Last Saturday Night

Last Saturday night, Mrs C and I went to see the Leicester
Symphony Orchestra play a selection of film music, from films
such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars (which
was their final piece). It was a sparkling performance - one
of the best concerts I've been to, especially considering
that the players are amateurs or semi-professional. They have
a new conductor, a Polishman called Pavel Kotla, who worked
some magic on them (as did their previous conductor, Nicholas
Daniel,in the last few years).
Why did we go over to Leicester for a concert when there's
always a lot of music on in Nottingham, you may be asking?
Well Mrs C's sister-in-law is one of the orchestral players,
so there are the added attractions of seeing her play, and
meeting up with our Leicester relations for the afternoon and
evening too. So we go to the concerts there, more often than
we do in Nottingham.
We've been going to Leicester for a few years now, and I'm
gradually getting to know the layout of the road network,
which I still find confusing. I used to find Nottingham
difficult to get round too in my early years here, but now
I'm fairly clued up on the road layout. However I still
occasionally get lost in West Bridgford, which is a suburban
maze just south of the River Trent (and the cricket ground).

When we arrived at Mrs C's brother's house in Leicester late
Saturday afternoon, I noticed that the accelerator cable had
snapped while I was reversing the car onto the roadside. This
happened once to me in Leeds, not far from my late mother's
house. Fortunately her local garage men repaired it for me
fairly quickly -- we'd gone up to Leeds for my daughter's
graduation ceremony at the Uni, which was later in the day.
So I knew how to get the car going with using some heavy duty
garden wire to open up the throttle, and with a couple of
minor adjustments, we managed to get back home again at the
end of the day. Good job the roads were almost clear of
traffic by then. The alternative idea would have been to get
Green Flag out to tow us all the way home, which would have
been a safer and the correct thing to do, but we didn't fancy
waiting for the rescue service to turn up. One of our
daughters commented yesterday, that if this had happened to a
modern computerised car, we wouldn't have been able to get
the car going - the computer would have shut everything down.