Coca Cola car fix - must be the real thing!

A FRUSTRATED Weymouth driver was being driven to distraction because his car kept breaking down and no repair seemed to work.

He’d be bowling along without a care in the world when the engine would suddenly cut out. Experience showed that if he waited ten minutes and then fired the ignition up he was frequently able to start the car and go on his way, but an occasional problem became a regular one.

Several mechanics had a go at it without success because the car continued to die but then he had a stroke of luck... he broke down again.

The AA mechanic who arrived seemed no different from others who had had their heads under the bonnet, but this one not only had a shrewd guess at the problem but took highly unusual measures to deal with it.

Apparently the source of the difficulty was a mechanism to recycle engine gases and the mechanic suggested a way to deal with it which worked perfectly, is still working and which amazed and delighted the car owner.

So what was this high-tech state of the art mechanical knowledge which had saved the day?

Well, the mechanic found an empty Coca Cola can, cut a tin circle out of it, punched two holes into the circle and fitted it into the problem mechanism! It has worked perfectly since, so the Coca Cola disc must be the real thing!

IMAGE is everything in a tourist town such as Weymouth and one restaurant was clearly well aware of this when it put up a notice near its front door.

Nobody likes to face drifts of tobacco ash when they arrive for a meal so the notice asked if people would refrain from dumping their cigarette butts in the small front garden area.

A perfectly reasonable request and one that visitors and passers by seemed to be heeding when I saw the site because there were no obvious mounds of stubbed out filter tips detracting from the ambience.

Unfortunately the restaurant seemed to have a few other rubbish problems on its plate to worry about.

Empty cans and bottles peeped out of undergrowth, polystyrene platters complete with half-eaten food jumbled their disorder and the entire ensemble was fetchingly decorated with an array of plastic forks and other fast food detritus.

The result meant that anyone attracted by the absence of discarded cigarette butts would have run screaming into the night at the sight of everything else dumped in the garden.

This was a shame because the restaurant concerned has a good reputation... which is more than can be said for people leaving their unwanted calling cards as they pass it by in the street.

Are holidaymakers flashing the cash?

BANKS and building societies are under siege from holidaymakers keen to flash their cash.

There may be economic gloom almost everywhere you look but it doesn’t seem to be affecting tourists packing out Weymouth town centre.

One hole-in-the-wall completely ran out of cash at 11am, other financial institutions ran out of £20 notes and you can barely get a £5 note they are so scarce.

One business told me that £10 and £20 notes are being tendered so frequently that the afternoon before their busiest trading day staff have to go to the bank and book up to £200 in £5 notes just so they’ll be able to offer change to customers.

And judging by the amount of time I had to queue to get money out of my bank I think it will take until the end of the summer holidays in a fortnight’s time before we see cash demand slacken off.

Pricey park and ride

WEYMOUTH’S new park and ride has opened and the ticket machines are really confusing people.

Drivers are quite rightly asking why the fee asked for Dorchester park and ride is £1.50 yet the fee for Weymouth’s is £3.50.

Could it be some sort of Olympic stealth tax, yet another council scheme to generate cash for its ailing coffers or perhaps Weymouth is just more upmarket and more expensive than Dorchester.

So I contacted council officers to try and find out why and the answer I was given was this.

Weymouth is more expensive than Dorchester because the county town’s park and ride system only operates on five days per week whereas Weymouth park and ride operates every day of the week. The fee also reflects the fact that Weymouth’s park and ride operates longer each day than Dorchester’s does.

Now you know and it will be interesting to see how successful the Weymouth site is, not now but after the Olympics.

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