Peugot Shark

The car hire firm dropped off a car I'd never seen before, when they delivered my works car last week.

It turned out to be a Peugot Shark - named after someone in the trade, perhaps?

It was one of those pseudo 4-wheel-drive things. I'm not a fan of 4X4 cars and can't really understand why anyone who's not a farmer would want one.
"I have a dog!" they cry. Well before I met Miss Franny, one of my girlfriends had a dog - a big one. I had a Mini and old Scamp never once complained that the back seat wasn't big enough... Most dogs fit neatly into the back of an estate car or an MPV.

Anyway, what did I think of the Peugot? For a start, it was designed by someone who had been driving a long time. By which I mean they had forgotten what it is like to be nervous at getting into a new car. I don't mean myself here. I drive around 30,000 miles a year and drive a different car almost every week and have got to know where most knobs and switches are.

But this thing had 4 sticks coming out of the steering column. So one will be wipers and one will be lights... One was to control the sound system - they are not just "radios" anymore! The other was for cruise control.

The problem was that the middle of the steering wheel was so big that it hid all of the markings on these controls. I only found out what did what by experimenting. Not good. The good people at Peugot thought so much about their airbag that they had created a space for it that almost equalled the diameter of the steering wheel. There was room to curl my fingers around the wheel but not much to see through except at the top where they left a gap to allow you to view the dashboard displays. Good unless you were going round a corner and wanted to know how fast...

This is really picky I know, but in the centre of the steering wheel is the Peugot rearing lion motif. It isn't on any sort of plinth and the leather of the steering wheel centre is cut around the emblem. Except it has such little inlets for mouth etc. that a snug fit is impossible and to me it looked really tacky.

It drove fine. The diesel engine wasn't over noisy though it did have the characteristic pause before it revved enough to nip out of a turning, by which time it was no longer safe to nip. The 6-speed gearbox was smooth, though compared with my Mazda you had to be going at a higher speed before you could change up and feel comfortable that the engine was going to cope.

The parking brake is electronic and the toggle sort - pulling the handle up both puts it on and off, though after the initial start you can forget about letting it off and just set off and it will release the brake automatically. With features like this on modern cars it makes me wonder why I have to pip my horn at so many pillocks who can't control their clutch and start rolling backwards at you at the traffic lights...


The speedo was much more accurate than most cars too, when the dashboard said 70mph my SatNav said 68 - the average car seems to be doing around 66 or less. I have, by the way, checked the SatNav against lots of roadside speed displays and the speed shown by the SatNav tallies with those at 30, 40, 50 and 60mph. Quite often to do 70mph the car's speedo will be only just short of 80.

So to sum up, a nice car with a badly thought out steering wheel and control design and one that will cost you more than necessary to put new tyres on. Buy an estate or an MPV. Unless you really are a farmer...

Shark! Shark! Shark in the Trash!

Sunday 6 August 1989 - to quote The Beatles, "it was 20 years ago today"...

We were in Cornwall camping at Porth, just to the north of Newquay and today we spent a day in Newquay having walked from our campsite in Porth over the cliffs. This is Miss Franny, me, with Mum and Dad, walking along the cliffs between Newquay and Porth.

Lusty Glaze Beach. The cliff scenery in Cornwall is stunning. I never get tired of it. In fact every time I've gone I've taken the same photos from the same spots... I could probably tell you the rate of erosion by studying them carefully. But I won't... Instead we'll just admire the view and then in a while I'll come across a different year's holiday photos and scan those in as well. So you can see the difference on a sunny day or an overcast day. A Thursday or a Sunday...

Newquay has a series of beaches divided by jutting cliffs that make a procession of small bays that provide fairly safe bathing so long as you don't get whacked against the sharp rocky bits that the cliffs are made of and you don't get eaten. Oops... moving too far ahead... We'll come to the shark later. At the time many seaside resorts had street plans with bulbs that lit when you pressed an appropriate button to find a particular attraction. They dated from the 1960s so were starting to fade or malfunction and within a few years would mostly disappear, but they were great fun. Especially if another family were trying to find somewhere and you pressed other buttons so that several lights came on...

Look at this! One pound and ninety nine pence for a pair of sunglasses - outrageous! They must think we are made of money! These pages were written twenty years after the event but I'm editing them again now in 2023 - 34 years on - and sunglasses are now so expensive that people black out their car windows instead...

This is Towan Beach with its small island. Islands are just littered all over the place around here. You keep an eye open for four kids with a big dog but the Famous Five must be out on the moors somewhere in a horse-drawn gypsy caravan, whilst Uncle Quentin is making a home-made atomic bomb in his study, Aunt Fanny is watching the cook(!) make scones and Julian, Dick and Anne's parents will have gleefully abandoned their kids to go off on a cruise on their own again...

In the midst of all these sandy bays is a harbour, set in the corner where a headland juts out further than most of the cliffs. Around the corner is the best beach for surfers - Fistral Beach. We shall see more of that towards the end of the week. The 1989 week that is - the rate I'm going we might not get to it for months... As much as I like cliffs I like harbours as well.

Boats puttering about, fishermen mending nets and laughing at holidaymakers trying to fish off the jetty on the harbour side where the water is hardly conducive to the well-being of fish. Kids with staring eyes, too busy watching elsewhere to check their ice cream for seagull poo before having another suck... "Dad it tastes funny..." "There's nothing wrong with it, let me taste it..."

Mothers, pulling kids away from the edge of the drop off the harbour wall and tying headscarves around their hair, wrinkling their noses against the fish smell that goes with a harbour. Older kids with a bucket full of crabs, picking them out and thrusting them at each other to see who gets scared first.

We spent most of the day on the beach and even I had to stop taking photos after a while... I have no records of what I was reading in those days. I kept a diary for a while around 1980-82 but it started getting very hit and miss in '83 and by 84 had stopped altogether. Only when I started creating web pages on the Internet in 1994 did records of my life start to contain words again instead of just pictures.

What? You want to hear about the shark? Are you sure? There's a gory end... but only for the shark. We made our way back to Porth as the sun was starting to set. It's a few years since we went back to Cornwall but I always still remember the sheer volume of the crickets chirruping along the hedgerows of the walk back from Newquay down onto Porth Beach and then round to the cafe. There was a bit of a pong outside the cafe, rivalling that of Newquay harbour.

One of the dustbins had a 4-foot dogfish draped over it. The small shark had been washed up by the tide and collected off the beach. Jaws it was not - but I've never seen a larger one outside of an aquarium and whilst you would have to wait patiently for a while for it to take your leg off, a toe might have made a tasty snack for it!

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