Some of you, I gather, like to hear about the sillier, more light-hearted moments of life on the road covering Formula One. Others just want to know about the racing. I can sympathise with both so, here at least, I'll try to steer a middle course.
Long family summer sojourn over and with the motorhome deposited at Monza, I got back to Blighty for four days in early September and started the task of replacing everything I was short of courtesy of the Hungarian tea leaf who complicated life so much in early August.
My mobile phone situation was not straightforward. Back in the early noughties, Orange was sponsoring Arrows and did a great deal for journalists whereby they provided us with a small, neat tri-band handset and picked up the tab for our calls for a couple of years.
For freelancers paying their own bills, it was manna. You could keep in touch with the family from Timbuktu and make as many business calls as you wanted without being five grand lighter at year's end. It was, quite simply, the best 'freebie' we parasites had managed to pilfer in the past 20 years, by a factor of at least 50.