Baby, you can drive my...Popemobile....

(Follow me on Twitter! @janemcintyre12  and also @normandycottage  )

........so this little baby`s up for hire at 250 euros an hour. Interested? You need to contact Paddy Dunning. He`s the Irish businessman who inherited the Popemobile, made famous during the Pontiff`s 1979 trip to the Emerald Isle, along with a wax museum.

A quick buff up and it`s ready for you to borrow. Paddy reportedly took  his auntie back to the airport in it. She`s a nun, y`know..and her trip made her the talk of Rome.

What you drive can have that effect, can`t it? You know...turn heads in the street. Evoke envy. Make people think you`re doing damn well for yourself. Or lead to uproarious laughter and downright derision.

My dad used to have a Ford 8. Really. He lent it to my Uncle Jim for his driving test. Then hid in a shop doorway on the test route to watch the fun unfold. What he`d "forgotten" to tell Jim, was that the passenger seat had rather loose fixings. With immaculate timing, Dad heard the motor spluttering down the street just in time to emerge from his hiding place, to see Jim at the wheel, as the car kangarooed past, with the driving examiner on his back, with his size eights flat up on the car roof. Loose fixings, see. *

I could never trust a car. Or love one, really. I was so deeply traumatised as a new driver by cute little motors which promised the world, but couldn`t even get me over the Hog`s Back without the aid of a breakdown truck.This was before the days of mobile phones, remember.Once, I was attempting to drive from dad`s place in Kent, back to an early newsreading shift in Southampton in a white Mini 1000. It was late, dark, rainy and cold, and there wasn`t a single house in sight when the engine decided to splutter and die. I swore, shivered a lot, whacked on the hazard lights, and may have cried. OK, I cried. There was no earthly point looking under the bonnet. So I decided to just sit there until dawn broke. By which time the radio station in question would have missed several bulletins and hopefully decided to send the radiocar out for its reader.

Luckily, an AA recovery driver had passed me on the other side of the dual carriageway, on his way to a call out. Two hours later, he was on his way home, saw my by now, very faint hazard lights, and stopped. By this time I was frozen with cold and fear and may have hugged him. Don`t ask me what was wrong with the thing, but he fixed it, and I made it home for an hour`s kip and a shower, in time to slide into the newsreader`s chair to say..."It`s six o clock; Jane McIntyre reporting..." Just.

Several more second hand cars received a vicious, John Cleese-like kicking for letting me down at crucial moments, before I decided to bite the bullet and find a brand new one, under warranty and through one of those lease deals. I truly didn`t care what it was. I rang round every main dealer in town and asked what the monthly rate was for their cheapest model. I cut back on other things (clothes, shoes, boots, nights out.... ) and clinched the deal. Four lease cars down the line, I`m happy driving alone and far from home again. But as to what it looks like, and how fast it goes ? Don`t give a damn. There`ll always be someone who has to have the biggest, shiniest, newest motor in the car park. A head turner. A headline maker. But as long as I`m driving something (anything...) which gets me from A to B...it`ll never be me.

*Yes, he failed.

+What was your first car? And your worst? Ever been let down by your car at a really crucial moment? And how do you feel about cars as status symbols...? Love to know what you think...!  

@janemcintyre12 Loved it! Perhaps you'd like to read about "my motors?" http://jpw-theaverageman.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/my-motors.html?m=1 … Hope you like it!<<

Good as gold; whiter than white

Seeing all the fabulous London scenes on television during the Olympics has reminded me how much I love the place.

So, inspired by the prospect of a trip at someone else`s expense, and fired up by the athletes` quest for success, I`ve just entered a competition to win a night in a `top hotel`in the capital.

I have a blitz on competition entries from time to time. I can`t say I`ve been as lucky as my Auntie Marjorie. She scooped dozens of prizes, from handbags to holidays. And all kinds of kitchen appliances.

Competitions were a hard slog in those days, though. You had to research your answers, and then often come up with a `winning tiebreaker slogan` about why you loved the product so much.This took a certain skill, blended with a degree of sycophancy towards the contest`s sponsors. Suss that and you were sorted.

My mum always hoped to emulate her sister`s success. She spent days on a competition run by a washing powder company. A massive, life-changing cash prize was up for grabs. All you had to do was make as many words as you could out of the brand name.

She pored over her task, night after night. And because you had to collect a dozen box tops to send in with your entry, the house soon resembled a laundrette. Really. The sheets were blindingly white. And you couldn`t wear a jumper for more than half a day because she`d whip it off you and stuff it back in the twin-tub.

Weeks later, a branded letter arrived at breakfast time. Mum brought it to the table; hands trembling. It told her she`d won `a share` of £10,000.

Fifty pence, actually.

Fifty pence, because so many people had found precisely the same number of words as she had. She was so disgusted that she ripped up the envelope; cheque and all. We never had that brand in the house again. Moral: read the smallprint.

