PigPog

• Update, July 2011: I lost this torch, and replaced it with a slightly bigger and brighter Fenix. This one turned up a couple of weeks later, and now Sam uses it. Still a great little torch.

Torches are always a compromise. The smallest ones are never very bright, and the brightest ones are hardly convenient to carry around. Things have moved on a lot in recent years, with big improvements in LEDs, and better use of lithium and rechargeable batteries, but the compromises are still there. Unless you’re really quite geeky about your gadgets, or you have specific needs (like camping, or walking home after dark) you probably won’t care much what sort of torch you have.

I wanted a torch that was brighter than the one I was using, but not too big. I was willing to carry something bigger, as long as it wasn’t too inconvenient. At that point, I was using a small Fenix torch, that used a single AAA battery. It was small enough to slip almost unnoticed into a pocket, and was surprisingly bright for its size. We live in a 3rd floor (4th to those in the US) flat, with an external metal staircase, so it’s handy to have some light when climbing them on winter nights.

After a bit of reading and thinking, I ended up with the Fenix P2D Premium Q5, which I’ve been very happy with. It’s probably expensive enough to horrify many people, but more expensive torches are available too. Add in the excuse of using some birthday money (or whatever excuse I actually added in to the mix – I forget), and an expensive torch starts to look like a sensible purchase. Maybe not to you, but to a geek like me trying to justify a new toy.

I’d read that it was the size of a thumb. It’s about the width of my thumb, but a bit longer. It fits very neatly in my fist, not sticking out at either end. It’s light enough than holding and carrying it doesn’t feel like an effort. It’s big enough, though, that it would take up a significant amount of space in an already part-filled pocket. It came with a little pouch on a belt loop, so that’s how I carry it, on my belt next to my Swiss Army knife. I can have it in my hand in about one second, so it’s not much hassle to reach for it.

It’s very easy and comfortable to have in hand. In a pocket, it would be quite small on its own, but it’s quite a big thing to add to a pocket that’s already fairly full. For those times when sticking a torch in your mouth is the easiest way to work with both hands, it’s usable, but a bit bigger than you’d want to chew on for too long.

Brightness is even more difficult to describe, but it’s quite impressively bright. On full brightness, when standing on the stairs outside our door, it can light up the ground three floors below quite well. It can light up the houses two long gardens away behind our building. The houses across the street from them, too, but not very noticeably. When standing, it can show up on the ground quite well in daylight, and if I shine it at a 100W light bulb, the bulb throws a clear shadow on the ceiling, even when turned on. It’s 180 lumens, if that helps any.

On full brightness, though, it has two limitations:

• It only lasts for one hour on a battery. Since they’re expensive lithium batteries, burning through one in an evening would be a problem. That’s not so likely to happen, though, because of the second limit:
• After ten minutes of use, it gets hot enough that Fenix warn that the torch or battery could be damaged. It becomes quite uncomfortable to hold.

With a small twist of the top section, though, it drops from ‘turbo’ mode to ‘general’ mode. Gentle presses of the power switch will then switch between three more power levels, giving between 2 hours of use and 30 hours of use from the same battery. Even on the lowest setting, it’s painful to look into the beam, and quite bright enough to see your way around in the dark.

It has a couple of other tricks, too:

• In turbo mode, it can also be set to strobe – very fast flashing of the full power light. Not much use day to day, but you can see why it might be useful for law enforcement and military. In a dark environment, it’s quite disorientating.
• In general mode, the same setting (an extra gentle press of the power button) sets SOS mode – it flashes the morse code for SOS. Probably not very useful halfway up the stairs to a flat in Tiverton, Devon, but could be a nice feature to have if you’re buying it for camping or hiking.

I bought mine from Heinnie Haynes, and I’ve always found them good. It looks like the P2D isn’t a current model any more, but the PD20 looks very similar, so is probably the replacement.

I bought the Fenix Diffuser Lantern at the same time, which is a useful accessory. It’s just a single piece of plastic that fits over the end of the torch, spreading it’s light in all directions. Sam has used it a few times in place of a lamp at her side of the bed, but it would be a very useful camping accessory.

I also stocked up on the NexTorch CR123A batteries, which makes the torch much cheaper to run. At a rough estimate, I seem likely to get through around three or four batteries a year, so the 12-pack will last a long time.

Unless you either obtain some geeky delight from a torch, or go about the sort of activities that really require such standards of light output, you’re unlikely to want to shell out for a torch like this one. If you do fall into either of those categories, though, it’s a very nice little tool/toy. I have no real need for it, but I love it anyway.

