• Next time you encounter a Central Motor Auctions transporter
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driver, don't be suprised if he sports an immaculate hairdo because a new addition to the CMA fleet is Dianne Tordoff who recently switched from hairdressing to driving a car transporter for the auction specialist.
Tordoff, from Liversedge near Bradford, holds a HGV and one can hardly blame her for preferring driving to the confines of a hair salon. I wonder if any truck drivers have retrained as hairdressers. Hairdresser turned truck driver Dianne Tordoff with her Central Motor Auctions transporter.
• Nearly blind pensioner Stan Black steered a minibus full of blind people to safety when the vehicle began rolling down a steep hill in Weston Super Mare with the driver stranded on the pavement.
Black, 74, reacted quickly when the minibus, with 10 blind people on board, began to roll down the hill. While he steered the vehicle with one hand, his wife Winifred, 69, struggled to pull on the handbrake.
After 200 metres the minibus came to a halt.
Black said afterwards, "I can't see very well but I know the journey well. I could just about make out where we were going."
John Thomas, secretary of Bristol Blind Bowling Club which organised the minibus outing, says, "Stan and Winifred did very well and reacted quickly. What would have happened had a car been coming the other way I dread to think."
• I'm not surprised to hear that the Institute of Advanced Motorists is more than a little annoyed by the number of erring drivers who, when hauled before the beak, profess to be LAM members, in the hope of gaining the bench's sympathy.
In fact, says the JAM, "the opposite usually happens, because the courts expect high standards from motorists pledged — as JAM members are — to drive responsibly as well as expertly". Quite right too.
• J Shewring of Norfolk, who has been a reader of Commercial Motor for nigh on half a century, spotted a Bristol Lodecker performing sterling service in sunny San Fransisco where it serves as a mobile booking office for the Gray Line bus company at Fisherman's Wharf. Evidently it has company in the form of a Leyland Olympian which is taking tourists on sight-seeing tours round the city. Interestingly enough, the Lodecker still carries its original registration number, 449 SNU. I wonder if anyone out there remembers driving it in its youth?