’s Leafers at the Pit this weekend!”
Uhm! Really!
I waited and sure enough, a few minutes later he suggested that this year, perhaps we could pop across (it’s an hour away) and have a gander. Mindful of the fact that, much as we love them, the idea of spending hours walking around looking at other peoples Land Rovers and chatting about axles, gearboxes, engine conversions or leaky gaskets may not be to every ones taste, he sweetened the deal with an even more casual, “Oh and whilst we’re over there, and seeings how the event is held at the National Coal Mining museum, we could spend some time looking around the museum as well.” Continue reading
Not exactly what I had in mind when I said we needed more colour in the garden
Remember the story of Jack and the beanstalk and in particular the part where his mother, in a fit of disgust at her sons apparent gullibility, scatters the magic beans on the ground and next morning an enormous beanstalk has grown? Well something similar appears to have occurred in my garden overnight but instead of a handy giant beanstalk, my garden sprouted Land Rover panels …… banana yellow, Land Rover panels to be precise.
A purple splash along the back fence
These days there are two types of jobs to be done on my series 3 Land Rover, Annie. There are those in the areas Mud has already been through/worked on, so any seized nuts and bolts have already been cursed at, hit with a hammer, beaten into submission with a mallet and generally forcibly removed and replaced with shiny new ones, coated in copper slip.
Hand made with love
I had hoped to take a picture of Annie basking in her success (and the sun) but the rain stopped play.
The Land Rover Owners Ex Wife 