Now, for those of you that are not familiar with the term ‘bogey’, I am referring to what we in the West of Scotland called a home made death-trap of a vehicle. Folks from other geographies may variously describe it as a ‘guider’, ‘trolley’, ‘kart’, ‘soap-box cart’, ‘mini-kart’, ‘box-car’ and probably many other terms.

The idea was simple, you made your bogey out of whatever pieces of scrap you could find, then you found the steepest hill closest to where you lived and you hurled yourself down said incline, atop your home made death-trap. Making it to the bottom of the hill was a triumph. Making it to the bottom uninjured was a miracle.

These classic vehicles were constructed lovingly from items retrieved from the local dump an any other places where things were thrown out. The key bit was getting wheels. Usually the inspiration to construct a bogey was prompted by stumbling across some discarded pram wheels; “Look, wheels! Let’s make a bogey.”

Once you had the wheels, then you needed wood, lots of wood. A bit like the hunt for wood in the lead up to Bonfire night, only you were a bit more particular. Then you had to ‘borrow’ someone’s Dad’s hammer and nails, and sometimes, if you were lucky, a saw. After injuring yourself and your pals in many creative ways; “you hold the nail and I’ll hit it”, during the construction phase, came the test run.

It was acknowledged the person who found the wheels usually ‘owned’ the bogey and had the honour of doing the trial run. This was generally the safest time to try it out, as there was little expectation and no record to beat. It was later in the day when it got really dangerous, as everyone was going hell-for-leather down the hill, trying to get the fastest time, or most creative driving style; some head-first, some backwards, some steering with their feet, or teeth.

Valuable life lessons I learned making bogies:

• The bogey is in charge, you are merely a passenger for this particular ride.
• If you don’t lean into a turn, you invariably come off.
• You can’t steer with castors as your front wheels, no matter how good your string is.
• The skin on your knuckles never heals as quickly as you think it should.

If you had seen it, you would have wanted a shot too.

It’s generally not the glamorous lifestyle many people imagine. I rarely got much time to sightsee and my experience was more airport -> taxi -> meeting -> taxi -> hotel -> taxi -> airport. You have to be able to occupy yourself a lot while you wait for flights, but it does give you a rich seam of war-stories to draw upon in years to come.

So, in the style of so many things on the web these days, here’s a ‘Top 10′ of things that set you apart from the common-or-garden tourist.

1. You know what metal you have on you at ALL times
   Airport security is the bane of all travellers’ lives. Personally, I am a big fan of airport security, I have no axe to grind, I’m just trying to get from A to B with the minimum of fuss.

   The thing to remember is that they’re just doing a job; a job that hopefully makes travelling safer for all of us – safe from both the determined and the stupid. The less hassle you give them, the quicker you will be on your way.

   The frequent traveller can pinpoint everything on his person that will set off the metal detector. And they will have either moved it into their hand luggage or tray before they get to the detector, meaning they will only ever be stopped for a random search.

   The introduction of recent measures regarding liquids extends this model a little, but you get the idea. A smooth passage through security is the key.

2. You carry one, and only one, piece of hand-luggage
   Anything more is checked into the hold. Some people who have an obsession on carrying on loads of hand-baggage and cramming it into the overhead lockers.

   Your one piece of luggage will be sufficient to carry your laptop, MP3 player, earphones, other valuables, breakables and anything else you will need to survive in the event your other luggage goes amiss.

   And you know it will fit in the overhead locker, or better still, under the seat in front of you. The closer it is to you, the better.

   The one caveat I’ll place on this one is if you have a tech job. I had to travel with a kit-bag too. It had about 30x mobile phones and PDAs in it, and I wasn’t putting them in the hold. It was still minimalist tho.

3. You know where your passport is at all times
   Without your passport, you’re dead in the water abroad. you really don’t want to have to do the whole Embassy thing, and being refused travel until it’s resolved, do you? So make sure you have it on your person at all times.

   Having written your passport number of countless visa applications, customes tickets and hotel registers, you may even know your passport number off by heart. You may even end up carrying it around with you at home, but that’s just taking it a bit too far.

   I include in this that you know where your tickets are, your loalty, membership, lounge and cash/credit cards too. But you knew that, right?

4. Your mobile numbers are all prefixed with country codes
   It’s one of those things you do during the endless waiting in airports, you stick ‘+44′ (or equiv) in front of all entries your address book, even the local Indian restaurant and vet’s; like you’re ever going to call them from the US.

   You will of course have international roaming enabled for all countries and you are aware of the countries where even that won’t work, like Korea, home of Samsung and LG, where you’ll have to hire a phone at the airport

5. You don’t browse or hang about, you focus on the goal
   Unless you’re looking for something, like a gadget or something for your journey, you will not be amongst the throng of people in the airport shops or Duty Free.