We are now happy owners of two iPod Touches – I went to Exeter’s Apple store yesterday to pick then up as Sam made her way back from Birmingham. So far, I’m very impressed. It’s a great little PDA, does games well, syncs nicely with the Mac apps, and it’s an excellent little browsing machine. With eReader, it’s also a very nice eBook reader.

I’ve had a lot of fun with it already, and I haven’t even pulled those white earbuds out of their wrapper yet.

I recently switched back to using my Pocket Lyndhurst Filofax. Notebooks were going ok, but for the question of where my ‘GTD-style’ lists went. I tried putting them on the computer, but I never got around to even putting them there in the first place. I came up with a couple of different ideas for mixing them in with my usual daily notes, or putting them in the back of the same notebook, but neither felt right. It would either take too long to find a list when I needed to quickly check something, or it would take too long to copy the lists over every time I started a new book.

I did toy with the idea of just not keeping lists at all, but things kind of fell down without at least having a shopping list on the go, and I concluded that lists are good, I just need to be more careful about filling them up with things that I have no intention of actually doing, then using them to torture myself for procrastinating. Simplify.

The Filofax could work in a simple linear way, like a notebook, for general daily scribblings and notes, but could also have lists in another section, easy to find, and rarely needing copying out again.

The only problem I found after a while of using it again was that even the Pocket size was a bit too big. It fit in my jeans pocket, but it really packed my pocket out, and was big enough to be awkward to get in and out of it.

After lots of pondering and comparing, I finally ended up buying a Mini (smaller than a Pocket size) Guildford from Staples. I picked up a ‘today’ ruler, and lots of lined paper at the same time, along with just a little plain paper. I grabbed a set of subject dividers from WHSmith back in Tiverton, and so far, things are going well.

The Mini size doesn’t fell too much smaller when using it as a Filofax, but it feels much more reasonable to use as a wallet, where the Pocket always felt a bit ridiculous. Time will tell how well I stick to it in the longer term, but I’m certainly liking it so far.

At least this time I wasn’t alone – Sam was having great trouble settling on the right thing to use for a diary for next year. With doing Slimming World, having the right format to track her eating for each day is important. A combination of Filofax and WHSmith held the answer for her, too, with a smart new bag bringing it all together.

We had rather a nice surprise on Tuesday. We had Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday off work, because we were going to see An Evening With Andy Rouse on Tuesday night, and since I had plenty of holiday left, figured we’d take a bit of time around it.

On Tuesday morning, just as we were wondering what to do with the day up until we went to see Andy, my mobile rang. It was my mum, just calling to check that she had the right mobile number for me, and delete the other numbers she still had lying around from phones long since gone. Oh, and while she was talking to me, would we do something for them while we were off? Would we mind picking out our Christmas present for this year? Any car we wanted, with a budget of up to £10,000.

Obviously, it took a while to lift my jaw back up and speak coherently (well, as coherently as usual, anyway), but once I had, I agreed to have a look around.

Mercedes/Smart

So, on the way to Street, we took a detour to Taunton. Our first stop was at the Mercedes dealer to have a quick look at a Smart ForTwo. It was very much a long shot, as we wouldn’t be able to even offer anyone a lift and would struggle to take anything more than our shopping with us. Even having our cameras somewhere accessible from the seats would be tricky. Also, the safety of them would probably rank as mediocre in a ten year old car, and is pretty poor these days. Actually, looking back on it, I’m not even sure why I thought it might be an option, but I wanted to check if we could fit comfortably in one. We’re both on the weighty side, though Sam is very rapidly becoming less so, and I’m quite tall, so the first step with any car is to find out if we could actually get around in it comfortably.

We parked up and walked in to the dealer. There was a salesman quite handy, but he was on the phone. We waited around until he finished his call, but he then made another call without actually acknowledging our existence. We found our own way to the Smarts, and did get a slight glance from the cleaners, but only because we’d walked on the floor they’d just washed. The Smart fitted. The dealer seemed to be coming over, but he took a turn and walked past us without a glance. We got the message – were are not Mercedes people. Not even, in fact, Smart people. We left.

Toyota

Our next stop was Toyota. We’ve had two of them, and liked them a lot. We’ve always loved the dealers, too, and this one was no exception. We told the salesman that we were interested in looking at the Aygo and the Yaris, and he showed us around both. I’ve already written up a few thoughts on them. The biggest problem was the gearboxes. I drive an automatic, and I’ve only driven automatics since passing my test in a manual. I have no wish to start stirring a stick around now, not when the car is quite capable of doing that part itself. All of the current model Toyotas that have ‘automatic’ gearboxes actually have a MultiMode manual gearbox. You can switch it to automatic mode, but even then you have to lift off the accelerator to let it change gears. Not quite as automatic as we were hoping.

