Photography

It's a while since I posted some photographs and looking through my collection it seemed to me that there are some that by good fortune came out quite well.

The photo above is an example. It was taken at my friend Russ's 60th birthday party. He's a neurologist by profession but has a band as well and they played some marvellous music. I'd been taking photos with my flash all evening and these pics were OK, but the flash failed on this picture and the lights of the stage came out in gorgeous colour.

So this photo was a mistake, but one I'm glad I made.

Footnote: Having blogged this, I see blogger has cut off the right 1/4 of the picture. If you click on the photo you'll see the whole picture and consequently the full range of colours.

Your Mileage WILL Vary

The man in the car waved at me. So did the woman in the next car. They didn't use all their fingers.

I think it was because I was driving on the motorway at 60 mph. The speed limit was 70 as far as other drivers were concerned but they didn't realise I was conducting a Scientific Experiment.

You see a few months ago I bought a Bluemotion Golf. It's wonderful: comfortable, quiet, solid German engineering, good to drive and well-equipped. And its fuel consumption is phenomenal: 60.1 mpg urban, 83.1 extra-urban and 74.3 combined. That's about 900 miles on a tank of diesel.

The problem is that I've been getting just 600 miles from a tank.

So I designed an experiment. I decided that in the Golf I would

• Turn off the air conditioning
  
• Drive half a mile to the local service station
  
• Check that the tyre pressures were optimal
  
• Go to the motorway and drive along at 60 mph to the next junction.
  
• Drive back along the motorway and go home.
  

This should be closer to an "extra urban" cycle than a combined one.

I must say it is a little nerve wracking driving along the motorway at 60. One is constantly checking the rear-view mirror to see whether some speed fiend is burning rubber in his attempt to avoid running up your exhaust pipe, but I managed. The majority of the motorway journey was actually done at 50 mph, because of roadworks, which should have made the journey even more economical.

And then, as a scientific control, I did the same with my wife's Mercedes C220CDI. Here's what we found.

Have a look at what's happening here.

In the Mercedes, my little drive (shown in the purple bar) achieved pretty close to the official Extra-urban (red bar) economy of the car. It was way better than the Combined figure, which is what I'd expect.

But in the Golf, the fuel consumption is far worse than I'd been led to expect from the official figures. Although 80% of the drive was at 50-60mph on the motorway, I achieved barely more than the Urban figure and way less than the Combined one.

What going on here? To find out, my wife phoned our dealer, Martins of Basingstoke, who promised to get a technician to call back. She phoned three times, but we've had no call back from technicians.

This is really a pity, because in every other respect we're very happy with this Golf. But we bought it for fuel efficiency and it's just not living up to its claims and it appears our dealer couldn't care less.

I feel like waving at VW. Not using all my fingers.