Once upon a time, British registered cars produced hours of harmless fun on long car journeys. Anyone else remember the numberplate game?
As someone who can't read or write on a car or a bus (and that includes scrolling on a screen) without becoming a biohazard, long car journeys as a passenger, or even short trips on slow-moving buses, are tedious for me. I can't remember how we came across it but at some point in my childhood we discovered the numberplate game, which passed the time. British numberplates used to include the whole range of numbers from 1 to 999 and you had to spot them in numerical order (so you were not actually collecting numbers, as such, merely looking out for the next one and moving on: no writing involved!)
The old system was replaced in September 2001, a few months before my son was born, and my first thought was They Have Spoiled The Game! Surely it would soon become impossible to play, as older cars disappeared from the roads. Not only that, a few years later the government introduced a scrappage scheme intended to boost the sales of new cars by encouraging people to part with their old ones. I therefore didn't attempt to play the game with my own child. The new registration scheme doesn't lend itself to any very obvious equivalent, as although it has been in place for over 14 years there is quite a limited range of numbers (so far, only 02-15 and 51-65). The previous sequence with prefixes A-Y ran from 1983 to 2001, and before that there was a sequence with suffixes, from 1963 (ish) to 1982. Earlier than that there were also plates with up to three numbers.
On a longish walk down a busy road a few weeks ago for some reason the game popped into my head, and I noticed that many of the cars passing me had pre-2001 plates. I started wondering whether it would still be possible to play the game after all (surely not? How many people have cars that are over 14 years old? OK, I do, but surely it isn't typical?) I then had a little bet with myself, that if I should happen to see an old car with a number 1 I would start again and see how far I could get. Within ten minutes I had seen 1, 2, 3 and 4, in that order. Do not make bets with yourself.
I don't know that I am really obsessive enough to carry on with this all the way to 999, but observations over the past few weeks have led to some surprises. There really are lots of old cars still on the road. Why? Is it a Cardiff thing? Is it just that the economic recovery hasn't reached Cardiff? Do we have better car mechanics than other places? Is it that people may be in work, so have the money to run a car, but are not affluent enough to borrow money for new cars or to buy them outright? A stroll around my neighbourhood revealed over 100 pre-2001 registered cars, with a surprising number of those coming from the pre-1983 sequence. There are even a few which predate the A-Y suffixes, so these vehicles are over 50 years old. Some of them are the classic makes which clearly really do last, but others are not so obviously so (although it is not a bad guide to which manufacturers are good!) I am certainly not going to feel so self-conscious about my own old car in future. While there are, as you might expect, older cars in down-at-heel areas, you will also find them in some more comfortably-off districts, perhaps because there are elderly drivers there who are not quite ready to stop driving altogether but think it is not worthwhile to invest in a new car. In some streets you will pass a row of cars in which all or nearly all are over 14 years old. There are some exceptions (personalised numberplates, or people who have chosen to keep a favourite number from car to car, so the car is not as old as its registration makes it appear) but even so, it's obvious that many people do not change their car at anything like the rate which car manufacturers might hope for. How do they keep going at all, if Cardiff is typical?
The game is really just a harmless pastime, but it does have the side-effect of making you quite observant. Woe to anyone who commits a crime if their car happens to have a number close to one someone playing the game is looking for (although you might feel a bit silly confessing - "Yes, I'm sure the number was 121, I remember because I've been looking for 120 for days and it was annoying seeing the next one"). As far as I can remember, the rate of spotting numbers is not dissimilar to what it was back in the 1970s. More cars on the roads compensate for the new ones which don't count.
I haven't given up yet - a month-long wait for one number nearly made me forget the whole thing, but yesterday I saw the next two numbers within seconds of each other, so I might carry on for a bit longer, and marvel at what I've discovered about the car market in the meantime.
Showing posts with label trivia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trivia. Show all posts
Sunday, 24 January 2016
Friday, 1 July 2011
Thing 3 (Part 2) : Names
Helen
Unobjectionable, easy to pronounce. There were no others in my year at school (the only other Helen I remember at school actually had the same surname as me). At college, a few more, but not in overwhelming numbers. (One of those is now an academic at my place of work!) It was only on arriving at library school that I started to realise just how common a name it was. In my first professional post I was greeted on the first day with "we were wondering if you wouldn't mind using your middle name": I was the third Helen in a small team. In my current post I started on the same day as another Helen, and there are several others. And just look at all the Helens following CPD23! It does seem to be a very popular name for librarians.
