I don’t see myself as a Luddite but something about the obsession for accuracy these days is starting to piss me off. When I was being educated, on the occasional times I deigned to attend that is, there was always some bright spark who could quote Pi to god knows how many decimal places. To my mind, Pi is generally 3.14 - Usually, I am more than happy with Pi being 3.

Bear with me, this is going somewhere.

It’s all the fault of the sodding electronic calculator. See back when I was younger than I ever really was, there were slide rules, and a slide rule looked like this:

I appreciate that many people reading this won’t have ever used a slide rule in anger, but the principal behind them is that most of the time, you more or less guess the answer, as opposed to have it displayed to 9 decimal places in monocolour LCD lettering. Look up a little from here… See the third scale down? Just to the right of the 3? There’s Pi marked. It’s marked roughly between 3.1 and 3.2 - It’s about 3.15 in fact. If you want to multiply Pi by 3 you pop the two numbers together on the correct scales and read off about 9.45 on the result scale; if you want to multiply it by 30, you add multiply that by 10 in your head… If you want to multiply it by 3 million, you do the same only with more zeroes and your error rate has gone up considerably, but it doesn’t matter much really, does it?

Why is this annoying me? Apart from the fact that I want to shoot people who can quote Pi to more than 6 places? Well it’s the post office, that’s what it is. They have digital scales now, and when the parcel you are posting weighs 501 grammes, they charge you for over 500 grammes. Generally speaking by that point, I just rip a corner off and make them re-weigh it but even so, when did we become so obsessed with this “down the nearest gramme” accuracy? I don’t like it. Make them stop. I am not even going to start ranting about their new letter size measurement devices which very much depend on the operator’s skill at getting parcels through a little plastic measuring slot - Well I am not going to rant YET, at any rate.

I want markets back where they plonked stuff on scales and weighed it in pounds. If it was 4.4 pounds, and cost 30p a pound, they’d charge you about £1. 30 because that was roughly what 4.4 * 30 is (a slide rule would confirm this to you, if you were to ask it, especially a W.H.Smiths one with the little clear slider thing missing like most of them are these days). These days they pop things on digital scales, tell the scales that the things you want cost 78p per 100 grammes, and when it weighs 264.5g it prints a label that says £2.08 (yes, the bastards round it up too).

I blame the Common Market.

As an Englishman from the North of the country; I have been raised in the secure knowledge that the pinnacle of human achievement was reached with the invention of the shed. Men need sheds as much as they need air, water and Marmite - It’s as simple as that. A shed gives men independence, freedom, and a place to sit, drink tea and watch the world go round.

Having been raised in this belief, I would consider it sacrilege for somebody to suggest that there may be something better and more practical than the shed. It doesn’t seem possible, does it? Well far be it for me to try and improve on the shed, but I do think I have found a possible contender for the next generation of shed. The Ambulance!

Before you scoff, think about it! It’s a huge shed, with lots of twiddly things in it, loads of cupboards, built in seats, and and and… AN ENGINE AND WHEELS!

You can drive it away and have your shed somewhere else. Think about that! Ok, so now the more naive of you may be asking “Why an Ambulance? Why not just get a camper van?”. Camper vans are gay, that’s why. People who have camper vans are generally utter knobends who should be banned from the road and then shot. Ambulances on the other hand… Well, you can tell people you got it because it’s a big van, whilst secretly dreading the idea of ever actually having to use up all that space in there. When you get really bored, you can hunt for the sirens, and work out how to reconnect the blue lights. You can try and work out what all the data cabling is for, you can even try and work out why the interior lights only work sometimes. AND THERE ARE BUTTONS! LOTS OF BUTTONS!

Trust me on this one any Northern Men out there… Before you go out to the Shed Shop to look for a new hideaway; have a look in Autotrader and see if there are any old ambulances for sale first. You will thank me.

Oh yes. Here’s one I made earlier: http://lorry.org/Misc/Ambulance/