Content by Rolfe in January, 2026

Still in Bali On cruise liner Set sail Tuesday Rain is warm Pool is tiny.

I showed that video to my friend who has a low-mileage 13 year old petrol Polo and is waiting for the right EV to enter her life. I swear she drooled, but she wants to know if it supports Android Auto.

Current situation grand.

Food here, excellent.

Mushrooms? Where did they come from? Mushrooms here, small. Should've photographed dinner.

Missing word "tap".

I've never noticed any problem and it gets quite cold here. Not so far north as @QLeo but considerably higher up.

Trip outside resort Not drinking water Pics of monkeys On camera card.

IIv I've had a charger drop me at Tebay a couple of times (the second time it was probably my own fault) but I didn't realise they were running slow. Haven't charged there since early November though.

Night vista appealing

AEB is not 100% reliable. You can't just drive straight at someone and expect it to stop.

Evening dinner entertainment Thunder and lightning Breakfast ambience damp Morning heron awaits Hotel garden impressive Dry by lunchtime Weather, I mean. Sea very wet. Pool wet too. Sand gets everywhere I mean everywhere Impossible to shift

Rainy season here Doing its thing Electrical storm overnight Internet playing up

The lowest you can set the protected charge to for the VtL is 20%. However the car is supplied with a default setting of 50%, or at least mine was. As I discovered to my cost the first time I camped in it. The second morning the SoC was 48% and the VtL wouldn't come out to play. I had to wash in...

And yet, it's fine here. Entirely habitable.

Can't go wrong. View from lunch. Local fauna cute.

Lying on sunbed On the beach Under a tree Pleasant breeze blowing Swim later, great.

Sun tan? Cloudy. But basically yes.

If it's like that in south Australia, what the hell is it like in the north?

It's a bit muggy but there's a bit of a breeze. It'll probably rain later.

Terry, that's serious. Am I reading it right that you have aircon in the house?* Can't you open the car from the app on your phone? Who do we call if you stop responding? * motorhome, of course - forgetting you don't actually have a house right now.

27°C, 78% humidity.

My "complaints" about the cold are performative grumbles.

Yes I know. Still get upset.

My God Terry, I would be a smear of grease.

Musa Dua beach resort. Bali.

The cat! 😿 😥

It's "all right". Our English teacher Mrs McConnell would have had your guts for garters for that one.

Weather is fine. View from breakfast. Madainn mhath, a chorra-grithich. Jetlag is horrible.

Well, Caliban is now in his garage at 69% charge with temperatures rapidly heading for the minus department. I'll let you know in a month how that works out. Since the garage is locked and the keys are inaccessible, I've left the car unlocked just in case.

I have had plenty exchanges with various parties where it was clear I was conversing with Google translate.

Doha airport magnificent.

I remember 1981-82 (I moved house at the beginning of 1982, from Lanarkshire to Hertfordshire) and it was "interesting". I remember 2009-10, I had just got the Golf and was finding out about winter tyres the hard way. Unfortunately all the photos are on my computer and I only have access to my...

Only if he sees the post before I've had the chance to fix it. He doesn't have the power of undetectable copy-editing.

Chan eil feum agam Beurla a bhruidhinn.

Four? Not enough. Temperature here -1C inside the garage.

They're usually working, but I agree with you about the price.

It's just such a nuisance taking a punt on which site to go to, of several in the immediate vicinity, then not knowing whether to wait or to go to a different one if it's busy.

Don't rub it in...

Along with a fair chunk of the rest of the world!

Mainly the power to correct typos and grammar mistakes you plebs make

I noticed that as a problem when I was planning to drive from Halifax to Osbaston one Boxing Day. The alternative seemed to be the petrol station at Desford crossroads, which has a reasonable number of MFG chargers. It's not been very encouraging recently, with road tax and pay-per-mile. But...

Wishful thinking pointless

Killjoy.

I'm not honestly sure if we do them for that one. Maybe needs escalated.

I'm taking my phone. Nobody is safe. <evil cackle>

You can not. The other mods will get you. And I'm taking my phone. And most forums work like this. No penalty if the autocensor deletes a banned word. All hell breaks loose if you circumvent the autocensor though. So don't. (There are far more elegant ways to do it, by the way.)

Oops, oops, oops. Did I hear they finally installed chargers at the Green Welly? Or not yet? In this weather I'm just grateful for the pre-heating function, and happy to spend as many electrons as necessary to keep warm. I have to take the cat to the cattery in a few hours.

I remember a German friend saying she met an American who said, on hearing her nationality, "I'm German too!" Whereabouts in Germany are you from, asked Sabine politely. There followed a spiel about the ancestors coming from somewhere in Germany and settling in Iowa in the 19th century. "That...

This was what was showing on Friday evening. Yesterday when I cycled half a mile into the village, people were saying, too cold to be on a bike. Still, solar generation is going great guns. For January.

