I was intrigued to see that Prince Charles has had his venerable old Aston Martin converted to run on wine - or, as Sir Trevor Bong put it on News At Ten - "run on wine, your Highness, sir."

Sir Trev didn't explain exactly how the Royal DB5 "runs on wine", but it turns out it that this is surplus wine from an English vineyard. So that's OK then...

HANG ON A MINUTE! Surplus wine? What a bizarre concept. Why on earth - where on earth - is there surplus wine?

This, it turns out, exists thanks to the EU, which imposes quotas on the amount of wine that vineyards can produce and sell. Once they've filled their quota, the excess has to be disposed of somehow that does not involve bottling and selling for drinking, so it gets distilled into ethanol or disinfectant. Ethanol is bio-fuel.

And that's all grand and groovy, but why are there wine quotas in the first place? To keep the price of wine high - although it's much higher here in the UK than in many other European countries thanks to our tax regime. So much for a "single market" - and protect producers by guaranteeing that market forces do not come in to play.

 

Mind you, I'll never understand how Austalian winemakers - who have been hit by drought for the last 10 years - can manage to make wine, ship it half-way around the world and still sell it for £2 a bottle less than the French. Yes, the typical sub-£5 bottle of Aussie white may be pretty basic stuff, but often that's all you need. A bottle of French wine that costs less than a tenner is usually utterly rubbish. No wonder they'd rather see it turned into disinfectant...

And we're not talking about a few piddling litres of unwanted vin de plonk. The European Union's annual "wine lake" of unsold wines is more than 13 million hectolitres - equivalent to about 1.7 billion standard-size bottles. And even given that the Prince of Wales' Aston does about 15mpg, that's more than enough to keep Charles being driven by drink.

Last year, the EU was talking about paying farmers to grub up vineyards in an effort to cut down on wine production that can't be sold. But, now, with the price of fuel at all time high, it might actually be cost effective to process that "surplus" vino into automotive go-go juice.

An alternative would be to put some of that wine into bottles and allow us on this side of the Channel to buy it at the kind of prices that our European bretheren in France, Spain and Italy enjoy. A few months of British binge drinking would solve the problem...

Guild Party Faces £3m Black Hole! That's the front page headline in the Evening Post today.

Well, I love to say "I told you so", so ... I told you so. Eighteen months ago I wrote about how the council had failed to make enough financial provision for the 2012 Preston Guild. At the time, some comment-makers accused me of getting my information wrong. Do you still think so?

Here's a reprint of that blog post, from December 13th 2006:

Guild Weak
For some people every Christmas is a surprise. When the calendar flips over to December, the big day suddenly looms on the horizon like some hideous, tinsel-glittered, money-eating monster.

It seems that Preston Council has had a similar experience. Not only did the authority forget to plan much in the way of public festive fun, but they've also suddenly realised that an even bigger event is, metaphorically, just round the corner.

Yes, it will soon be Preston Guild time again. Oh joy...

The Guild is to Preston what the Goose Fair is to Nottingham or Lady Godiva to Coventry - something unique that sets us apart.

It has been going on every 20 years (give or take) since 1179, so you might imagine we'd be old hands at organising it by now. You might also imagine that work on the next one - in 2012 - would have been gently begun soon after the last one ended. And, of course, you would be wrong on both counts.

The city council has suddenly realised, with five-and-a-bit years to go, that fingers need to be extracted, and the job begun. Well, better late than never...

However, the real challenge for the council is not to find someone to organise the party. No, what they must do is make the Guild relevant to the Preston of the 21st Century. And that will be the easy bit. The tough job will be paying for the shindig!

The 1992 Guild, which I recall as a series of rain-lashed street parades and park events, plus some concerts at the Guild Hall, was old fashioned even then. By 2012, a few floats and a children's sports day will be an utter anachronism. It needs to be massively bolder, brighter and bigger.

But Preston's record on council-organised events isn't great. In fact, it's shocking. And even when they've been a success, money is always a problem because there's always some killjoy ready to say it should be frittered away on something more basic - like emptying the bins.

But if the council hasn't had the foresight to give someone the job of organising the most important event in the city's social calendar - and they haven't - they must at least have had enough sense to squirrel away money for the past 14 years to pay for the thing. Haven't they?

Well, they certainly have a Guild Fund. At the end of March this year there was £210,000 in it. Another £100,000 will have been paid in by next March, and the politicians have agreed "in principal" to add the same amount every year from now on. But even if they do, by 2012 we'll only have just over £800,000...

