I was driving home benignly last week when this large black peoplemover sized car pulled up beside me whilst I was waiting for the lights to change. Nothing strange about that, other than my driving radar suddenly sprang up in red alert. What was it that my subconscious had noticed that I hadn’t?

I quickly realised. Even though the vehicle was stationary, the wheels still appeared to be turning. On closer examination, the vehicle had large serrated spoke-like appendages that appeared to freewheel on the bearing, or were possibly even driven via some sort of motor assembly. (The front ones were sedate, the back ones were still going very quickly). They didn’t stick out like the Roman Chariot wheels of old (or the hot car in the movie “Grease!”) but you got the feeling that had the designer been able to have done so, he would have done so.

I eventually realised that this vehicle was a proverbial “Hummer”, & the Internet revealed that spinning wheels are a fashion item.

What purpose did it serve? Only to get noticed, as do little blue LEDs set into the bonnet, fluorescent tubes under the vehicle or indeed fluffy dice hanging from the rear view mirror. The other attributes don’;t make you check your handbrake is on though!

Efteling is a theme park in the Netherlands that I have had the pleasure to visit three times, the most recent on a North Sea Ferry dash this weekend. The Hull-Rotterdam trip is an easy journey (if the crossing isn’t too rough) and the two ships are to a high standard, being renewed by P& O at the turn of the century for a cool £90m each.

We had an added bonus of getting a “Club” cabin on the way out, it cost us extra less than the value of the miniatures in the Minibar & it even had a double bed!

Efteling is an enchanting place, although dull grey skies and intermittent thunderstorms do take the sheen off the magic somewhat. The theme is Hans Christian Andersen, although it also has a complement of thrill rides as well as a couple of Disneyesque dark rides well worth a repeat visit. My favourite ride remains “Dream flight”, a breathtaking ride through enchanted forests, elves, trolls and castles in the air.

My determination to visit Efteling began back in the early ’90s when I worked for CCT Lighting. One of the Directors, David Manners, had been visiting our Dutch Distributor, Flashlight Utrecht. They had been supplying Efteling with Minuettes Silhouettes and Starlettes for many years and were particularly pleased to have been chosen for the Dream Flight project. David had been given queue-jumping VIP treatment along with the Editor of Light & Sound International and had been asked to write a piece. He knew I had a flair for prose so he delegated it to me. It was a bizarre experience to ghost-write an article based on a souvenir brochure but after a couple of informal chats with David about his impressions of the place I came up with the words & it subsequently appeared, tweaked to include the Editor’s impressions as well. Of course, it had sparked my interest so it was interesting to see how wide of the mark I’d been when I eventually made it to the park.

I wasn’t wide of the mark at all, the place has Disney standards for most of the rides, along with its own rich traditions going back to the 50s and earlier. I’d also suggest spending two days there, as you won’t be able to see it all in a day.

It was a great trip, although it was cut short somewhat by Grandma getting seriously soaked in a maze attraction after being lured in front of some squirty jets by our Son & Heir…

The contract in Norway included six paid trips home in addition to the initial flight out and the re-patriation. The six flights were based of full economy rates, although it was perfectly permissible to do back-to-back Apex tickets in order to fit in more trips home. The Married ex-pats who didn’t have their wives with them favoured this approach, although being single I tended to plan the holidays around large events in my Eighteen Plus Calendar. The highlight of the year was always the 18 Plus Easter Holiday at Caister, and that year I flew from Stavanger to Schipol (Amsterdam Airport) then onwards to Norwich Airport, where I hired one of those new fangled Mini Metros for the drive to Great Yarmouth. The contrast in airports was dramatic, Schipol was large, spacious and well planned, Norwich appeared to consist of Portakabins to make up the facilities. I haven’t returned to Norwich since then, although Schipol is now a lot more rambling and scrappy than it was in the 80s.

I mostly flew back to Newcastle (where all of my stuff was, my Dad having arranged a horse box to transport my worldly possessions back from Coventry to Home for the duration. My worldly possessions consisted of clothes, books, records and a Mobile Disco!)

