Foiled!

I had decided that today I would write about...

No, hold on a minute. I wouldn't want you to get the wrong idea. You don't really think this drivel is planned, do you? I thought not: you are far too intelligent for that.

But on this occasion, I had actually thought of some more drivel. It's almost an extension of yesterday's blurb in that it concerns travel.

For many years now, vehicle registration numbers in Britain have indicated in what year the vehicle was first registered (except for certain exceptions, of course). Every six months, two numerals in registration numbers allocated to new vehicles are changed - on 1 September and 1 March. From the beginning of September last year, it seemed as though almost every other car bore the numbers 59, indicating that the car had been registered between 1 September 2009 and 28 February 2010. This year, the numbers changed to 60 on 1 September, but up until yesterday, a month after the new registrations came into force, I had seen only one car with a new registration. I put this down to the ongoing recession, last year's excess of new registrations being a result of the government's scrappage scheme. Then I had to go out yesterday afternoon. I can't have been more than half an hour, but I saw four cars with '60' registrations!

Of course, that still makes only five in the whole month. The motor industry must be feeling the pinch.