Countless times I’ve looked on Knockhill’s website and wondered (often out loud) about driving the short distance from Edinburgh to check out some of the events there.  And so finally, me and my Dad made the trip up there (a whole 25 minutes!) to watch the second day of arguably the biggest weekend on the calendar - the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship.

The day included support from the Porsche Carrera Cup as well as SMRC and the Ginetta GT series.  Our luck was in with the weather as the sun shined all day long - we’ve somehow managed to come home with sunburn.  Not what you expect early September in Scotland!

Me and the missus just spent a fantastic 10 days sunning it up on the cheap in Malta.  I came away qualified as a Scuba Diver, and as if that wasn’t productive enough, I even took some photos!  

Favourite thing to shoot was definitely the random selection of cars we came across, although it’s a shame I didn’t decide to start collecting them a little bit sooner.  Still grabbed a few decent ones though - check them out on Flickr.

This past weekend, RAF Fairford once again played host to the 40th Royal International Air Tattoo.  It’s become something of an annual (more or less) trip for me and my old man, I’m not much of a plane nerd by any stretch of the imagination but I do love the noise and the excuse to shoot a few photos and sit around outside drinking beer.

Backups have started to become something of a concern now that my ageing Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ is sporting 8TB of disk and a ~ 5.4TB filesystem.  Only a small fraction of that is media that I really, really care about (i.e photos, documents, content I’ve created) but the time taken to rip all of my CDs and DVD collection isn’t exactly insignificant at this point, either.  Sure it could be recreated from scratch if push came to shove, but I’d rather not go through that again.

After three and a half years of ownership and > 40,000 miles driven across almost all of Europe, last Friday we finally said goodbye to YK03 DPV.  It was an extremely tough decision, mostly because there’s few cars that can touch the E39 M5 for what it is.  Practical, refined and yet still capable of thoroughly upsetting 911 owners, it took some beating.  And then there was the sound of that V8…

Nostalgia aside, there were a number of big-ticket items on the horizon that would have wanted doing should I have decided to keep the car, and so instead it made more sense to look at something newer.  I did briefly debate a Cayman S and even perhaps an Elise, but after looking around eventually decided on an E46 M3 (ideally a CS) instead.  Largely because I know the marque, but the Cayman doesn’t really do it for me and the Elise is just a tad too extreme.  A Megane R26 was also briefly considered but come on, that would have been pretty depressing coming from the M5.