Some time ago I bought a shoe rack and coat rack from IKEA. Shoe racks seem to be more or less compulsory in Sweden. Attaching the hat rack (hatthylla) to the wall proved difficult. Rawlplugs pulled straight out and a little investigation led me to believe that the wall is made of lath and plaster, with a thick layer of extremely fragile plaster.

This weekend I finally got round to buying a stud detector, locating the solid bits inside the wall and then screwing a large piece of wood onto those bits. At last I have something solid to attach the coat rack to!

Of course the bit of wood (nice solid birch) cost more than the coat rack, but at least they match.

This evening I’ve been playing with Google Earth and Google Maps, set off when I noticed that the coverage of Kaduna had gone from uselessly blurry to “I can see your house from here” level.

So I’ve made a map showing some of the places I mentioned during my time living in Kaduna. You can see it online at

Kaduna Places or look at it in Google Earth: Kaduna Places.

You are driving a white van, approaching a crossroads that has traffic lights. The lights have white cross markers covering them, indicating that they are out of order. Due to curves in the road visibility of the junction is poor. What do you do?

A Sound your horn and continue anyway.

B Continue driving at about 10 miles per hour above the speed limit then screech to a halt after going through the junction to glare at the driver waiting on one of the other approaches.

C Slow down so that you will be able to see other vechicles at the crossroads and have time to stop if necessary.

D Stop at the lights and wait for somebody to fix them.

The answer is B, of course.

If you weren’t driving a white van and hadn’t won your driving license in a raffle then the correct answer would be C.

Links are here and here.

As my shoulder is still not quite back to normal yet I couldn’t take my Blade out, instead I had my old single-line kite. Not very exciting and I couldn’t even get a photo of me flying it because my camera batteries ran out!

We started out at Magog Down, just south of Cambridge but there was hardly any wind there. Next stop was Newmarket Heath, still not brilliant but at least windy enough to get the thing up in the air.

This evening I’ve mostly been looking at car hire websites, trying to sort out a car for the trip to Andy’s wedding in April. The internet makes things like booking with Irish car hire companies much easier.

This morning there was one at the Elizabeth Way roundabout, another (with lots of broken glass on the road) on East Road beside the fire station and a car vs. motorbike accident on Babraham Road just before the Audi garage. The Babraham Road one looked nasty, an ambulance was in attendance but then even a little shunt with a motorbike can have very serious results.

In the evening there had been an accident just before the bridge over the river outside Stapleford. The last one was at the roundabout at the junction of Queen Edith’s Way and the ring road.

(the arrows on the maps I’ve linked to aren’t the exact sites, just in case you were wondering)

Of course I had forgotten the first rule of cars, any time you go near a garage you end up handing over at least twice as much as you originally though you would. It turned out that one of the rear shock absorbers was buggered, so in addition to £100 for the tyres I had to cough up £130 for the shocks.

They also tried to tell me that my front fog lights wasn’t working but I wouldn’t let them do anything with those and when I checked later they worked fine. I suspect the guys at the garage didn’t realise that you have to turn the headlights on first…

I’m much happier about this than seems reasonable, I think I had got so used to one-handedness that I had forgotten how much I hated it.

I still can’t lift my left arm higher than my shoulder. Physio begins on Monday…