Fiona's on the road again

I occasionally visit the DVLA website for news of my previous car, Fiona. I traded her in when buying Sophie last October. At that point she had covered 194,729 miles and was visually in very good condition inside and out, despite her thirteen years. I'd looked after her. But a very expensive auto gearbox replacement was looming, and rather than use up most of my savings on that, I put sentiment aside and bought a newer car on a three-year HP deal - another Volvo, the same model, but actually better in every way. (And I preserved most of my savings, which is how I could afford to buy a new phone last month)

The DVLA let you see whether your old car is being taxed and getting MOTs. If there is an ongoing record, you’ll know that it's still on the road. You can't get details of who the new keeper is, nor where they live. But at least you know that your cherished companion of many years remains a going concern. 

Well, I'd looked at the DVLA website from time to time since trading in Fiona on 27th October 2023. I hadn't seen any indication that she was still being driven about. That might mean, of course, that the worn auto gearbox was being fixed, and the job was taking a long time. Perhaps Fiona had been taken to a specialist repairer, and had languished there while replacement parts were sourced and obtained. This would only be a worthwhile exercise if her purchase price had been low, and the job was being done on the cheap. She remained taxed though: which implied she hadn't been scrapped.

Then at last - it was yesterday - I saw that Fiona had passed an MOT on 16th February at 196,533 miles, and must therefore be running around somewhere in the country at this very moment. 

When I delved further, I saw that, actually, she’d failed an MOT on the 15th February at 196,530 miles because of dangerously thin rear brake pads. But clearly these had been dealt with, and she was then good to go next day.

The MOT test on 27th February 2023 at 184,296 miles had been in my ownership.

By 27th October 2023, when I’d handed Fiona over to Caffyns Volvo Eastbourne, she’d done 194,729 miles. The MOT on 15th February showed 196,530 miles. So she’d covered a further 1,801 miles up till then, driven by someone else. 

As for those dangerously thin rear brake pads, I'd last renewed them on 18th January 2022 at 167,569 miles. I keep a spreadsheet to show me which mileage-based expenses are coming up. Had I kept Fiona, I was scheduled to replace them (and the rear brake discs) during 2024. Well, the new owner picked that bill up. 

I wasn't much surprised that he or she hadn't realised the pads were getting thin when buying. My thinking was (and still is) that having taken Fiona in as part-payment for Sophie, Caffyns shuffled her off into a car auction, where cars are sold ‘as seen’, and there is no proper opportunity to make a careful examination of anything. The buyer would have viewed a very clean, good-looking Volvo, well cared-for, with many luxury features, and (above all) a powerful diesel engine that started first time. I've little doubt that while a Volvo main dealer wouldn't want Fiona on their forecourt - she was much too old - in an auction Fiona would have been tempting to the right person, and such a person had bought her. 

I'm speculating of course. And I shouldn't care. Really, I have let go. But nevertheless, it's good to know that Fiona is still active, and not simply a cannibalised hulk in some scrapyard. 

Curious to know just a little more, I tried following the test centre link, to see where in the country she had been tested, but found that I’d need the reference on the latest V5C to reveal that. Only the current owner can look that up. 

Well, I hope he or she likes driving Fiona, and will look after her. I would be very surprised to encounter her again. But if that should happen, I will try to place Sophie next to her, and get a photo I would treasure.

Copilot

Microsoft have been rolling out their AI app called Copilot, and a short while ago, after a Windows update, I noticed a new and colourful icon at the bottom right of my laptop screen. I left it alone until yesterday, when an experimental tap opened up a wide sidebar on the right-hand edge of the screen. 

It invited me to create something. So being frivolous, I asked Copilot to 'create a green dragon in a bowl of custard, breathing fire'. 

Well, Copilot obliged! I was presented with four AI-generated pictures of a dragon in a bowl of custard, being fiery. I scrolled through them, and chose what I thought was the most realistic, in the sense that if I ever came across a dragon sitting in a bowl of custard, this is how it would appear.  

I think that's a pretty good effort. It could be tweaked further of course, but for a first try Copilot has given me an unexpectedly polished result. The 'artwork' seems faultless. Yes, it's a bit Disneyish, but there's no mistaking what it is, and it's very much what I had in mind. Putting it another way: given this, would I commission a human artist to create a similar picture for me? Not when Copilot can come up with this. 

