Pandering to the Muslims

No, it’s not that sort of rant! I just happen to dislike the verb to pander, so much so in fact that I put aside A – Markworthy and reached for Volume II of the Shorter OED, the redoubtable Marl – Z, when the radio newscaster talked about some new Home Office edict “pandering to the Muslim community”. Sadly for my readers the word has been around a long time (Chaucer, Dr Johnson et al), so I cannot initiate a national “stop pandering” campaign. Indeed my researches discovered the rather interesting sounding panderess (“one who ministers to the baser passions or evil designs of others”). Maybe one day I’ll meet a panderess. Maybe I already have!

The new word/phrase/expression for the month of February has to be Lamda Sensor. This is apparently what is wrong with my Jeep and tomorrow Mr Sparks (Auto Electronics) is due to confirm this and tell me how much it will cost to replace.

The local garage-owner mumbled something about “lamda sensors” when fixing the intermittent yellow warning light on the car a couple of weeks ago, but I just tried to look insouciantly knowledgeable (wow, maybe my next blog will be “The Insouciant Nappa”) when he tried to tell me about what the trouble might be. He fixed the yellow light at the time without repairing or replacing anything, but last weekend the Jeep wreaked its vengeance – just as we departed for France the bloody warning light came back on.

The wife and I had decided to take a rather eccentric day trip to check out our maison secondaire. We took the Jeep on the night ferry to Le Havre on Friday disembarking early on Saturday morning eager to enjoy the 150-odd mile drive to the house mostly on excellent (and under-used) motorways. The Jeep had other ideas. As soon as we got on the motorway the wretched vehicle’s electronics system imposed a 100-kilometres-per-hour speed limit on itself. Yes, I lumbered along with a few lorries that also had 100-kilometres-per-hour speed delimiters, and every time I tried to overtake one of them the car would judder in protest and simply not respond. The shame of it all. But I did save myself at least one likely speeding fine.

On arrival at the house, the Jeep forgave me and for the return journey to catch the Saturday night ferry back to Portsmouth, it relaxed the delimiter. Indeed for the final 50 miles of the journey the bloody warning light went out completely and we have been pretending nothing is wrong at all. Damned cars. Damned Lamda Sensors (my business consultant is likely to be an expert on Lamda Sensors and will doubtless send me lengthy emails on the subject which, like cash-flow forecasts, I won’t quite fully understand). C’est la vie.