They had nothing used to show us, so we left it at that for the day and continued on to Street.

Exeter Car Supermarket

After some chat with my dad, I figured the Yaris was head of the list so far, but the gearbox was a bit of a concern. Our search continued.

On Wednesday, we thought we’d do a bit of a tour around the dealers in the Marsh Barton area of Exeter. We started with the Exeter Car Supermarket, thinking that would give us a good idea what the money would get us secondhand. The salesman seemed keen to show us the wide range of automatics he had available, right up until he had to admit that they had two. He did show us them – a Peugeot 307 and a Rover 25, but neither excited us in any way, and he didn’t seem very keen either.

Hendy Honda

We had actually tried to look at the Honda dealer in Taunton, but it had closed before we got there. So, we popped in to Hendy Honda in Exeter next. Our first impression of the dealer was that it was very much like a Toyota dealer – pleasant and friendly, with a quick greeting and a relaxing feeling. They told us that the Jazz was their cheapest car, but once it was up to a high enough spec to have the option of automatic, it was getting a bit beyond our price range, but they could show us some nice used cars within budget.

They had two Civics available, both nice, but one of a much higher spec than the other, and with a larger engine. They also had two CR-Vs, again, one rather newer and nicer than the other. And black.

I’d always fancied having a Toyota RAV-4, and the CR-V is Honda’s equivalent.

We had a bit to think about from that, so we headed home to ponder.

Ford

Next day, we decided we really should check out the dealers in Tiverton. Well, ok, so there’s a Vauxhall dealer, but we weren’t going to take the ‘consider everything’ policy quite that far.

We did call in at the Ford dealer, with very low expectations. The salesman was actually really quite good. The only thing he had there to offer us was a Fiesta, but it was a nice spec for a reasonable price. He also offered us what seemed like a reasonable price for our old Flossie.

Renault

Next, we headed for the Renault dealer, thinking that a Clio could be an option. He told us he had nothing at all in stock to show us, then said he’d take us out to show us both of them. We were confused, but he did show us a pretty nice looking Clio, and then a very surprising Scenic. The surprising thing was that we really liked it. It was only a year or so old, and not a bad price. He also offered us double what the Ford dealer had offered us for Flossie.

We had a new favourite. Right up until we got home and looked up Renault and the Scenic on the What Car JD Power Survey where the Scenic did badly and had a poor reliability record, and the Top Gear Survey where Renault were the second worst manufacturer.

Hmm. No.

Skoda

The very top ranking manufacturer in the Top Gear survey was Skoda, so we thought we’d have a look. They had nothing used available, and said that getting anything would be very difficult. They did have the Fabia (which I was careful not to call the Labia whilst at the dealer), but it was too far over budget, and they had a twelve week waiting list. That didn’t give them much incentive to give a good offer for Flossie, either, making things worse. Nice cars, and the dealer was very straight with us, but it didn’t seem like an option.

Hendy Honda

Back to Honda to poke the Civic and the CR-V again. Both were very nice. The Civic seemed much more sensible – a simple hatchback with good fuel economy. The CR-V was bigger than we need, drinks a bit too much petrol, and we don’t need to drive off road. We still wanted it.

We took both for a test drive. The CR-V was surprisingly easy to drive, and the extra height was good. It was comfortable, and had a bit more power than Flossie. Flossie is only a 1.3 auto, so she does struggle on some of Devon’s steeper parts. We’ve hit hills around here where we can only just creep up them at 10mph. The Civic felt a little firmer when cornering reasonably hard – roundabouts felt a little easier – but didn’t have such good visibility compared to the CR-V, and Sam came away with a bruise on her leg where the door was too close against her. I was a little more pressed against the centre console than I’m used to, but it was still quite comfortable. We left to ponder.

Decision Time

We had lots to talk about that evening, though Sam’s part in the conversation was mainly “WE CAN HAS HONDA CR-V?”. We finally concluded that yes, we can has Honda CR-V.

Sam called the salesman (Phil Sharpe – thanks, Phil!) on Friday morning, and confirmed that we would have the CR-V. My parents called him and paid the deposit.

Honda CR-V

We have decided to name it Bob. It’s a long story, and not actually very interesting or amusing, so I won’t go into it.

We filled in a bit more paperwork today, and although we still have a bit to do with changing the number plate over from Flossie, we’re pretty much all there now.

Anyway, pictures. Here we go – Bob:

All being well, we’ll be picking him up in a week or so. We’ll miss Flossie – she’s been a good car, especially for a sheep, but we’re looking forward to the fun we’ll have around Devon with something a bit more powerful, and capable of pulling off the road wherever there are pretty things to photograph.