But I thought Copilot should face sterner tests before giving it an unequivocal thumbs-up. I next asked the app to 'create a picture of a 2015 Volvo XC60 driving on a mountain road, in rainbow colours'. Well, I got this:

Actually, I first asked for a 2016 Volvo XC60, the same year of manufacture as Sophie, but it gave me an XC60 with the new body shape introduced in 2018. I therefore brought the manufacturing year forward to 2015, so that there ought to be no mistake whatever about the body styling. But it hasn't worked. Copilot isn't (yet) sophisticated enough to get styling details absolutely right. Apart from that, the rainbow effects are very much overdone. In fact it looks twee. The car might as well be accompanied by dancing fairies, unicorns and pink ponies. 

Very well: let's get dark and moody, and create a serious picture of doom, despair and tragic loss. I asked Copilot to 'create a picture of the steamship Titanic sinking in fog'. I thought of the powerful 1997 film. I had a particular scene or two in my head:

At first I got four rather staid and disappointing scenes of a multi-funnelled steamship in old-fashioned sepia. They looked like contemporary postcards from 1912. So I added, 'in colourful light'. The result was unfortunate. 

I didn't intend this. By 'colourful light' I meant masthead lighting, the odd searchlight, and various distress flares. Instead it looks as if the Titanic is hove to, fully afloat, in a calm sea, and everyone's having a ball. An amazing firework display will begin at any moment. No hint at all that anything is wrong - except perhaps the flotsam littering the water, which could simply be little bits of ice. I'm once again perfectly happy with the standard of the 'artwork'. But how could Copilot associate such playful party lights with the horror of the real-life disaster? Surely the name 'Titanic' by itself determines the prevailing mood, and those colours would need to be fitful and sombre by default?

So it's not a very successful experiment overall. Clearly you have to be very specific about what you ask Copilot to do. 

Is it useful to me personally? No. I don't want to make pictures this way. It bothers me that the results, though accomplished, are generic and obviously derived from existing photos and artwork. Yes, it's a very quick and easy way to produce a nice picture. But a stab in the back, surely, for any commercial artist needing to make a living. 

My abiding memory of Mum

Mum died fifteen years ago today, on 3rd February 2009. It was cancer, first diagnosed in 1975, but defeated for a long while with a mastectomy. It had, however, returned it later life, when Mum was in her late eighties. This time, it was lymphatic cancer. I was never told the precise details, nor about what had to be done at home daily. A nurse would come; and Dad learned to do a lot of it himself. He and Mum were so very, very close. They didn't ask me for help. They didn't draw me into it at all. Both put on a brave face when I visited. My parents kept many things from me. Frankly, I think I was - to them - still a wayward child who could not be trusted with sensitive information and disturbing details, even in my fifties. 

Mum actually died of a stroke in her room at the nursing home she had been moved to, five days after leaving the hospice where she had been for three weeks. She'd done well at the hospice. But on the grounds that she appeared to be in remission and couldn't stay there forever, the hospice wanted her room back for somebody else. 

The nursing home phoned me when I was walking back to my car, after visiting the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. It was bad news out of the blue on an otherwise sunny morning. News not expected so soon, as Dad and I thought Mum had at least another month to live. 

I didn't crumple in the street, just as I hadn't crumpled on hearing that my brother had been killed. I took it calmly, went into practical mode, and never really emerged from that. After a quick call to Dad, to say I'd pick him up and take him to the nursing home, I dashed back to the Cottage, then drove on to Dad's, and from there to the home to see what was to be seen, and say goodbye.

For Dad it was the passing of his life's partner, to whom he had been devoted. He was nevertheless calm, and seemed almost reconciled. But it must have been a savage blow to him.

My own feelings were mixed. I had been half-detached from the whole thing, partly because my parents let it be so, and partly from emotional self-defence.  And yet here was my Mum, once alive and full of personality, now this still figure laid out on her bed, with a strange unfamiliar look on her face. My Mum. But also a dead body in a nightdress. 

Had I ever seen a dead body before? Face to face? I wasn't sure. Now I was confronted with one. I was in her room alone. Dad had had his ten minutes with the woman who had been by his side - his wife - for sixty-two years. He was strong. If he had broken down and cried at the sight of her, you would not have known it. Now it was my turn to let tears flow - or not. Certainly my heart felt heavy, and my throat fit to choke. I had not been much of a daughter. I'd not been as affectionate as I should have been. I hadn't shared much with her. We had never held each other. 

