A few years ago we went to an event organised by Lidl to drum up support for a store in Binley. The planning application failed but they recently bought the old Somerfield site on the Binley Road in Stoke.

The last time we drove past, a few weeks ago, the site was still looking empty. There didn't seem to be anything above ground level. We drove past this evening and the building work seemed to have progressed quite well. The brick shell was in place and it looked very 'shop shaped'.

It was a toss-up between the lunchtime buffet at China Red in Hertford Street, or the Handy Nasty (Han Dynasty) near West Orchards. We chose China Red simply because we were nearer to it at the time.

The buffet was fairly cheap at £5.90-ish. The selection was reasonable given the price. Starters included prawn toast, chicken satay sticks, ribs, spring rolls. Main courses included beef curry, sweet and sour chicken, noodles, rice.

The food was tasty, but the disadvantage of eating at lunchtime is that I can't eat as much as in the evenings, so I didn't get to have as many platesful as normal.

I mentioned the weather yesterday. While we were up north, we missed the worst of the rain. Driving to work this morning, part of the London Road were flooded and we passed a few fields which had turned into ponds. We were definitely in the right part of the country for the Bank Holiday.

Update
Driving home tonight (by a different route) there were branches on the side of the Kenilworth road, which must have been blown down by the wind.

You can tell it's a Bank Holiday, because the roads are busy and it's raining.

We were 'up North' yesterday, to attend a Hamster Show at Lymm, in Cheshire. We only came 2nd in the hamster racing this time.

The track used for the Hamster Racing

The Old Cross, in the centre of Lymm.

This morning, we went to the Cheshire Oaks shopping centre, near Ellesmere Port. We got there shortly after opening time, and it was already busy. By the time we left there were lines of cars snaking through the car parks, looking for spaces. When we got to the motorway, there was a long queue of traffic on the opposite carriageway, trying to leave at the junction. They can't have been wanting to visit Ellesmere Port itself - the town isn't that interesting.

We went back to Aqua for a meal tonight. We were there as part of a conference organised at the University.

Everything seemed to go smoothly. When you are a group of over 50 people in a small restaurant, you appreciate that the service can sometimes be a bit slow, especially when they're still open as normal.

The food was excellent. When we arrived, there were bowls of olives on the tables. The first course arrived and consisted of plates of falafel and pizza. Subsequent courses had pasta, pizza and a bit plate of spiced chicken.

After the meal, most of us went down the road to the Whitefriars pub for a pint. A lot of the people with us were from other universities and they liked the old medieval building, and the range of beers on offer.

The Langar on offer consisted of bread dipped in a spiced batter and deep fried, and what looked like some kind of bhaji with onion, potato and spinach. There was also the sweet spiced tea available.

Walking around the stalls, we noticed some strange orange coloured food. We were told it was a kind of sweet so we bought a bag. It turned out to be a sweet spiced batter which had been deep fried. We watched it being cooked and it went into the oil a normal batter colour but came out a brilliant orange colour. I can't remember what it was called but I'll certainly look out for it again.

We woke up this morning to find that it had snowed in the night. I took my cameras and walked into Coventry to see if I could find anything to photograph. Unfortunately the snow was melting quite quickly. It was only a thin covering to begin with - it wasn't enough to stick on the roads.

Click on the thumbnail to view the image

Coventry City Farm is being forced to close soon, due to lack of funds. At the moment it is still open and they are accepting donations so they can still afford to feed the animals. While we were there, we lent our support by dropping some money in the collection box and also by buying a few things from the shop.

Some enormous pigs.

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I was driving a hire car today. I don't know whether the University regularly hires automatic cars but that's what I got. It's only the 2nd time I've driven one - I'm more used to a normal manual gearbox. It feels weird driving a car without a handbrake or a clutch, and the sluggishness from a standing start is a bit annoying (although the last point may have been because it was also a diesel).

When I got back this afternoon and returned the car, I got back into my own car to drive home. It then started to feel weird needing to press the clutch. The steering also felt strange - the hire car had very light steering whereas my car doesn't have power assisted steering so it felt very heavy.

While I was out, I heard about an unexploded 2nd World War bomb found in the city centre. Later this afternoon I read about the ring road being closed in an anticlockwise direction, but it was open and moving freely when I drove home. It looks like I got home just in time.

It was very windy as walked into town this morning. We pass a pond, and I noticed some ducks swimming in the middle. As I was passing, a sudden strong gust of wind blew them sideways, almost capsizing one of them. They seemed to have difficulty swimming in a straight line.

The Whitefriars pub (on Gosford Street) started its beer festival tonight. It was a bit smaller than the university festival (only 12 beers compared to over 100) but it did have the advantage of friendlier surroundings, and being within walking distance of home.

I think 2 beer festivals in one week is enough.

Thanks to the BBC iPlayer, I finally managed to watch the episode of Top Gear where they 'celebrate' 40 years of British Leyland cars. Unfortunately the episode I originally downloaded failed to work - the licence had 'expired' despite having 5 days left - so I had to watch the version with the sign language person 'flapping' in the corner of the screen.

In the episode, the presenters had to go out and buy an old BL car each, and then perform various tasks. They drove to the sites of some of the old factories, but most of them had since been demolished. The only one still in use is now owned by BMW. Others had been demolished and (like Longbridge) were derelict land or had been turned into hotels or offices.

