So I'm thinking those bats might come in handy ...

As oars.

I have my first choice bat, which is actually the second last one I bought. The new one got chewed up so quickly it almost became firewood (cheap n nasty - nothing to do with me clobberin' edges) and I have an older bat that dates back to school that's too tired to be of any use on the field now.

They're not seeing much service out on the cricket field at the moment - I'd pass myself as fit to play now (legs are just good enough, lungs are almost clear of bugs) but we've had So Much rain lately. Standing water and puddles on the road kind of rain.

Gotta wonder how much more rain our roads can take before we get a repeat of the floods from a few years ago. Bristol, or at least the northern part where I live, tends to get away without being too badly hit by flooding or snow.

Looking at 'em, yeah - you could probably use them as short oars :-)

By the way - the CT in my car's name doesn't mean Canoe Transport. How is that car going ? I've had a "6 months on review" type post in reserve as something to write when I get really stuck for ideas. I'm not going to do that one tonight cos I think it'll need a fair bit of rational thought, which is something I'm struggling for at the moment. (Tired and using most of my energy up in work time)

While I'll leave the Lexus CT thing for a while, what I will say is : If you can afford to get a New, Nearly New or up to 3 year old car, you should. It's worth it in terms of the amount of trouble free motoring you should get. My car experience so far has been :

Fiesta - 10 year old. Tired and broke a major component (master brake cylinder = no brakes)
Astra - 10 year old. Bits kept dropping off it
Belmont - 5 year old (I think!). When we bought it, it was just going through the failures ... It was sorted by the time I bought it from my mum but it still had things breaking on it.
Rover - 5-6 year old. DISASTER
Puma - bought at 2 years old, ultra reliable until it was mebbe 6-7 years old, then things started breaking.
Focus - 6 years old. And hitting the bits starting to drop off phase. One major failure (inlet manifold)
My dad's company cars - were pretty rock solid (we looked after them)

I've not had the CT long enough to give any reliability info, outside of there being no failures, no rattlies, no niggles (outside of iPod software) to report over 9 months and 6000 miles. Fingers crossed that it stays reliable ... There's not many complaints of mechanical failure appearing on the Lexus forums, which is good news.

You can hopefully see the pattern there ... New to 4-5 years old : car's fine. Older than that and bits start dropping off it, on modern cars as well as the old bangers. This is despite full service histories too.

There's 2 arguments going though :
Depreciation - a car loses a lot of its value over the first 3 years. For normal cars, the retained value after 3 years can be anything between 25% and 50% of the original purchase price.
Reliability - the early years of a car really are the best.

My advice - Figure out what car you want to get. Buy as young as you can afford. And then keep it until it starts to break. That worked well with the Puma - at £9,000 for 2 years old it was just inside my price range. And it gave many years of trouble free motoring. It didn't owe me anything ... but I did leave it a bit too long before I changed car, mainly because I didn't have a clue what the next car would be - there just wasn't anything on the market that stood out. I got bored with the Focus quite quickly but I'm hoping to hold on to the "I wanted it" choice of the Lexus for a good few years after I finish paying for it.

I'll leave it there I think, except to close on marvelling that the rain outside is louder than the fan inside this laptop ... Commencing to drown out both sounds with music :-) Current track : Misguided Ghosts by Paramore.