I’ve posted this now as well.

Readers who have nothing better to do than to check QC from time to time will notice change is afoot. Don’t fret. The website has not been taken over by someone else. Well. Not strictly speaking, anyway. Should be interesting to see what happens with a blog belonging to a bunch of cycle messengers obsessed with crosswords, fuckwit car drivers and a reality TV show called Clown Camp (“tough on clowns, tough on the causes of clowns”).

Felix suggests that our new web project might be too much in bad taste. It might be offensive to the victims or to their families. He suggests that perhaps we might want pictures of the dead and dying, just to be truly tasteless.

You know what? If I thought, for one moment, that posting such pictures would decrease the death toll on the roads, would make people stop and think about how fucking stupid it is to get into a tonne of metal and hurtle around in it at speeds close to 100mph; or how irresponsible the “Just one won’t hurt,” thought is – I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’d post a photograph of an 18 year old kid, blood frothing from his lungs because the steering wheel has smashed in his ribcage, his skull slick from multiple scalp lacerations and a fractured skull, slick with that special viscous blood that looks like seedless raspberry jam.

I’d do that. I’d do that if it meant people would start thinking about the consequences of their own actions.

ROADS AREN’T DANGEROUS. TREES AREN’T DANGEROUS. PEOPLE ARE FUCKING DANGEROUS.

Brenda. Died. Crushed between a house that fronted the road and the trailer attached to a tractor whose driver picked a really stupid place to overtake. Was she responsible? No. She was a victim. She was a victim of the “I’m all right Jack” mentality that epitomises modern British car culture. You could hear it in the locals down the pub afterwards:

“They should demolish those houses.”

“That road’s far too dangerous for cyclists to use.”

And where the trees are concerned, the question is not about just how poor the driving must have been for the car to end up smashed into pieces, wrapped around a big tree.

“They should chop it down! Burn it!”

Blame everything but the person behind the wheel of the car whose inattention caused it to smash into an immovable giant plant. Maybe the dead weren’t drivers. Maybe they were passengers. You know what: if more people exercised their right to say to their friends: “You are fucking scaring me, mate. I do not want to be in this car with you. Stop and let me out,” then maybe, just maybe, people would start to feel the peer pressure that’s needed to get them to drive with due care and consideration.

If more people were able to say to the driver: “You are driving this thing like it’s made of cardboard. It’s not. It’s made of metal and plastic and heavy shit that’s going to cause damage when it hits,” then we might getting somewhere.

But car culture is about the Jeremy Clarksons of this world. It’s a violent, thuggish world with no respect and no sense of decency. Sorry if paying it back in kind offends you but I’m offended more by the social attitude that makes me feel it’s necessary.

Next espisode now available.

This may well end up being the last volume of the Chronicles, owing to lack of character participation/interest. I haven’t decided yet. It’s either that or I divorce the Chronicles somewhat from the fora that gave birth to them, fix the cast of characters somewhat and go from there. We’ll see.

I just can’t bear the dismal punctuation in the paragraph that came with my test results. I simply must correct it otherwise it will make my teeth hurt for the rest of the day.

You scored as Lord Havelock Vetinari.

You are Lord Vetinari, supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork! Cool, calculated and always in control, you graduated from the assassins guild but failed a course on stealth and camouflage because the professor never saw you there (even though you attended every class). You always seem to know what everyone is thinking. After a conversation with you people feel that they have just escaped certain death.

You scored as Lord Havelock Vetinari. You are Lord Vetinari! Supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork! Cool, calculated, and always in control. You graduated from the assassins guild, but failed a course on stealth and camouflage, because the professor never saw you there (even though you attended every class). You always seem to know what everyone is thinking, and after a conversation with you, people feel that they have just escaped certain death. Lord Havelock Vetinari 94% Commander Samuel Vimes 81% Greebo 69% Esmerelda (Granny) Weatherwax 63% Cohen The Barbarian 56% Carrot Ironfounderson 44% Rincewind 44% Gytha (Nanny) Ogg 44% The Librarian 44% Death 25%

Which Discworld Character are you like (with pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

Ravenfamily has a new web project (actually we have two, but as one of them has been stalling for two years now, it doesn’t count). To get it up and running I need as many pictures of roadside memorials involving trees as I can get, preferably with NGRs (ObIgnorant: National Grid References from Ordnance Survey).