I gazed at her, or what was left of her. I felt no hovering presence. There were only these physical remains; a body that nothing now animated. I was not religious, but I wished her spirit - if there was such a thing - a wonderful onward journey. And even if there was only nothingness now, I would remember her, and cherish all my memories. I promised her that. 

Within a week I'd written a poem to encapsulate that five minutes by her bed. It was most unlike me to write a poem. An essay would normally be my preferred way to express in words what I felt. But perhaps, for once, a poem seemed best. Photographically, it would have been a series of blurred and out-of-focus pictures, as if by mistake I'd set too slow a shutter speed, and my hands had been shaky. 

Here's the poem.

UNDER THE SHEET

Strange, how a Hand had wiped away

All my engagements for the day.

Strange, how I'd had to drive behind

An empty hearse, with room for one inside.

And in the gallery, as I studied art,

How strange it was,

That feeling I was playing a part.

 

Then later in your room,

With the white sheet on your bed,

I stood with a bursting heart

While a storm wave broke in my head.

Oh so cold and pale!

Your face averted,

As if a flame had passed too close.

I hoped the bearer of that fire

Had been a winged angel

Or perhaps the Holy Ghost.

 

The unbeliever knelt and prayed,

And found some loving words to say.

I wished you in Heaven, and said it through tears,

But they couldn't repair the guilt of years.

I wanted to tell you and explain,

I wanted to tell you my real name.

And speak of this, and this, and this,

But all I could do at the very end

Was to give your cheek the softest kiss.

 

Lucy Melford  2009 0209

Reading it now, it seems very raw and unpolished, but I think my anguish at not ever being close enough to my Mum comes through. We'd had a wary way with each other. Now it was too late to break down barriers to full understanding.

I can see that room now, and her body on it. It must have horrified me. Try as I might, it's the abiding memory I have of her, even though I have many very good pictures of her while alive and kicking. I can summon them up on my phone in an instant, simply by searching the app I use with the keyword 'Mum'. Pictures like these (all of them taken by me) from 1975, 2000 and 2005:

Or this sequence from her 86th birthday in August 2007, less than two years before she was gone:

Her ashes are scattered in the rockery at the bottom of my back garden. So are Dad's. They were soon reunited. 

The immigrant barge at Portland

I was on Portland recently, having lunch with friends at the Jailhouse Café inside The Verne Prison. From the garden there you can look down on much of the vast Portland Harbour, including the quays and jetties at the foot of the cliffs. I was intrigued to see the Bibby Stockholm moored there. This is the floating accommodation intended for immigrants whose applications are being considered. It is a supposedly cheaper substitute for putting them up in hotels. It can house over 500 people, but at the moment very few are inside, because the entire notion of keeping people on the barge has been dogged by difficulties such as concerns over fire safety, legionnaire disease in the pipework, and its perception as a kind of floating prison. 

Anyway, it has reached Portland and looks set to stay there. Here are two shots I took of it from The Verne high above. 

I must say I was expecting to see something rather larger. 

It's that very compact oblong structure left of the orange maintenance rig with the white crane, and below the ship with the red hull. It looks utilitarian, but if the accommodation is about the same standard as you find on the average oil drilling platform, then anyone accommodated there wouldn't have a lot to complain about unless used to plenty of home comforts. Space, privacy, serenity, and a host of interesting things to do might all be lacking, but it wouldn't be a hell-hole unless the 'guests' trashed the place. (On the other hand that's a possibility not to be dismissed) 

Tap on the photos to get a larger view. I can count two main gangways into the barge, and two smaller ones. If a fire did break out, four gangways might not be enough to guarantee the safe evacuation of several hundred people unless they were highly disciplined and didn't panic. Quite a big ask, I'd say.

I saw no sign of life. 

Has the fuss made about this barge been justified? It's obviously better than some kind of internment camp (on the lines of ex-army nissen huts behind barbed wire), but I'd personally hate to be cooped up inside such a small structure for months on end while my application went through. While aboard, there would be a certain amount of supervision and security to contend with, certainly rules to observe. I dare say that it would seem a bit prison-like, and I can't believe that 500-odd men, even if they had their own rooms, wouldn't get bored and impatient and become a source of trouble to both the authorities and to each other.