   Instead, you exercise a guerilla-like approach to shopping; In, select, pay, out. Bam! No hanging about. Instead, you’ll be the one striding purposefully towards the gate.

6. You have over 10 airline and/or hotel loyalty cards
   The more places you go and/or stay, you’ll fill in the forms and find these things dropping through your door. You’ll start to wonder, ‘Why isn’t there a single collector system?’

   And then it will dawn on you that it would then be too easy to get some value out of it.

7. You know all minimum check-in times for all airports
   The frequent traveller doesn’t like to hang about in airports, even although it seems they do.

   So, getting to the airport with just enough time to spare becomes an art-form.

8. You’re not phased by changes to your plans
   Changes to circumstance are an inevitability of travel. There are a significant number of external influences on your travel plans, most of which are beyond your control. So why get stressed when the inevitable happens?

   You need to remain flexible, go with the flow, adapt. The people you’ll be meeting at the other end generally know how bad it can be, so just keep them appraised of what’s gone wrong and work out how you can fix it.

   That said, you will, of course, have planned for some eventualities. Won’t you?

9. You have a timezone/jetlag avoidance policy
   If you have to do intercontinental travel, you will experience the fun concept of jetlag. For most people this means being tired for a couple of days after they return from holiday once a year.

   But if your itinery means you are only back for 24h, you’re not going to survive that timzone zombie-like state for long.

   So you will have come up with a strategy. There are a few options, including some bizarre ones (Shine a light behind your knees? Aye right.)  Planning ahead when you should be sleeping to get you back in synch worked fine for me.

10. You have no patience for other  travellers
    Your calm, travelling exterior will likely belie the inner seething animal that wants to rip the head off other travellers that don’t conform to the above rules.

Happy travelling!

Can you remember all the cars you ever owned?
warning: nostalgia and petrol-head terms in the following post…

The first car I had was a Mk1 Ford Escort. It was silver with a purple roof when I got it (nice eh?) but I painted it black, with a brush. As the time, I reckoned it looked great, there were no brush strokes, it looked like a professional job… for a while, until the oil based paint got scuffed and started peeling off in strips.

The car itself was held together with cataloy and gun-gum but it was a learning experience and allowed me to hone my skills on rust removal, filling and sanding, oh yes the sanding.

Eventually I peeled all the paint off and resprayed it, with proper primer and black paint this time – it was sauce. Eventually sold it, when it failed its MOT, for £20. Well, we are talking the early eighties here, twenty quid was over 40 pints in the union bar.

All in all, a great first car, I stripped the engine down completely to replace a tappet screw. In those days I was hardcore on the maintenance front. No pics of a black one anywhere that I can find, so this brown one will have to do.

Next up was a Hillman Imp, in lovely baby blue (picture courtesy of Tim Morgan). The Imp was a tiny car and believe it or not, these were used as police cars back in the day.

This one had a lot wrong with it.  The starter motor jammed a lot, the handbrake was permanently seized-on, the entire gearstick came off in my hand once and the rear-mounted engine was easily accessible via a external handles, so the battery was once nicked.

The thief also stole the battery leads and clamp and, while I managed to get a battery and leads from the scrappy, I couldn’t get a clamp, so I wedged it in with a bit of wood. A few weeks later, while driving around, the wood dislodged, the battery moved and the resulting short caused the battery to explode into a million little pieces of white plastic. What a noise! Original cost: £30, sold a year later for £40 – result.

Then, when I was no longer a student, and had a real job, I got myself some proper wheels. Everyone who was anyone had one of these back in the day; a MkIV Cortina.

The profile of this beauty was, and still is, how every 4-year old draws a car; all big and square and boxy.

It was a great big hulking beast of a car, heavy and rear wheel drive, so great fun to drive in the snow. Mechanically however it was very guilty of eating points for breakfast, that engine must have been operating at about a million amps. Over the years I had this one, I must have spent hours and hours filing them down/re-spacing them and a fortune replacing them.

Then came a Vauxhall Cavalier, it was bit more orange than red, kinda rust coloured really. It was only after I bought it, I noticed it had a dent in the roof, not a big dent, just a dink, right in the middle – how do you get a dink in the roof?

A Lothian bus kindly ripped the side of this to shreds on a busy Saturday afternoon on Princes Street during the festival, I bent the stalk of my horn that day, trying to alert the oblivious driver to the carnage he was causing. I can’t remember much else about this car, it was quite uneventful, which compared to my earlier cars was probably quite a good thing.

Time for a step up in quality. This time I moved to a high-ish mileage ex-company car. The old-style BMW 320i is a design classic, still far nicer than the new ones.

A straight-six cylinder 2.0 petrol engine that was extremely quick. I had never before seen an engine compartment quite so full of engine. A really nice car to drive, with plenty of poke.