Please send them to the usual address. All pictures will be credited. Even better is if you can give me any information on the death toll associated with the trees and if the pictures can include bits of burnt-out wreckage.

Of course, if you object strongly to being in any way involved with a poor-taste attack on the sacrificial cult of the car, then you may not wish to bother.

Last night, about twenty minutes after Frood and I got home, there came a knock on the door. Frood answered it.

It was a chap from the other end of the village. He’d found a cat in his drive the previous day, he’d said. It had been run over. Did we not have two black and white ones?

Frood and I were convinced both the cats had been in the previous evening, but I said I’d go and take a look because I might be able to identify the owner and I had to be sure.

I really wasn’t expecting it. I was so sure both the cats had been sleeping indoors the previous night. Yet there he was, lying in the box this chap had out in his garage, at first looking like he’d just fallen asleep because he often slept in that position. Until I saw the blood in his mouth.

Mr Scrofulous Shelfbracket Scroggins (formerly known as Lammas) died age 7. He is survived by his sister Moss-Covered Four-Handled Family Gradunza (formerly known as Beltane). He was short-sighted, stupid, affectionate, chirrupy, rubbish in a fight, liked to play bongos on the window when he wanted to be let in, had a catnip habit and looked like Keanu Reeves.

I liked him. Of the two of them, I liked him best, which is a rotten thing to say but there you go.

Poor Munky. Scroggins was his cat – they both are/were. I felt awful carrying the box back to the house.

He was buried in the garden with his favourite catnip toys. Don’t know if he’ll get a chance to use them but I’ll have a word with Bast.

And then maybe I’ll call in a favour and have a word with Sekhmet. Scroggins managed to crawl up onto our neighbour’s drive. I can’t believe the driver was unaware of hitting him. The bastard should have stopped and taken him to a vet.

Scroggins was not hard to spot. He had a lot of white on him. Drivers travel through our village far too fast. It’s small, narrow and twisty. But they’re locals – they know the roads, of course. We’ve had a lot of dead cats in our village these past 6 months. Next time it could be one of the children.

Thanks to the nice man who trawled the village asking to find out who was the owner.

Sleep well, Scrogs.

I am moving to Scotland.

I realise I haven’t made a proper announcement yet. My last day in employment with the EA is 17^th February. I start my new job, based in Fife, on the 13th March. So big changes in RF Devon. The more observant of you will have seen elsewhere on the site that I grew up in Fife, so I am moving home.

I’m still a bit in shock, I think, as I only really decided to get serious about doing something about moving back up north a couple of months ago. There was a flurry of interviews and it felt like I was spending more time on the Virgin Plymouth – Edinburgh than I was spending in my own bed, all of which I somehow managed to accomplish without my present boss finding out despite each interview requiring me to be off work for three days.

Now I have to start thinking about selling the house (2 – 3 bed, great views, Rayburn, big kitchen, wildlife garden, specially-outfitted extension dedicated to bicycle storage complete with en suite, nice commuter distance from Exeter if anyone out there is interested) and moving up there, wondering when Frood will be able to move up and whether he’ll be able to get a job fairly quickly…

They say that some of the most stressful experiences you can have include moving house and changing job. I’m doing both of those things.

But, to paraphrase the Old Man, change or die. There’s no way we could carry on with the way things are at the moment. This is the right moment for change – I suppose it has to be. Steam engine time. It wouldn’t have all happened so quickly otherwise.

We’ve been down here for four years, nearly five now. That’s about average for us. I still dream about being a cycle messenger-come-comic writer-come-superhero, but we’ll get ourselves up there first and see what happens.

And it’s close to Edinburgh airport so I might get to see more of Maura, which would be a huge bonus.

I keep having an image in my mind of this woman who was once a little girl who wanted nothing more than a name, sitting in a clearing picking at the moss. She has a name now. She has many names, not all of them to her liking. She’s been kept there for long enough that she’s somewhat institutionalised but she can’t stay. Even the moss is thinning and fading away.

And the Old Man turns up and looks down at her with a smile and just says: “Time to go.”

Sorry? You have to ask?

There is not one iota of Shimano componentry on Shackleton. Blackbird has some Shimano cranks and a single Shimano hub, but I didn’t buy them. They were lying around. Fingal is as Shimano free as I could get him without actually paying for a Royce bottom bracket. Although I will get him one of those at some point.

It’s the closest thing I got to religion. I’m sure it is totally irrational, but I’d rather not give money to Shimano.