At the site of the old factory in Coventry they commented on how it had turned into a hotel. They complained that there was nothing to commemorate the site of the factory, apart from a few road names (Herald Avenue, Dolomite Avenue). They must have missed the metal plinth which gave some of the history of the site.

The Canley factory has gone the same way as most of the motor manufacturing in Coventry. A lot of the sites have been converted into flats, offices or shops. The Canley site has an industrial estate, a hotel and a Sainsburys. The Peugeot site at Stoke is now flats and offices. The only cars made within Coventry are the Black Cabs, made by London Taxi International, at the factory on Holyhead Road. This factory (tucked behind the BMW/Mini dealership) is opposite yet another shopping centre built on the site of an old car factory - the Alvis Retail Park.

Anyway, back to Top Gear. They took their old cars to a test track and had to drive along a bumpy cobbled road, with a colander of eggs taped over their heads. They scored depending on how how much egg was still in the colander, and lost 'points' for any trim which fell off. The biggest bit of 'trim' lost was the back door from Clarkson's Rover SD1.

Another of the tests was to drive up a 1 in 3 stretch of road, apply the handbrake, and see if the car would stay there. Now 1 in 3 is very steep - lesser gradients make it feel like the car is tipping over backwards. The Rover had great difficulty even getting up the slope. The wheels lost traction and the wheelspin hid the car in huge clouds of smoke.

Back when I lived in Aberystwyth, there was a 1 in 4 road between Waen Fawr and Llanbadarn. At the bottom of the hill there was a T junction and I had to approach it very slowly because it always felt like the car wasn't going to stop. Heading the other way, up the hill, unless I managed to get a good run up I had to take the hill in 1st gear. At the time I only had a Rover Metro with a 1.1 litre engine so it struggled when presented with challenges like that.

We got rid of the Metro a few years ago, but we noticed the address in the back of the handbook was given as 'Canley Road' - the site now occupied by the hotel/industrial estate/Sainsburys. I did a search for the postcode on Google maps but it doesn't exist any more.

Getting back to Top Gear, the tests became more surreal. They filled the cars with water and drove around the track to see which would go the furthest. The surprising winner was an Austin Princess driven by Captain Slow.

Top Gear is at its best when they have the silly games and challenges. Most of the car reviews get very tedious. They tend to be either overexpensive cars being driven fast around the track while being compared with other overexpensive cars, or small/affordable/economical cars being accused of being dull and boring. I can't be the only viewer who gets tired of hearing about the latest supercar with zero relevance to everyday life. It's like a car version of the pathetic Celebrity type of magazine.

Despite these problems, the banter between the presenters is good. The 3-way reviews, where they all go out with similar cars and compare them, tend to be more interesting than the one-off reviews with individual cars. Hopefully they'll continue to do more of the motoring challenges - the one where they had to drive old cars across Africa was one of the better episodes of the series.

Coventry's new Ikea store opens tomorrow. The local news has been full of scare stories about how the traffic to the store will throttle the ring road and bring the city to a standstill. As a countermeasure, the council has set up signed diversions especially for Ikea traffic.

The shop was actually open this morning, although only to 'Ikea Family Card' holders. We had received a letter telling us about this sneak preview and a voucher for free delivery if we spent over £150, so we went along to see what the shop was like and to pick up some furniture for the front room (which we are in the middle of decorating).

There were a lot of security guards and crowd control barriers outside the shop, but a surprising lack of people. The shop was fairly quiet inside too. Apparently it's the tallest Ikea in europe, according to the announcement we heard on the instore 'radio' while we were in the restaurant. One advantage of this height is the view - you can see a lot of Coventry from there.

We managed to buy enough furniture to qualify for the free delivery. Everything arrived this afternoon, just as we were about to resume stripping the wallpaper in the front room. Our hallway is now full of rolls of carpet and flat-packs of furniture.

There were predictions of around 15,000 visitors to the store today, but I don't think they will have had anything like that many. They are expecting 20,000 tomorrow for the Grand Opening. There are 'Gift Cards' for the first 500 in the queue, and plenty of special offers and price reductions, so I expect there will be quite a few people lining up outside when the shop opens.

I don't know whether the population of Coventry doubled over the weekend but the traffic was much busier than usual on the way home tonight.

Near one one the many roundabouts on the way home, there is a bus lane. It is separated from the main carriageways by a traffic island. There are traffic lights here, the ones for the bus lane are always red unless there is a bus approaching.
Tonight, a lot of cars seemed to want to use the bus lane. They didn't seem to realise that the light was never going to turn green for them. The traffic in our lane was moving so slowly, we got a good look at the long queue of cars stuck in the bus lane, waiting in vain for the lights to change.

We found out earlier today that a friend of ours was in a band. They were playing live at the Beer Engine pub. As that is only on Far Gosford Street, not far from here, we decided to go along and see what they were like.

Their opening song was a solo piece featuring their vocalist/guitarist, and reminded me of a Badly Drawn Boy song, which isn't a bad thing. The band is a 5-piece: vocalist/lead guitar, keyboards, saxophone, bass guitar, drums.

They were pretty good. Worth going to see if they're playing nearby. They'll be performing at a local Battle of the Bands and I wish them the best of luck.

They have a page on myspace but there doesn't seem to be much there at the moment.