Reading the Fairtrade Foundation’s newsletter, I noticed

All espresso-based drinks sold in Starbucks in the UK are Ireland are now Fairtrade.

Good news! I can now relax my boycott of Starbucks … though I still will prefer to find independent coffee shops, as the taste is likely to be better. Not that I’m often in a coffee shop other than the one at work.

It also notes that Morrisons’ ground and roast coffee is also all now Fairtrade. Good for them too, but there’s no Morrisons near us.

It has definitely been financially sensible to take the second car off the road whilst Emma was overseas. Now that she’s back, it’s time to un-SORNStatutory Off-Road Notification it and get it going again.

As usual, there’s more to this than meets the eye:

• Re-Taxing the car: the normal relicensing process is well handled online with the DVLA, as was the SORN process, but there’s no obvious un-SORN option. I soon figured it’s the same as a normal re-licensing, but you have to get the vehicle insured first, but you have to pay for all the month you’re wanting insurance for (in this case half of August unnecessarily).
• Insurance: using comparethemarket.com I landed up with Admiral Insurance again. I still don’t understand why there can be such huge differences in the quotes (more than 100% in this case) from different companies … how do they all stay in business?
• Taxing again: despite Admiral’s claims, it took much more than 24 hours for the confirmation of insurance to make it through to DVLA’s computers, so that added another 3 days before the car could be used.
• Breakdown cover: very speedy and efficient with Britannia Rescue.

So, at last we’re ready to go. Or so I thought. In retrospect leaving the battery to drain for 4 months wasn’t a great idea. A jump start from the bigger car got it going pretty quickly (though the instructions with the Halfords Jump Leads didn’t mention revving the good engine which would have helped), and Martha did a 45 minute trip up and down the motorway to put a good charge in it. But the next morning it was dead again. Ouch.

I spend a while on Halford’s website looking at various options for battery chargers, trickle chargers, new batteries, and power packs. Wasn’t clear what to do, so I land up giving my old boss a ring. He knows way more about cars and their mechanics than most mortals, and more than once I’ve been in an unfortunate pincer in the pub with him and another petrol-head. So now he could make amends by giving some advice, and the loan of a charger. If in a few hours the car is still dead, then it’s almost certainly time for a new battery, probably from Groves Batteries.

(I came across this in an article, and I thought I’d jot the main points down here, so I can find them again later.)

• There are 30 million incomes in Britain
• the top 10% (3m people) earn on average £105k before tax (so that’s me out then)
• the top 1% earn on average £253k
• the top 0.1% (30,000 “super-rich”) earn more than £500k a year, with an average of £1.1m

The combined income of this 30,000 is £33bn – or 4% of all personal income in Britain. Slightly obscene? I think so …

Source: David Goodhart, Prospect, Aug 2007.

… is the number of British towns the average Brit visits in their lifetime (according to the Telegraph). Unbelievably (to me) it continues to say that 1 million of us have never our hometown.

But how many towns are there in Britain? Wikipedia has useful links. From that I make it about 1172 in England, 137 in Wales and 233 in Scotland, making 1542 total. Have I visited more than 30 of them? I would certainly hope so, but I’m not going to try right now. Question is, how many should be reasonable to visit in a lifetime?

With Emma now safely in Malawi, we thought we should see if we could go back to just using one car. After all we managed with one before she started driving lessons.

So I SORN’d the Fiat, which was an easy online operation at the DVLA. I’ve also applied to get the rest of the year’s car tax repaid. Stopping the breakdown cover was also easy, but it was more complex for the insurance. Given the hassle of insuring a car, and that she might want to be driving again in 4 months, we thought we’d see if we could get the insurance ‘hibernated’, reactivating it later in the year. But no, Admiral wouldn’t do this for us, so we had to cancel it entirely, and pay an admin charge for the privilege (grrr).

Still, overall that should save us nearly £600 on insurance and tax, given we had a teenage named driver. We’ll see if it gets us to walk more than before …

All these films got me thinking about how many we see in a year. Adding up the ones seen on cinema, rentals and TV, I reckon it’s about 60 in the last year – that’s one every 6 days. Or perhaps more worryingly, 5 days’ worth. Hmm.

When I was in Washington just after the results of the election were announced …

Following an idea passed on by Seth Godin, I decided to give a donation to Wikipedia. After all who has broadband and doesn’t use it most days to look up and learn all sorts of things? So much so that they get 50,000 requests every second! Serving that takes about 300 servers around the world: those by themselves aren’t that cheap, but I imagine paying for their bandwidth is much more expensive. (If you want more details on the architecture see James Hamilton’s blog posting.)

We have also made a donation to Christian Aid this Christmas in lieu of sending Christmas Cards to local friends.

To me, most fleeces look pretty similar. So I was surprised when browsing in a shop in St. David’s, finding some fleeces from Seasalt of Cornwall. At first they looked ordinary enough, until you saw the tag on it proclaiming “I’m made from plastic bottles!“. So nifty I thought I better encourage them and invest in one

I’ve just finished The Righteous Men. I’m sure Jonathan Freedland or his publisher chose the Sam Bourne pseudonym because it’s structurally similar to Dan Brown, and allows for a similar style on the front cover. He can make you turn the pages in the same way that Brown does, and he’s picked a religious myth theme. But thankfully, the writing style is superior to Brown’s with more believable characters, and (ISTM) built on a much stronger set of facts, rather than than fiction-as-facts of The Da Vinci Code. The one thing that did jar was part of the ending which seemed a coincidence too far.

I really enjoyed it, and it’s been good to relax with a thriller again over the last month. Thanks, Dad, for the loan You got any others by him?