I ran this beauty for ages, up and down my favourite motorway. I don’t think this 3-Series design has been beaten since. Sold it to my mate still running sweetly with 107k miles on the clock.

My next car was a bit of a lemon; a Volvo 440. My excuse for this aberration of a vehicle is it was my first company car, and I didn’t get to choose it. I was allocated one from the ‘returns pool’ until the lease was up. The benefits of having a company car in those days outweighed the tax penalty, so I put up with the six months of purgatory.

I can confidently say this is the most uncomfortable car I have ever had the (dis)pleasure to drive. Despite having more methods of adjusting the seat than any car I’d had before, every 30 mile trip you did still felt more like like ten times that over cobblestones.

When I finally got to chose my own company car, I plumped for a Peugeot 406sri. I don’t know why, never had a French car before, but the list was limited, so toog a punt.

Despite the garish upholstery; light grey with red zigzags, it was a peach to drive, solid and really comfortable for long journeys.

With a 2.0l petrol turbo engine it zipped along nicely. Unfortunately the company policy was to replace the cars every 12 months and I had to give it up. How could that be economical? Devastated.

The company’s car policy had changed to Rover instead of Peugeot, so instead of my original grand plan of just getting another 406, I opted for a blue Rover 214 saloon. I didn’t fancy the hatchback equivalent, I have an irrational preference for a proper boot.

Nice tidy car but, like the Cavalier, generally quite unremarkable. Then again, only having to put up with it for a year meant it wasn’t such a bad deal.

Next, against my better judgment, I went for a hatchback. This time a Vauxhall Vectra, with serios danger of moving into sales-rep land.

It was a nice car, but was tainted a little when I was hit twice from begind on the M8. First time by a Metro, then again, a second or so later by the same Metro with a Transit Van attached to the back of it. The hatchback always rattled after the fix-up job.

Replacement time, and a promotion took me up a class, but still only Rover to choose from. This time a Rover 620i. A bigger lump of metal, but with a 2.0l turbo diesel in it this time.

Nice and comfy and built for distance, it was a good car, even if it did sound like a Massey Fergusson on a bad day. At replacement time, they switched the policy again, so Peugeot was back on the agenda, woot!

Without hesitation I plumped for the Peugeot 406sri again, this time in blue. A few things had been updated from the original, white one I had, but the upholstery was still as whacky as before. Just because it’s an SRI doesn’t mean I’m a boy-racer you know.

Another move of job meant I was moving out of company car land and back into personal ownership, so I bought the 406 off the leasing company at the end of the lease. Eventually, the age and mileage of the Pug meant that things were starting to go wrong with it, radiator, cooling fans etc and being a high spec, specialist parts = expensive to fix so, at 80k+ on the clock, it had to go.

Out of the blue I decided to try something new and went for a VW Passat this time, the Highline to be exact. It was also my first attempt at internet car buying. My experience with Virgin Cars was so bad, I was put off the idea and went for the dealer option.

The Highline was a 1.9 TDI and I opted for the 130psi, with a bit more poke than the ordinary. Great car, nice to drive, comfortable, relatively economical for the size. I would have kept it longer than the 75k miles it went before its aforementioned demise on the M8.

I fully expected that I wouldn’t be getting temporary wheels of the standard I had been used to, but what transpired is just a bit beyond a joke. Well, clearly it is not beyond a joke since everyone is openly enjoying the fact I am having to drive the automotive equivalent of a roller-skate.

It’s a Chevrolet Matiz, and I reckon it has a 1200w engine. Yes, it has to be measured not in cc’s, but in watts, like you do for a hairdryer.

This is a picture of my seven year old standing beside it. No Photoshop manipulation was required here, it really is that small.

I suppose I’ll be able to say I’ve driven a Chevvy, even if you couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination call it a classic Chevvy.

The Randan 2 wasn’t a huge boat, but big enough to require a flat-bed articulated lorry.

I’ve seen trucks carrying boats before, but never gave them a second glance.  Being stuck behind one in the rain made me think of how out of place it really was up there, towering over me in my car.

My first thought was of the sheer hassle it must have been to get it on there and secure it to the back of the lorry.  There were props and ties and all sorts to make sure it stayed there, balanced precariously on its keel.  And it was all lashed with tarpaulin to protect it, I presume from the weather and grime on the road.

I like boats.  Well, I’ll qualify that; I like decent-sized boats with engines in them, bristling with gadgets.  Maybe one day, when I’m rich, I’ll have a boat.  But I’d be in Monaco driving up and down the sea in my boat, being all warm and tanned, in the sunshine.  Not on a rainy M8 between Edinburgh and Glasgow in March.

Until last night I only considered boats as floating objects. But I’ve now decided I also like the idea of boats on the back of trucks too.  We should have more of that.