A few weeks ago I discovered the Walkscore website. You give it an address and it uses Google Maps to plot nearby facilities and calculates a walkability value for the area.

We live near Coventry city centre and putting in our address gives a walkability of 53/100, or 'Somewhat Walkable'. There are some shops nearby which aren't on the map so I might add them and see what difference it makes.

This morning's commute was a bit like something out of the film Duel. When I joined the ring road, a lorry flashed its headlights to let me on. We both left at the same junction and drove 3 miles down the same road, turning right at the crossroads.

I pulled into the car park to let Emma out, then turned around and drove back to the main road. The lorry had also pulled into the car park and turned around, and followed me back to the road.

At the next crossroads I turned left, with the lorry following me. I took the next turning left, but by now I had managed to get a bit ahead. I think the lorry also took the same turning but it was too far behind me so I can't be certain.

I'm sure this is just coincidence, and nothing sinister at all. There are roadworks in the area and some roads are closed. Otherwise the lorry wouldn't have had to turn around where it did. I think the driver might have found himself at the wrong end of the roadworks and the route to the other side happened to be the same route I was taking.

Seen in a shop at a motorway service station on the M1:

We were away at the weekend, up north to a friends wedding. The drive up was terrible - the M6 was a slow crawl nearly all the way from Birmingham up to Junction 17, where the motorway was closed due to an accident.

We stopped at Stafford Services on the way, and had a walk by the lake.

The wedding went well. Despite all the rain, it stayed dry for the photos after the service. The reception was held in a marquee at the groom's parent's farm. We were supposed to be camping in a nearby field overnight but we had to delay pitching out tent thanks to the non-stop rain this morning. We managed to get the tent erected in the afternoon but it needed both of us - one to stop the tent blowing away while the other pushed the tent pegs into the ground.

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.

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.

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.

It normally takes us around 30-45 minutes to drive to the University in the mornings. We normally encounter bottlenecks of traffic near the railway station, along Kenilworth road near the A45, and on Charter Avenue. This week it has only taken around 10 minutes to do the same drive, with no hold-ups anywhere.

We were wondering where all the traffic had gone, then it occurred to us that it was school half term. Some of the decrease in traffic would be due to people taking time off work to take their children on holiday, but I'm sure most of it is due to the absence of parents driving their kids to school.

I find it amazing that all the extra 'school run mums' add enough traffic to make the roads grind to a halt and increase journey time by a factor of 3 or 4.

Part of the Coventry ring road was closed yesterday - there was a long queue of traffic approaching junction 5. Thankfully we managed to avoid it by staying on the slip road and got to our exit ok. The rest of our drive to work was uneventful. There was hardly any traffic on the Kenilworth road - all the cars must have been stuck on the ring road.

According to the news, the incident was caused by a deer on the road. Unfortunately the animal had been hit by a car and had to be put down.

What I find puzzling is where the deer came from. There aren't any large expanses of green near junction 5 of the ring road. Coventry might be a small city but a deer still has a long way to walk to get there from either the parks or the surrounding countryside.

Coventry seems to have more than it's fair share of crap drivers. There was heavy rain this morning. An awful lot of cars were driving around without headlights. When I looked in my wing mirrors, all I could see was a wall of grey. A car without headlights would be effectively invisible.

Another thing I saw this morning was in a slow moving queue of traffic approaching a pedestrian crossing. The traffic was also queued up beyond the crossing. The lights turned red and Mr Genius accelerated to get over the crossing and join the queue at the other side. He risked the lives of anyone trying to cross and saved himself a grand total of zero seconds on his journey.

A few weeks ago I saw a car parked on a zebra crossing. It was also parked on the wrong side of the road, facing the wrong way. The moron driver had parked there so she could go to the nearby cash machine.

When I first moved to Coventry, I decided that when I started work, I would try to get a job where I could commute by public transport. I saw how bad the traffic was at peak times, and didn't want to be stuck in a car in the middle of it. When I was working in Birmingham, I used the train because driving would have been a nightmare. On the two occasions when I did drive in, it was no quicker than the train, and was certainly more stressful. At least on the train I can sit back and close my eyes for half an hour.

Unfortunately, where we're living now, we're not on a direct bus route to Uni, so what should be a 15 minute drive can be an hour on the bus. At peak times, it becomes a 20-30 minute drive, thanks to a few bottlenecks near the ring road or at certain roundabouts.

I might as well get used to it - I've got another 4 years of it to look forward to.

Due to a Security Alert, this train will not be stopping at Birmingham International

No explanation was given. Our train had stopped just short of the station before the announcement was made. When we got to New Street, I noticed that the next train to International had been cancelled. There was also an announcement saying that the next train to London Euston (which normally stops at International) would not be stopping there.

I don't know what happened there - I hope it was nothing serious, just something like accidentally unattended luggage.

Update: 09:15
The National Rail Enquiries web site has the following announcement: _Train services on all routes via Birmingham International are being disrupted due to a security alert.
Birmingham International is currently evacuated and train services are currently unable to call at this station _

Update: 10:20
Found this:

BIRMINGHAM International train station has been evacuated this morning following reports of a suspect package.

British Transport Police ordered the station's operator Virgin Trains to close the building at 8.48am.
No trains are stopping at the station, although they are still able to pass through.

A spokesperson for British Transport Police said: "We can confirm that Birmingham International railway station is currently evacuated.

"Officers are at the scene following reports of a suspicious item and a person is helping us with our enquiries.

"Trains are continuing to operate through the station."

There was also news about this on the BBC website.

It was my company Summer Do in Birmingham tonight. Emma was supposed to be meeting me at the office but she was running late. It had been raining all day and the railway lines were flooded. No trains were leaving Coventry station but the ticket offices were still happily selling tickets to people. They weren't going to put on a rail replacement bus because they claimed the flooding wasn't their fault.

Emma eventually turned up 2½ hours later, having taken the bus instead. She said she wouldn't have bothered but I'd already paid in advance. We stayed for a few drinks and the buffet, to make sure we got our moneys worth.

We didn't know whether the trains would be running properly by the time we were ready to go home, so we thought it would be safer to leave early. We were in luck and there was a train ready to leave when we got to New St.

We got back to Coventry before midnight. Emma had pre-ordered the Harry Potter book from Waterstones and we had to wait for the shop to open. She decided not to read the book there an then, but to wait until morning.

I was reading the Metro newspaper on my way to work this morning when I noticed a voucher for a 99p Mocha 'Today at your station'. The voucher expiry date was 10th June 2007, so it looks like the offer is open to Time Lords only, which is discrimination and should be illegal.

There was a list of stations where the voucher was valid. ALL IN LONDON! Since when have any of those been 'my station', especially because I was reading the Midlands edition of the paper on the Coventry to Birmingham train. So get your Tardis over to London and get your cheap cup of coffee.

I was on the platform at New Street station, standing next to my train waiting for the doors to open. Some people walked past with bin bags tied around their legs as makeshift waterproof leggings. All I can assume is that they were on their way home from the mudbath which was this years Glastonbury Festival.