A Volvo at Sherwood Garage!

A Volvo at Sherwood Garage! I like the stripe up the middle of the hood.

It's been raining here quite a bit, so I've resorted to taking Ottilie to the local library fairly often. She's holding her Miffy book bag, containing books for her "summer reading challenge". The library gives out cards (like customer loyalty cards from cafes) - when the child completes each of six books over the summer, they get stickers and cut-outs to make a themed diorama. Ott still has the certificate from last year's circus themed promotion. This year it's "story lab" which has a kids' science lab feel about it.

Last week Ottilie read "Popcorn Pop" and "How the Zebra Got its Stripes". This week it's "The Three Little Pigs".

An old-style Jaguar on a street near our house! How old, I don't know, because I'm no expert - and it's got personalised number plates (unlike most UK plates, that betray the year of registration).

Nottingham is not far from Coventry, home of Jaguar manufacture for many years. Grandad says:

"William Lyons, the founder of the Jaguar company, started off in Blackpool, of all places, making sidecars for motorbikes. Starting in the later 1920s, they built up a thriving business and eventually built sporty bodies on the basis of other people's cars. 

"Small at first, then bigger and leaner, they used the initials of the sidecar company, Swallow Sidecar, SS, as the name of a long-bonneted sporty vehicle, only to find that the Germans had taken the SS title and applied it to their sinister police force-army, producing quite the wrong image for the un-political SS Car company. So Lyons & co changed the name to Jaguar Car Company, making a series of  racy-looking cars that looked fast and eventually, with success, became superb creations with their own powerful engines and sporting records--and at a fraction of the price of Bentley, Alfa Romeo and Aston Martin- the rest is history! 

"Oh yes: as Blackpool wasn't brimming with experienced engineers and tradesmen, Lyons and associates moved to the Coventry and surrounding areas, developing the company, shakily at times, to its present stature."

It's an MG! But what type? This is the car of the grandad of a child whose pirate/princess birthday party we'd been to. Ottilie was dressed cunningly as a pirate-princess.