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Red squirrel, Blue Motion, what’s the connection?

Well there’s a nice surprise.  I just paid my car tax online and it turned out to be a pleasant experience. Not only because a dinky little car guides you along each stage of the journey on the DVLA website but at the end of it the bill was less than a third of what I expected to pay.  Last year it cost me over a hundred quid. This time a year’s excise duty is £35.  That’s our reward for choosing our new, less polluting (though now quite grubby) Blue Motion Golf. 

I’ve had occasional urges to write about cars but until now managed to suppress the inner Clarkson (someone has to). However, must admit I’m an eco-warrier with nostalgic memories of my first car, a Morris Minor with a split windscreen and left-right indicators that shot out from somewhere just behind the doors, in those long-ago days when the Highway Code meant learning handsignals as well as how to stay on the road.

None of that kind of thing in our new Blue Motion which has so many automatic functions you barely need  do anything more than stay awake at the wheel, taking occasional awestruck glances at the dashboard.   I am learning to overcome the distraction of the little computer screen that tells you how much diesel you are consuming along every millimetre of the journey. A nice smooth run can clock up 75mpg but a trip to the shops could register 20mpg.  (If nothing else it puts you right off driving in town unless you absolutely have to!)

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But no time to gloat. I am packing for a week  at Pond Cottage where I hope to see the two red squirrels now reported to be visiting the bird feeder.  Funnily enough  greys are much less visible since the first red arrived which makes me wonder about the culling fever that is now heating environmental circles. Hope I have time to explore that one a bit further. Maybe I can think about it while the Blue Motion is driving me up the M90 past that hellish eyesore of the open cast coal mine at Kelty.  I wonder if local habitat destruction has had anything to do with displacing red squirrels to Pond Cottage.