Luton Airport

[Steve Singleton]

Ah Ivan..... "She lit some kind of fire in me" That cracked me up..... Thank you for the smile that gave me.

I met my wife in a very roundabout way when I was in Huachipato delivering iron ore to the steelworks there: C.A.P. (next bay down from Talcahuano). After returning to England, I returned by air (at my own expense, of course) and married her.
We had 34 years together, including many years at sea (I was a Sparks) and we lived in England for some 18 years...after which, I felt duty bound to live in her country, so we sold up and came back to Chile..... 2001.

We had many good years in the house we built in Patagual....about 17km east of Coronel..... Sadly, she died of cancer in February, 2017..... So I never got to repay her the 18 years of love she gave me and my family in England.

So here I am. Still in Chile.Winter has just passed...and I am looking forward to another fabulous summer.....

And just so I CANNOT BE ACCUSED OF GOING OFF TOPIC..... The last summer here saw many forest fires, and indeed I had to evacuate----only for one night---- The wind changed fortunately. Fire. It's a Devil, is it not?

[Ivan Cloherty]

Steve, that fire she lit still burns to this day, I am well into my 80's but was dancing the rumba, samba and American smooth (all Cuban style, not ballroom) on Saturday night, my dancing partner is 30 years younger than me, a very close friend of my late wife (who died in Feb 2022) and she and her family have kinda adopted me, I teach her to dance at her home and her husband cooks dinner, they make sure I am not lonely and have given me a new lease of life and dancing again has cured my aches and pains.

I feel sure that your wife knew that her love was repaid many times over by the very fact that you returned to her home country, the big C is very cruel I lost my first wife to it when she was still young, and also my second wife to it, but both gave me marriage long honeymoons. I met both my wives at a dance so that lady in Vina del Mar lit fires that both burned brightly I remain eternally grateful to her.

[Steve Singleton]

Thank you Ivan, for your kind words. Very much appreciated.
The last few years have not been kind. I took up with a widowed neighbour who my late wife & I had known for many years....but despite that, we found ourselves incompatible. And so it was not to be.

Now....about the Luton fire........

Take care. Enjoy the dancing!

[Steve Singleton]

Hi James....
I meant to reply to your comment last week....but, as so often happens, one gets sidetracked....
Check out "The MacMaster " on You tube.... Bloke called Lee, lives in or near Nottingham.....The Saga of his Porsche Taycan EV is unbelievable ...
Cost to buy: GBP120K....less than a year old, was told the battery needed replacing because it had grounded on some bump (he thinks) causing minor damage to the battery tray.... Cost: GBP40K..... A third of the price of the car new!
He even tried to trade it back for a petrol Porsche..... it didn't come off. (I'm not party to his financial funding obviously.)
It has let him down due to battery failure....possibly only the 12v "back-up battery" failing (Not a lead-acid traditional battery, I gather.) Locked him out on his driveway. Was dead in a Heathrow car park when he came back from the States.

I'm not Anti-EV....far from it.... Maybe they are the future....maybe they will save the planet. (MEGA MAYBE!)
But my gut feeling is that the ingredients at this moment in time are all wrong: The mining of the raw materials...the criss-crossing of the oceans to process the ore..... The faulty batteries persist.....the infrastructure...the sheer inconvenience of the charging.

And then, at the end of the day......you realise that cars contribute almost next to nothing of the overall CO2 pollution.....
It's trucks, trains, airplanes and ships....not to mention coal-fired power stations in India and China....opening on an almost daily basis, that are the major problem....not cars! Someone has their priorities wrong.

We press on. Cheers,
Steve.

[happy daze john in oz]

Like so many in the past the advent of the EV has been far too fast.
A mad rush to convert the planet to a new form of transport without thinking about the possible problems.
All we hear about them is of the problems, no positive news.
Read one report which claims as many as 50% of EV owners have gone back to ICE ones.
One guy here spent $140,000 on one and told at point of sale the battery was only good for about 8 years.
He has attempted to unload it by selling, no takers.

Then the story of the couple in Scotland and the problems they have had.

Then we hear that kids as young as 8 are working in the mines to bring up all the required ingredients to make the batteries.
Though that level of slave labor was only in the times of Dickens.