Ceridwen
"No", I said, "I don't mind using my middle name, it's Ceridwen". Cue hasty change of subject, and no more was heard about using my middle name. Outside Wales, not much chance of anyone pronouncing or spelling this one correctly. (The "C" is hard and the stress is on the second syllable. Ker-ID-wen.) Its heyday was a bit before my time (like a lot of expatriate Welsh, my parents were a bit behind with fashions in Welsh names), but there are more of us around than you might expect. Ceridwen comes from medieval Welsh poetry originally: she owned the cauldron of poetic inspiration, which sounds good, but she wasn't a very nice person. My parents did not realise, and nor did I for a while, that it is used widely within pagan circles, and quite often by people who didn't start out as Ceridwen. It gets shortened to Ceri (usually, though a recent Welsh novel featured a Crid). It's the name my husband and his friends and family use.
My Twitter name at the moment is @Ceridwen339. I'm aware that it puts some people off - too Welsh (tough!), can't pronounce it (see above), or possibly expect Wicca and are disappointed. 339 is simply the number of a house I used to live in. Inevitably there was already a @Ceridwen (she lives in Arkansas) and several variations on Ceridwen with numbers and different spellings, all foiled no doubt by the Arkansas lady (and including a Ceridwen Price). I'm probably going to tweak the Twitter handle (339 isn't a magic number, but maybe it looks that way in conjunction with Ceridwen!)
Price
Another common name, but one which causes a surprising amount of bother. People make you say it and spell it over and over, and claim they have never heard it before. Nobody gets it first time on the phone. I get more financial spam than anyone else in the office. It has nothing to do with money! It's just a boring patronymic.
Helen Price? There must be hundreds. Strangely, several of them are or were librarians (and there's that Sol and Helen Price Library). There are over 80 Helen Prices on LinkedIn, and, inevitably, at least 6 on Twitter, including one in Cardiff. I always used to sign my name "Helen C. Price" and that is how it appears in LC authorities.
Saunders
I'd been warned by married friends that marriage is a name minefield. I started out intending to keep my own name - well, as a cataloguer, I wouldn't want to mess with that authority heading, would I? Saunders, as well as being another common patronymic, was also the surname of two other people working on the same floor (it's right up there with Helen as a common name!) My intention was scuppered quite early on by officialdom, but I did hang on to my own surname as an extra middle name, which for some reason I thought was a well-established practice (Hillary Rodham Clinton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning), and now I know it isn't. The trend today seems to be moving back to wife taking husband's name. Changing your name brings its own problems. Credit rating? Back to square one. Getting bureaucrats to accept that you are still the same person, ditto. If you are a married woman, making sure you still have enough ID with your name on it, changed or not, to be able to produce documentation for anything, be prepared to do battle. I would really like to know what the experience of couples in civil partnerships in these matters is - I haven't spotted a name-changing tradition developing there but there may be one. I do know one or two married couples where husband and wife have joined their names.
Saunders is also probably on a level with Price for people making you spell it and not hearing it right first time (favourite version : Mrs.Thornbirds) and some people seem not to be able to pronounce it either.
Helen Saunders? Quite a few of those (though fewer librarians!) Helen Price Saunders? Yes, that's me, usually. Helen Ceridwen Price Saunders? Definitely me, but that is too many names!
Unobjectionable, easy to pronounce. There were no others in my year at school (the only other Helen I remember at school actually had the same surname as me). At college, a few more, but not in overwhelming numbers. (One of those is now an academic at my place of work!) It was only on arriving at library school that I started to realise just how common a name it was. In my first professional post I was greeted on the first day with "we were wondering if you wouldn't mind using your middle name": I was the third Helen in a small team. In my current post I started on the same day as another Helen, and there are several others. And just look at all the Helens following CPD23! It does seem to be a very popular name for librarians.
Ceridwen
"No", I said, "I don't mind using my middle name, it's Ceridwen". Cue hasty change of subject, and no more was heard about using my middle name. Outside Wales, not much chance of anyone pronouncing or spelling this one correctly. (The "C" is hard and the stress is on the second syllable. Ker-ID-wen.) Its heyday was a bit before my time (like a lot of expatriate Welsh, my parents were a bit behind with fashions in Welsh names), but there are more of us around than you might expect. Ceridwen comes from medieval Welsh poetry originally: she owned the cauldron of poetic inspiration, which sounds good, but she wasn't a very nice person. My parents did not realise, and nor did I for a while, that it is used widely within pagan circles, and quite often by people who didn't start out as Ceridwen. It gets shortened to Ceri (usually, though a recent Welsh novel featured a Crid). It's the name my husband and his friends and family use.
My Twitter name at the moment is @Ceridwen339. I'm aware that it puts some people off - too Welsh (tough!), can't pronounce it (see above), or possibly expect Wicca and are disappointed. 339 is simply the number of a house I used to live in. Inevitably there was already a @Ceridwen (she lives in Arkansas) and several variations on Ceridwen with numbers and different spellings, all foiled no doubt by the Arkansas lady (and including a Ceridwen Price). I'm probably going to tweak the Twitter handle (339 isn't a magic number, but maybe it looks that way in conjunction with Ceridwen!)
