Jazz

After 11 years of trouble free motoring Sheila's Honda HR-V has gone. It's been almost perfect since we got it as an ex demo car in 2001. Apart from wear and tear items hardly anything had gone wrong with it in 82K miles. One and a half new sets of tyres and a few wiper blades, and apart from service items it only had three things go wrong with it, and one of those was paid for by Honda. The other two were very minor and inexpensive.

To replace the HR-V we surprised ourselves by buying a three month old ex demo Honda Jazz. Surprised because it was always a given that we'd get a CR-V but in the end it seemed just too big and impractical. Amazingly despite its seemingly small size the Jazz is actually bigger on the inside than the HR-V was, and not actually any smaller than the CR-V is. Looks can obviously be very deceiving!

The Jazz is actually great fun to drive and not at all like you might expect given it's less than stellar image. It's got good nippy performance, is extremely quiet and smooth, handles well, and is loaded with many things that are options on most other cars. Two bikes will easily fit inside and the seats fold in ways I've never seen in other cars like it. And, on top of all that, it can easily do over 50mpg.

Fingers crossed that it will live up to its reputation and be another superbly reliable Honda.

Playing again

For the first time in about 15 years I'm about to go out and play guitar in a band. I used to do this on a regular basis for years and years, playing about 2 or 3 times a week, but stopped regular playing in the mid 80's doing only the odd gig after that.

The background to this is that the charity Sheila volunteers for is having a fund raiser in a local restaurant and needs to provide some live music as an added attraction to get people along. The husband of another volunteer, Danny, plays guitar and we have spoken about all the ins and outs of playing on all the occasions we've ever met previously. He has two daughters who are both good singers and so getting together to form a band seemed like an obvious thing to do.

We've decided that as we're playing in a restaurant we'll do an acoustic set with him playing a 6 string and me a 12 string in order to produce a really full sound. This also means we'll have good control over the sounds and the girls won't have to compete with us forcing the sound levels up. After all, people will be trying to eat while we'll be playing.

The rehearsals have been working out fantastically but I'd forgotten just how much hard work it can be with all those arrangements and chords to learn, let alone the fact that I didn't even know a lot of the songs so have had to learn many of them first. With only two weeks to go we need to cram in three more rehearsals and we should be ready to go. If it works out on the night, as well as it has so far, then everyone should have a great time.