On another occasion, I took the Olsen Bergen line ferry from Stavanger to North Shields for a friend’s wedding in Newcastle, however the boat wallowed outside Tynemouth for a couple of hours and I missed the ceremony. The return journey was spent in the cabin with a soldering iron as I had bought an electric piano in kit form and hadn’t finished assembling it at home! It was quite a rough crossing, the fleet only had rudimentary stabilisers and one of them was known as the “vomiting Venus”.

In the summer, I had my parents over to stay (I must have slept on the couch) and we had a pleasant trip up to Bergen via hydrofoil, an overnight stay and a flight back down. On eating breakfast in the hotel, we heard an American guest ask the waitress if the bill included a service charge, the reply being “yes, but not tips…”

The other tourist trip to do from Stavanger was to go and see Preikestolen, or Pulpit Rock. This was a three sided protuberance way up high in a nearby fjord known for the brave and foolhardy to actually get married on (if you were OK with a two hour walk and hiking gear rather than tuxedos). A 40’ cruiser (which may have been called Clipper)made the trip daily during the summer months from the harbour and I may have went on it twice, once with Hans the telex Supervisor. I don’t remember too much about the trip, other than it took a couple of hours and they fed mountain goats on the way.

Mobil introduced language lessons for ex-pats in conversational Norwegian, which I looked forward to immensely. Our teacher was very practical, and on one occasion he brought the contents of his daughter’s dolls house for us to learn the words for furniture. We didn’t progress beyond “present tense” but combined with my CSE German, it was certainly enough to get by, especially as most of the Norsk speak excellent English.

As the year progressed, I found myself more and more into the local social scene. We had cabin painting out on the islands, I met some of my neighbours socially (they told me their Mother thought I must be a Russian spy!), I declined invitations to go cross-country skiing and I half-planned (but never implemented) a trip by boat up past the arctic circle to see the northern lights. I went to one particular birthday party that saw me heading home at first light, after long sessions singing with a guitarist and also discussing the finer aspects of undersea construction with a North Sea Diver. Of course, a lot of the time there was nothing much doing, so I rented a lot of videos and replaced my Acorn Atom PC with a proper Apple II system that I bought off an ex-pat Yank. It was all 110 volt and came complete with TV, fan feed dot matrix printer and transformer.

It didn’t look as though there would be further work beyond the first year, so I landed a follow-on job with Northern Telecom out in the Middle East. Inevitably, after I signed the Contract, another job appeared, this time for Esso Stavanger. In my final weeks, I was invited to the Mobil Christmas Party, which was a delightful event. I also visited the home of one of the Operators who I had a crush on, a stunningly pretty older woman who had the looks and charm of Felicity Kendal (in her Good Life persona) who was also an outrageous flirt. I was a little shocked to meet her husband, who proudly showed me his vast collection of antique hunting rifles, all fully working…

On my last day, the team presented me with a glass mug engraved “1981″ and a saying in old Norwegian which roughly translated said with good humour, life is to be lived. Sadly, it got cracked in one of my many subsequent house moves (whilst the various crystal decanters didn’t!) but it now lives at my Mum’s house for safe keeping. Now that David is no longer a toddler it is probably safe to bring back to Morley.

It is Obtiser day. In the letters page, a missive from neil Dawson (Morley North Labour Party Secretary) attempts to spin the election result still further, suggesting that the Independents are a “Busted Flush”. In it he draws our attention to the implied fact that Finnigan came fourth in most polling districts and labour came first in every single one by a good margin.

How does he know this? Well, he doesn’t, it is speculation based on a non-scientific sample by party activists watching ballot papers as boxes are unpacked and counted but not sorted. (Sorting takes place after the initial count is complete, not before.) They may also use exit polls as well, but these results are at best indicative and can not be legitimately substantiated beyond the overall result. If politicians used the word “probably” in their potentially misleading claims they might be more credible, however being truthful and factual does not suit the political parties if it doesn’t suit their message.

Two other political letters in the paper, the first from Ardsley Labour Councillors explaining about a local grass cutting problem. Needless to say, they blame the Council and also patronise a local resident who complained about them using the situation as a photo-opportunity.

The third letter is a sort of joke about mohican grass cutting and installation art which a) doesn’t make any sense, b) isn’t funny and c) isn’t in the style of the author, who is on the same planning panel as me. I’ll ask him to explain it to me next week and you never know, he might even tell me who really wrote it…