God bless all who sail in her...

Buying a 2000cc petrol engined car just as the price of unleaded hits £1/litre might not have been such a good idea, but the Saab got us back to Castle Acre safely, though mammoth thunder storms that nearly flooded some of the roads we were driving that night.

And to complete a perfect road trip, the Brown family tradition of carrying a Piglet doll on the dashboard can now continue. Pictured here is a reunion of three of the four Piglets that have kept me, my father and my grandfather company in the cockpits of various Royal Air Force planes and family cars (for instance: a Spitfire, an Airspeed Oxford, an Auster, a Meteor jet, a Sabre jet, a Hunter jet, a Canberra jet, a VW Passat station wagon, four Volkswagen Golfs and a Skoda Octavia...). When BM heard about the tradition, she dug out a half finished Piglet she'd started as a child, but never got round to stuffing or giving eyes. Piglet number four now sits proudly above the dashboard of the Saab.

*j*