Price
Another common name, but one which causes a surprising amount of bother. People make you say it and spell it over and over, and claim they have never heard it before. Nobody gets it first time on the phone. I get more financial spam than anyone else in the office. It has nothing to do with money! It's just a boring patronymic.
Helen Price? There must be hundreds. Strangely, several of them are or were librarians (and there's that Sol and Helen Price Library). There are over 80 Helen Prices on LinkedIn, and, inevitably, at least 6 on Twitter, including one in Cardiff. I always used to sign my name "Helen C. Price" and that is how it appears in LC authorities.
Saunders
I'd been warned by married friends that marriage is a name minefield. I started out intending to keep my own name - well, as a cataloguer, I wouldn't want to mess with that authority heading, would I? Saunders, as well as being another common patronymic, was also the surname of two other people working on the same floor (it's right up there with Helen as a common name!) My intention was scuppered quite early on by officialdom, but I did hang on to my own surname as an extra middle name, which for some reason I thought was a well-established practice (Hillary Rodham Clinton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning), and now I know it isn't. The trend today seems to be moving back to wife taking husband's name. Changing your name brings its own problems. Credit rating? Back to square one. Getting bureaucrats to accept that you are still the same person, ditto. If you are a married woman, making sure you still have enough ID with your name on it, changed or not, to be able to produce documentation for anything, be prepared to do battle. I would really like to know what the experience of couples in civil partnerships in these matters is - I haven't spotted a name-changing tradition developing there but there may be one. I do know one or two married couples where husband and wife have joined their names.
Saunders is also probably on a level with Price for people making you spell it and not hearing it right first time (favourite version : Mrs.Thornbirds) and some people seem not to be able to pronounce it either.
Helen Saunders? Quite a few of those (though fewer librarians!) Helen Price Saunders? Yes, that's me, usually. Helen Ceridwen Price Saunders? Definitely me, but that is too many names!
Friday, 24 June 2011
Thing 2 : meeting the neighbours
Thing 2 in the CPD23 things programme is "investigate other blogs", find some of interest, follow, comment and generally get used to how the whole thing works and find out who else is taking part. There are so many! I'm sure I've missed many that are relevant to me and hope to stumble across them via tags - or serendipity - which come to think of it is probably how our catalogue works too.
I've found four colleagues from my own workplace so far, including a cataloguing colleague's blog darksideofthecatalogue, and Notes from the basement (featuring our special collections where I spend some of my time with the rare books), and lots of people who are already Twitter contacts, but I'm also hoping to reach out a bit and find the ones I don't already know in real life or online.
As my career, if that's what it is, has been quite diverse, I have a fairly wide range of points of interest (cataloguing, subject librarianship, public libraries, special collections, rare books, Welsh). I've found some blog names I like, e.g. ones with literary or cultural references such as Palely loitering and Libraries gave us power. I'm looking forward to following Adventures of a Welsh Librarian, from the National Library of Wales (one of the many places I've been associated with!) : it's a partly bilingual blog, too, which I also considered doing although I think for the purposes of CPD23 I will stick to English as there don't seem to be many Welsh-speaking participants. This may change later on once I have a better feel for how I might use the blog in future. Name and appearance make a big difference, sort of "kerb appeal" for blogs : I need to work out how everyone else is doing all the clever things which make their blogs look so professional, and I still need to come up with a better name for my own. And finally, a trivial fact : a lot of people called Helen work in libraries!
I've found four colleagues from my own workplace so far, including a cataloguing colleague's blog darksideofthecatalogue, and Notes from the basement (featuring our special collections where I spend some of my time with the rare books), and lots of people who are already Twitter contacts, but I'm also hoping to reach out a bit and find the ones I don't already know in real life or online.
As my career, if that's what it is, has been quite diverse, I have a fairly wide range of points of interest (cataloguing, subject librarianship, public libraries, special collections, rare books, Welsh). I've found some blog names I like, e.g. ones with literary or cultural references such as Palely loitering and Libraries gave us power. I'm looking forward to following Adventures of a Welsh Librarian, from the National Library of Wales (one of the many places I've been associated with!) : it's a partly bilingual blog, too, which I also considered doing although I think for the purposes of CPD23 I will stick to English as there don't seem to be many Welsh-speaking participants. This may change later on once I have a better feel for how I might use the blog in future. Name and appearance make a big difference, sort of "kerb appeal" for blogs : I need to work out how everyone else is doing all the clever things which make their blogs look so professional, and I still need to come up with a better name for my own. And finally, a trivial fact : a lot of people called Helen work in libraries!
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