Free Notes From the Hard Shoulder by James May

fast-forwarding through that tedious bit where Susannah York prances around in her pants), we went shopping.
    We – I mean I – needed some new crockery and several other items for the home. Now I have always regarded any form of cohabitation as rather unnatural, and balked at those tiresome conventions of domesticity that manifest themselves in a mealy-mouthed desire for co-ordinated housewares. But in a famous department store I was struck by how much more pleasurable this sort of thing is as a couple, and by the realisation that greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his spare time to help his special friend choose some poncy plates. Colin even bought me a pub lunch.
    I realised, though, that our diet was sorely lacking in Omega B supplements and free radical scavengers. On the way home we diverted to a supermarket, where I bought the ingredients for dinner while Colin had a free-trade cappuccino in a nearby coffee bar, in case anybody saw us. That evening, after another round of killer on the Cross Keys oche, I cooked my partner free-range shepherd's pie with a medley of organic vegetables, washed down with a couple of bottles of a robust burgundy. By now we were beyond the point where the subject of staying over even had to be raised, and after watching Cross of Iron over a few large whiskies, we went to our separate beds.
    The next morning, while Colin knocked up some crumpets, we decided we'd earned a proper day out. An air display in Wiltshire sounded promising. It was a fine day, we could take a picnic and a blanket and I could do the crossword lying in the sun (although Colin doesn't like this because he says it means I won't talk to him). We could also enjoy a pleasant drive in the country.
    And here we arrived at the acid test of our relationship; the equivalent, in a normal heterosexual coupling, of that first audible fart. Could we, as two grown men now totally comfortable in each other's company, drive through London in my Boxster with the roof down?
    No.
    THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE CAR OF THE FUTURE
    As a schoolboy, I found car design rather frustrating. Long before the days of the laptop and laser printer, all we had was the squared paper in the back of a maths exercise book and the coveted Oxford Mathematical Instruments Set in its burnished metal tin.
    The hours we spent on this sort of thing! You knew that car design had taken an unhealthy precedent over algebra when the two met somewhere forward of the staples in the middle of the book, which was always difficult to explain when you were sent to the stock room for a new one.
    But there was something about the design language of the mid-'70s, the tyranny of graph paper and the obvious limitations of a plastic set-square, that led the artless youth inevitably to a Volvo244 or the earlyLotus Esprit. Pages of them.
    Later, there was real engineering drawing, with a much greater range of drawing tools and much bigger pieces of paper. Yet it was still pretty difficult once you deviated from the rectilinear and attempted anything as curvaceous as a car. And because it was something of a matter of kudos to have the hardest pencil in the school – I had an 8H – most of my designs ended up in slices.
    Back at home, there was alwaysLego. Lego was great for aeroplanes, with the eighter and fourer blocks being staggered to give the semblance of a fuselage and the flat plates forming wings. It was also good for waterline models of supertankers: the superstructure of these things is essentially blocky.
    Still, not much cop for cars, though, and the problem is one of resolution. A boy's small box of Lego bricks is to car design what Teletext is to cartography (see the weather pages). To render a convincing curve, or even the suggestion of one, you need to make an enormous model out of thousands of blocks; with just a few dozen even the Lotus is impossible. It's why digital cameras have millions of pixies in them. It's also why the Lego Pudsey Bear at