You can buy a lot of chicken feed for that, and a heck of a lot of damp squibs - but a party to be proud of? Never in a Preston Guild!
Published Date:13/12/2006

I started work this morning by subbing a story about a family whose baby daughter - born apparently normal - is now blind and deaf and dying of a rare genetic brain disease. This puts my life into context.

Compared to that kind of horror story, my life is all sweetness and light, and what worries I do have - having enough money to last the month, enough wine to last the weekend and enough patience to last the day - are trivial indeed.

But into each life a little rain must fall. And if I catch the little bleeder who keeps nicking the caps off my car tyre valves, I'll have their guts for garters. Not that I wear garters. Well, only after a couple of bottles of red at the weekend...

It's one of those silly little things that's so damn annoying. The caps are there to do a job - keeping grit, muck and water out of the delicate valve mechanism. And the valve is there to do a job, too - keeping the air in the tyre. Call me precious, but I like to keep the air in my tyres, as I find crashing such a bore.

And I'm not talking about those ordinary plastic caps. I got fed up of replacing those, so I bought some fancy-schmancy locking valve caps. Yes, there are such things. For a while they defeated the light finger cap nabber, but lately they've been showing their age, a winter on the road seems to have made the locking bit rather dodgy, and today I noticed that all four have vanished.

And I'm not sorry, because the method of locking them - which involved screwing a teeny tiny screw into a tiny teeny hole on the side of the cap - was a pain in the rear end. And that meant that, along with the vast majority of motorists, I didn't check my tyre pressures as often as I should (about once a week is good).

So now I've bought new locking caps, which promise to be much easier to get off. But only if you have the key, of course. I hope the cap nabber doesn't have the key, because it looks like a one-size-fits-all affair, so anyone with a set of these caps can have it away with the caps off anyone else's car. If you get me.

The caps will be going on the car this evening. But how long will they last?

As the son of a former Navy carrier man - pop was on HMS Victorious in the Second World War - I was interesting to hear that we're to spend £3.9 billion on two new vessels.

I can't say I'm pleased about it, because having to buy weapons of any kind, and massively expensive weapons especially, is a terrible use for money, but that's the world we live in. And if our politicians are keen for our forces to play the role of world's policeman then they should certainly ensure that the servicemen and women of tomorrow have the right tools.

But I'm definitely not keen on the names chosen for the new "super carriers". The names of ships should put fear in the hearts of the enemy and steel in the spines of the crew. Great names of the past include the likes of Broadsword, Furious, Dreadnaught and, of course, Victorious. So what are the new ships to be called? HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales.

Queen Elizabeth is a great name - for a cruise liner. And Prince of Wales is likely to be confused with the Prince of Whales. It has just not been thought through.

Is it too late to have a rethink? I'm sure Liz and Chas wouldn't mind - they've had plenty of things named after them down the years, after all.

Let's give the Navy ships with names to be proud of, and which turn our enemies (whoever they might turn out to be) to jelly. How about HMS Psycho and HMS Frenzied Attack?

Did you see the Grand Prix at the weekend? Fantastic, wasn't it?

Obviously, some people enjoy watching finely engineered racing machines driving round and round and round on a dry track, but most people want to see action - overtaking, skids, crashes, bashes and punch-ups in the pits. And nothing ensures that Formula 1 will turn into Wacky Races more than a good downpour.

After this wet carpet of a summer, it's odd to be calling for more rain, but if the F1 bosses could arrange it for the remaining half of the racing season, I guarantee that their TV audiences would double.

Here's my plan for improving Formula 1.

1) Get rid of all those petty rules about car size, weight and engine power. If you can build it, you can race it.

2) Allow weapons fitted to the wheels, just like Dick Dastardly.

3) Rig up water cannons on one section of the track, triggered randomly by a computer. The track would get a dousing, but no-one would know when, leading to amusing tyre choices and pit lane scrambles.

4) Gadgets to allow drivers to extracate their cars from gravel traps allowed - grappling hooks and harpoon guns a-go-go!

5) Two words: Bumper Cars!

6) At the end of each race, the crowd gets to vote out one driver.

7) Have a Le Mans start, but involve a Takeshi's Castle-style obstacle course.

8) Paint targets on the tyre walls. Hit the target with an opponent, score extra points!

9) On the sound of the horn - reverse direction!

10) Figure of 8 track layout, with no bridges.