Unless it snows again. Caithness is apparently completely cut off right now.

Enjoying getting there, no chance. Enjoying it while I'm there, well, yes.

Well, that looks clear enough, even for summer tyres. Enjoy.

Dream on.

Note about disguising sweary-words. Don't do it. It doesn't matter in this case, because "bloody" is not on the list of banned words. There's no need to disguise it, but no penalties for doing so. The situation is different for banned words. If you disguise a banned word in this way then you...

Which is why I'm flying out to Bali tomorrow.

It's one way for me to get enough posts and reactions to win this in a canter. Except that I'm going on holiday for a month, so talk among yourselves. Short answer, not with this bunch of useless, woke-obsessed numpties in charge.

Lucky you!

Another forum I'm on does it simply by number of posts, but you can ask for it to be changed to anything you like.

Don't start me on people who think that where their great-great-granny might have been born gives them some special rights to claim "identity".

My main beef about that Polo is that the driver is confined to the driver's seat. Now and again I find I need to get out on the passenger side. This isn't especially difficult in the MG4, but it looks impossible in a lot of modern cars, including this one.

It's very easy to have a blazing row over what the facts are. I've been following a few of these on Twitter.

Good point.

That would depend on the charger availability though. A larger land mass isn't an issue if there's a big charging station every 10 or even 20 miles.

It's not so much finding a charger, but finding one available. Sometimes, anyway. Tebay is turning into an absolute honeypot. Going south for Christmas I turned in there, but seeing the state of the place I turned back on to the motorway and went on to Killington Lake. On the way back, all 12...

I like this one of Caliban parked beside Loch Morar, with Hilda the e-bike charging from the VtL.

I am now addicted to camping in the car, and that doesn't look as if it has the necessary six feet of load bed behind the passenger seat. And would it take my bike? The bike thing (and aircon, which wasn't available in Polo/Fiesta sized cars in 1998) was why I moved up a size. But it's still a...

A woman interviewed on BBC Alba this evening was bang alongside you on that one. Do you follow Angry Pict (@symbolstones)? On the other hand, this could easily turn into a bit of a row and there is a serious danger I'd be in the middle of it, so maybe we should all back off and get back to...

Dark ages because there were very few records from that time, apparently.

Re that last, I wish I knew how.

That looks nice!

I just did that, and the bloody emails still come. I don't want to have to run around unfollowing a bazillion threads, but I don't want these emails while I'm on holiday. What do I do?

:rolleyes: Today? Head south for goodness sake. Even here requires care although the snow isn't at all deep. I wouldn't go anywhere on summer tyres frankly, but my friend has to get here tomorrow from Glasgow in an elderly Polo in summer tyres so I've told her to leave early and go real slow.

He seems to have started at Glasgow, or possibly Edinburgh, not much difference in distance. From there to Annandale Water is 64 miles straight down the motorway, maybe an hour's driving. It's really too soon for young men to be demanding coffee and pee breaks, if they want to get anywhere that...

This has got very political very suddenly. Lots coming out at the moment about what actually happened in 1707, and what didn't happen. No great mischief I suppose.

I saw a very recent tweet suggesting that he is now on the side of the angels. Declaring that EVs are the best cars and will be most people's choice fairly soon. I don't know if he'll ever live that video down though.

That video was amusingly debunked when it came out, including by The EV Guy, who made a video entitled "Are electric kettle owners lying?" He tested the claim that you can boil enough water for a cup of tea in 60-80 seconds by filling the kettle 85% full. There were other anomalies such as the...

https://www.highlandsunbridled.com/product-page/2026-calendar

It was going to be the next great thing in the 1990s. Absolute balderdash of course.

Snow last night. Not much though But still there Pre-heating is good.

A few Christmases ago I ended up snacking on mini Easter eggs on my way south to my friends' house for Christmas. That and a bag of crisps. It was just about all the petrol station had. Changed days now.

20% sounds plenty. But there are rumours about 50%, which is nuts.

My last car had a warranty period of 3 years. It lasted 14 years. (It did have a new engine within the warranty period, somebody obviously slipped up there.)

I was getting repeated flashing before I realised that the undertray of my Peugeot had been dragging on the road for days, if not weeks.

Anybody able to put a number on "sufficient" in that context?

Much less interesting Elderly female neighbour

:cool:

First foot arrived Not a man Really not tall Fair, not dark Handsome? No comment Bad luck year?

I have to say, you lot are generally an easy moderation job. I haven't told anyone off for many months, and the only people I ever banned were commercial spammers.

I merged this with your earlier thread to keep it all together. I just hope the damn chargers continue to work.

It was a video of his, from the arctic circle, that was key to our discovering how to camp in the MG4.

There are another couple where people seem to think they should be driving on the right.

Someone posted this in another forum to reinforce why autonomous cars are needed!

Bliadhna Math Ùr dhaibh uile!

Bliadhna Mhath Ùr a h-uile duine