What old age might have in store for us?

[klondike]

I often wish I'd got my grandparents and parents to write down the names and relationships of people in photos on the back. I found a Victorian wedding photo which must have been before the the birth of my mother as I do recognise the face of her much older sister as a young child who was a bridesmaid. Scores of others where I recognise nobody. All unknown and forgotten.

Won't be a problem in future - no finding little boxes of photos - virtually none get printed now. All online and I suspect mostly never viewed again. I expect names will be no problem though - the internet giants know more about us then we do ourselves. Possibly not me as I don't do social media but many of my pictures do get stored by google.

[Scrumpy]

Sitting at the crossroads forgetting whether you are going to turn left.. right or straight on...
 

[klondike]

Never done that. I have been on autopilot and realised I hadn't a damned clue just where I was and had to turn on the sat nav to find the way home. Usually on autopilot I get it right and just wonder how the hell I managed to last 20 miles or so. The other favourite is heading off to one regular destination when actually going somewhere else. Frightening really.

[Michael Rolls]

Never done that. I have been on autopilot and realised I hadn't a damned clue just where I was and had to turn on the sat nav to find the way home. Usually on autopilot I get it right and just wonder how the hell I managed to last 20 miles or so. The other favourite is heading off to one regular destination when actually going somewhere else. Frightening really.

Done that when I was only about 40!

[klondike]

When I was contracting I'd often drive up to 80 miles and back each day. A lot of that used to get done on autopilot. That was before sat nav was around so just as well I didn't go past a turn.

[Michael Rolls]

know the feeling - it was 58 miles from home to office so 116 miles a day before I drove out to meeting, etc (to be fair, if I could be sure I would be office-bound for the day, I took the train, but most weeks that didn't happen - did over 3,000 miles a month)

[Alex]

I drove home from Germany on my own, up through Holland to Rotterdam and no sat nav in those days.  I wonder how I did it sometimes, I guess we lose confidence when we get old because I certainly couldn't do it now !

[klondike]

On your own was quite a trip. I remember there were three of us drove to Cologne in a company 3 lite Granada up to the scuppers with disk drives (in those days huge things about 2 foot across and a foot deep). It was a disaster recovery exercise where our system had to be brought up and run on the the German mainframe.

The exercise went off without a hitch but the car was worse for wear. This was the days of vinyl roofs. Honking along an autobahn and a pillock wondered what it would be like with the electric sun roof open. He soon found out. The vinyl must have been fixed badly as the wind got under the edge and ripped it right back. The back edge must have been well fixed as that held and it sounded like the car was falling to bits as it hammered up and down on the boot.

On top of that the brakes were crappy and as it was an automatic that made things worse as there was just about no engine braking. We'd been lent the car by HR or Personnel as it was called back then and they were told about the brakes and why it no longer had a vinyl roof. Apparently the message about the brakes wasn't passed on as we heard that somebody had taken it out and gone over the middle of a roundabout. They were not best pleased.

[Alex]

I had an accident in a Ford Granada on black ice.  My ex was asleep in the front totally pixxed, his head pushed out the windscreen and he didn't feel a thing     They were big sturdy cars weren't they ? fortunately for me.

[klondike]

I used to regularly go to watch banger racing at a couple of dubious tracks. A couple cars used to stand out Rover P6 2000s were fast but the "Sweeney" model Granadas were robust as hell. They could take and dish out one hell of a beating. The thing that always amused me was that those bangers were all MOT failures usually in those days on the grounds that they were so corroded that they were unsafe on the road. Those bangers made that look like complete BS.

My son bought an old Triumph Dolomite that had been a "star" in Ashes to Ashes with its claim to fame being Gene Hunt had to drive it as his Quattro was out of action and made some comment about it being a heap of shit. It still is as although #1 son is still full of good intentions about the restoration it still hasn't happened and it is slowly rusting away at his mates garage. it will probably be part of my grand daughter's legacy.