It didn`t put me off though. I was determined to do better. One day, my geography homework session upstairs started to bore me, so I idled away a couple of hours on a competition in mum`s `Good Housekeeping` magazine.You had to research something about grapes and France. I had my geography textbook upstairs so sorted out the answer, but was still only 14, so whacked in an entry in mum`s name. She came home from work a month later to a crate of vino on the doorstep. Never has a detention for absent geography homework been forgotten so fast.

 More recently I won a weekend away at a lavish hotel near Windsor. Well, Heathrow, really. We wondered why the band was playing so loudly over dinner, until we saw the planes angling up into the sky from the airport every four seconds. Lovely treat , though.

But back to tonight`s competition. It took about half a minute. I mean-the answer was just a sentence away from the question. Like those phone ins on daytime TV. `What letter of the alphabet follows "P" ? ` Oh and it costs how much  to ring up and enter? And did you know there are competition websites where you can pay to get the right answer?

I reckon the prize is all the sweeter when it follows a bit of effort. And on that note, I`m heading back to the telly  to watch more fabulous, brilliant athletes going for gold in London. There`s no luck involved there. Just superb levels of fitness, years of training, and plenty of blood, sweat and tears. Mind you...if they need the name of a good washing powder for that.....

PS.Thanks for dropping by. If you`re on Twitter, could you possibly retweet this? And if you`re not from the UK, could you drop me a note to say where you are? Especially if you`re one of the readers in Latvia or South Korea! Thanks.

Teach...your children well....

......remember the song? OK, if you`re too young, you might have seen it on the BBC`s `70s series. Appropriate really, as there`s been a fair bit in the press about what makes a good teacher,and about getting more students to become one. Even encouraging more sixth formers to go into schools, and see what it`s like on the other side of the desk.

I guess you`d be more inclined to consider it as a career if you`ve got happy memories about the staff in your school. Happiest days of your life? Well they can be. But a `bad` teacher can knock your confidence for life, too, can`t they?

Years ago Dad used to talk about getting the `strap` across his hand for misdemeanours as a young pupil in Musselburgh. He could still recall the sting of the leather across his outstretched palm. That`s what you did with `unruly` pupils in those days.

In my first term at infants` school in Ealing, I remember being made to stand in a corner for half an hour with my back to the class. The heinous crime that I`d committed was `swishing my hands across the desk`, and then trying to make my best friend Rosalyn do the same. I was four, but even then, I knew it was a fair cop, and served my time with not even a glance over my shoulder.

I might have hated Mrs Jeffries for life after that, but she made me Mary in the school nativity that year, and I got to ride on a push along donkey with a cushion up my dress.

Years later in Kent, I can remember English teachers in my secondary school inspiring me with their encouraging words in the margins of my exercise books. That always felt good. I loved English, and have Miss Rhys-Jones to thank for my pronounced pedantry over punctuation. (And alliteration; clearly.)

But I loathed my art teacher when she kept me back after class one day `for a word`. She studied me, from top to toe (yeah..I was pretty sure she didn`t want to paint me....)...taking in my unruly blonde hair, brightened only that weekend with a hefty application of Sun-In, the thick clumps of black mascara, and the glistening layer of roll on lip gloss (mint flavour). Down went her eyes....to the standard issue green elasticated belt, hiding a waistband rolled over several times until the bottle green box pleats covered my arse but were way, way above my knee...to the chocolate brown platforms, exactly the same as my friend Carol`s (Freeman, Hardy, Willis) and defiantly three inches higher than school rules permitted.

`I suppose you think you`re rather glamorous` she hissed.`But you`re in the fifth year.Not a fashion parade.`

 The thing was... I did feel fairly glamorous. We all did.We were fifteen, and spent at least half an hour plastering that stuff on before school. And it was an all girls`school too.

But another part of being a glamorous fifteen year old then, was smoking. At least we thought so.You couldn`t do it at home. It was tricky on the bus, in case your mum`s friend saw you. You could sometimes get away with it down at the Wimpy. But if you tried it in the school grounds, it meant immediate, non negotiable expulsion.

I hated tennis, so I took the risk, and happily signed up to the practice of `whacking the buggers as hard as you can into the woods`. Only a select few knew about this. And once enough tennis balls had been `whacked into the woods`...someone had to go and retrieve them. And because it was the `woods` and no-one apart from us knew what might be lurking there, we were allowed to take a friend. And she usually dragged a friend along too. (Safety in numbers).

What was lurking there ...stuffed in a Woolworth`s carrier bag, at the end of a large log, deep in the undergrowth, and worth the nettle stings and bramble scratches to reach them, was one glorious packet of More Menthol, and a box of matches. And their presence meant that at least four of us, in the course of double tennis, got to have a smoke. We chose menthol to hide the nicotine smell, of course, but I`m sure Miss P knew what we were up to. If she`d reported us, we`d have been marched off the premises. I always assumed even to this day, that she took pity on us because she smoked like a trooper herself .

But I`ve just realised she probably let us go because we were so completely crap at tennis.

Anyway. No detentions. No expulsions. Thanks, Miss.