h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I decided to get a Bluetooth headset as I have had several calls while driving my car. I pulled up at the lights tonight alongside a decrepit hatchback given a hot-hatch makeover, to see a bloke not only talking into his mobile phone but watching a movie on a DVD screen bolted to his dashboard! I got away from him as quickly as I possibly could.

Scary!

I keep a distance to cars whose drivers are on a cell phone, and I'm cautious around trucks. Some of the drivers do indeed watch dvd/tv, talk into phones and eat at the same time.

I have some primitive earphones for my cell phone, but I find - like some surveys - that I and other people are distracted from the actual driving when we are on the phone, although we have both hands on the steering wheel. The result of the last survey I read was that people tend to slow down when they are on the phone while driving.

I just refuse to answer the phone while driving. No handsfree, no headphones (which don't count and is still illegal) and no bluetooth. J will answer if he's with me, but otherwise they have to call back.

Good news can wait, and bad news never goes away. Although if there is a convenient place and I'm not in a hurry I will stop the car to answer the phone.

Mmmh, from my limited experience, you can tell people who phone and drive by the fact that their speed is erratic, getting slower on straight bits of road and suddenly faster and whatnot, and they also don't drive in a quite straight line.

Heck, it's difficult enough to have the radio while driving!

Come to it, walking while chewing gum isn't so easy either.

Being a pretty matter-of-fact kind of person, I don't use my 'phone as a social tool. When people call me it's infrequently, but generally for important reasons , like 'I'm stuck in traffic on the A52 and can you please pick R up for me?' So I tend to feel duty bound to answer. Hence the headset.

I have a pretty quick and powerful car, and it needs all my attention while I'm driving it, so I try not to use the headset either. Given today's driving conditions, people need to be more on their guard when driving, not less.

Heh, my phone isn't a social tool either. It's so that I can keep in touch with J, and the only people who phone me are my parents!

I do get texts occasionally, but that's usually in the evenings.

I realised today how much I hate driving. It took me an hour and 10 minutes to drive 16 miles. First, I hit an inexplicable tailback coming off the A52 and onto the M1. It looks like there was so much traffic wanting to get onto the M1 southbound that it was backing up to Nottingham. Then there were roadworks on the A6. As far as I can tell they were digging up one set of kerbstones and replacing them with an identical second set of kerbstones.

My car is overkill for what I need. I have suggested that I replace it with something cheaper to run, but Mrs. Monk has vetoed my suggestions on the basis that they are either too camp (Smart Car), too weird (Skoda Roomster) or too impractical (Audi TT). She's also right when she says that the Guzzling Green Monster is too bloody handy at times, such as when she's ferrying relatives to and from the airport or relocating beehives.

I thought your car was bought for the purpose of visiting your beehives?

That was one purpose, admittedly. But I'm getting to the point where if it's a choice between running a cheaper car and not having beehives, or running this one, that I'd go for the former alternative. It's cost me £440 this month, and that's *before* the loan and the petrol.

Or move your beehives to somewhere more urban. I get a lot of honey bees on my lavender.

Done that: we lost a lot of bees this winter due to the erratic weather, and we're now down to one hive which we keep on the allotment. So a 4x4 estate car is a bit of a sledgehammer, really.

Did you know urban hives yield twice as much honey as rural hives? It's because of the diversity of plant species in all our gardens.

I didn't realise that. I often wonder if I should follow the bees home and ask for my free jar of honey for providing all that wonderful nectar!

The trouble with urban hives is that it's almost impossible to produce single-blossom honey, like rape or borage honey. Come April, we get the huge fields of yellow around us, and the beekeepers will move their hives there as they can guarantee a huge source of fast food for the bees. Then they'll sell it on as 'local honey', which means that allergy sufferers like my sister in law will buy it because it helps condition their immune system.

In an urban setting you get a right mishmash of all kinds of nectar. It's pot luck.

It's still local though, isn't it? Whatever the honey is made out of? Or does it make the quality worse?

Yep, it's still local. But certain kinds of pollen cause people more aggro than others. Rapeseed is a notorious irritant, so if you can get pure rape honey then you're more likely to stimulate your immune system more effectively. Still, honey is honey - it's a prized foodstuff wherever it comes from.

Borage honey is lovely stuff: very delicate and pale, almost totally colourless.

Ah, I see the point now. Not really my thing, bees. I find that local nettles mashed up with hot water are much better at dealing with my runny nose than anything else, but I don't actually have any allergies to pollen (that we know of anyway).

They both sting, though. And have you ever tried polishing the furniture with nettle wax?

No, I've never gone that far!

Nettles only sting if they're fresh, and I did find that the more of them I drank, the less the stings bothered me. Anyway reminder - Not worried by stings! Except from bees and wasps.

So how often do you consume nettles? The only time I can remember doing that was drinking some nettle beer I made in my teens, which was disgusting.

I didn't much last year due to the rain, but the year before that I was having a drink every day.