I always enjoy the South Cerney Steam Fair in August. It was rammed with old cars this year, along with the usual selection of characters with vintage tractors, military vehicles, stationary engines and, of course, plenty of steam-powered vehicles. You can see them making their way to the event on the surrounding roads (at 4mph) for anything up to a week before the gates open. Among the show characters this year was a nomadic gentleman displaying his 1975 Bedford TK, complete with towbar.
Dressed in the requisite white singlet, surrounded by toy-gun-toting offspring and various siblings and spouses, our friend was frequenting the beer tent, where he could be seen holding something that looked like a large clothes brush, admiring it fondly. His joy was soon interrupted by the arrival of four worried-looking coppers, who looked as if they would really have preferred to have been dancing the Macarena rather than confronting an angry ethnic minority.
A few moments after they had taken him away, the ‘clothes brush’ emerged from under his table and began to scuttle around the beer tent forecourt at high speed. I’m not sure if the Bedford TK owner had been arrested for being in possession of a pet hedgehog, but upon his return a punch-up nearly broke out when the concerned citizen who had rescued the beast in his jumper proved unwilling to return it to its owner.
Can you ‘own’ a hedgehog? I’m not sure, but this surreal scene reminded me of my dad, who told me that, as a boy, he’d also had one as a pet. “It used to follow me everywhere,” he said, “but I swapped it for a football!”
I decided to give my Audi A2 a bit of a birthday present by having the cracked plastic wheelarch repaired and the cloth seats cleaned, and mending the electric-window switches, which were disappearing into the door armrest. Warming to the theme, I thou
