Plates

When I was little, 1 August was a date to remember each year. Many times we would be on our summer holidays by then (88 days and counting until the boys go on tour to the IOW) and I remember being out in the car scrutinising each car that passed us on the road to see whether it had a new number plate.

The plates in question would have been ones that either ended in a letter towards the end of the alphabet, or as time progressed, flipped back to the beginning and moved the age identifier to the start.

(I can still remember the number plate of the V reg Renault that we had, as well as the numbers of Uncle Andrew's A reg dark blue Maestro - the one with the weird econometer - and our B reg light blue Maestro. Weird, especially when I can never remember the number plate of my current car!)

For the last ten or so years we've moved on to number-based age identifiers, and to smooth the peak in demand that came round at the start of August, we now have two changeover dates, one at the beginning of March and one at the end of September, so on Tuesday we moved over to the '11' plates.

Whilst I didn't go anywhere on Tuesday, it took until I was nearly home this evening (so two journeys to work and back adding up to about 180 miles) before I spotted my first 11 plate - it was on a shiny new Jag that came tearing past me on the motorway.

The lease on my car runs out at the end of July, so I will no doubt end up with an 11 plate in a few months time.

A song to finish today. This one was played on the breakfast show today and I thought it was rather good.

There - I've admitted it - I'm a closet country fan!