LET'S RUN OR IT'S SURE TO CHASE US DOWN [547]

The Toyota Corolla is the biggest selling car in history, but I had to remind myself of this because, in its twelve generations over the last sixty years the car is, if not boring, then ubiquitous enough to blend into the urban background. I can reliably see three of them within five minutes of leaving the house one early Sunday morning, namely the one which I posted this article, one of which was a taxi. If a police car had passed me, that would likely be a Corolla too. “The car in front is a Toyota” was the company’s advertising tagline in the 1990s, but is more often true now.

I have noticed the wedge shape of the Corolla estate more recently as it has become more seen in the UK as a police car and taxi. The “Police Authority Specification Corolla”, only available as an estate, appeared in 2024 with a 1.8 or 2-litre hybrid petrol engine, and fully kitted out for police use by Toyota themselves, rather than by the police constabulary themselves or an intermediary, which I though had been the case to now.

Special rates are also offered for the Corolla estate, in a “Sports Icon” trim level, through Toyota’s fleet and business portal, which appears to be the source of the prevalent Corolla taxi. I have twice been in the back of these, at either end of trips to and from an airport, and they are perfectly serviceable as a taxi for hire, with enough rear room for four suitcases, although I do not agree that it can sit three people in the back. A “Corolla Commercial” is also sold on Toyota’s website, the back seats of the estate removed to install a flat floor, the remaining rear doors and windows not stopping them from describing it as a van.

The Toyota Corolla appears to be the only estate car still made in Britain, at Toyota’s UK manufacturing plant in Burnaston, Derbyshire, with engines made in another Toyota factory in North Wales. All Corolla 5-door hatchbacks and estates sold in Europe are made in the UK, and while a slightly smaller Japan-only version of the estate is made and sold there, it is based on the European design. From 2020 to 2025, the estate was branded as a Suzuki Swace, under a five-year licensing deal Suzuki made with Toyota that seems only to have changed the badging, as it was one of my airport taxis – I guess it filled a need for Suzuki at the time.

Estate cars – or station wagons, if you must – are not endangered as a category of car, the sport utility vehicle (SUV) proving the versatility of their form. But the shift towards SUVs by car companies has reduced the availability of “regular” cars that used to form fleets of company cars, taxis and police cars. The Ford Focus and Mondeo have ended production in Europe, the Volkswagen Golf is only sold as a hatchback, but the Vauxhall/Opel Astra continues to hold on, their prices are undercut by other manufacturers, including VW’s own Skoda and Seat, and by Toyota.

I could have easily written this article about Skoda, although their use as a service car is split: the Octavia, similar in size to the Corolla, is also often used as a taxi in the UK, the result of good word of mouth and competitive deals, but the next car up in size, the wonderfully named Skoda Superb, is more often used by the police on motorway patrols, most likely replacing the Volvo V90, another discontinued estate car. Both cars make good use of parent company Volkswagen’s parts bin and service network, which also readies their models for police use, but my guess is that, as the inventors of “just-in-time” manufacturing that saves on storage expenses through having parts ready only at the right moment, Toyota is passing on value in other ways.

DON’T ANSWER ME, DON’T BREAK THE SILENCE [546]

“Why would I ask a computer how to do anything?” My family could argue I do this all the time, especially if something piques my interest – I am not looking up information to prove what one of them said is correct, it is to find a citable source if I make use of it here later.

Asking for information, rather than just searching keywords, used to be the preserve of the search engine Ask Jeeves, later known as Ask.com, which accepted queries in natural language, the site picking the key words from the sentence. I did not know that Ask.com, since 2010 just an aggregator of results from other search engines, had only closed on 1st May 2026 – Jeeves had largely been dispatched with twenty years before.

If I want to look for something online, I prefer to be shown it. I certainly don’t need the computer to interpret it for me, for that will be my job. Research skills are far more than deciding whether certain words have been used lead to the correct answer, it is deciding whether a whole source is even relevant to begin with, something a computer cannot do without human input. 

I am veering back into feeing crotchety about A.I., despite previously pronouncing myself bored of talking about it. But the wagon will keep going until all resources have been devoured, from concerns about data centres affecting water supplies, to the manufacturing of Random Access Memory (RAM) chips being prioritised towards equipping these centres at the expense of consumer products, an issue that won’t see demand being balanced by supply until 2027-28.

What concerns me is that the increased cost of computers, smartphones, TV streaming boxes and so on will not come down when RAM chips become more readily available. More RAM will still be needed than before if the expectation of these devices is to run A.I. programs locally, instead of acting as a terminal to send and receive results from a data centre. The gallop towards A.I.-centric services will irrevocably change the expectations of the devices we buy – I say this as someone who has never turned on “Apple Intelligence” on my iPhone 17, leaving me with a fast phone with a decent amount of RAM.

I am slowly realising is that the interface most often presented by A.I. programs, namely just asking your device to do something, could become the expected way to interact with it. Forget your keyboard, mouse, or your fingers on the screen, for the microphone may soon be all you need.

I already ended a previous article by saying, “I don’t know what point I want to make, as this is my reacting to something that doesn’t sound right, but what helps others to work changes how I would work, so therefore, I’m not doing it.” However, I wrote this in 2020 about preferring to use a keyboard when writing on a tablet computer, because my “daily driver” at that point was an iPad. That is just how I work, as trying to type on a tablet screen will become uncomfortable – writing longhand with pen and ink is preferable.

But I could never dictate my work into a computer, or ask it to edit my work. I might say a sentence in my own head before typing it, but attempting to say it out loud before typing it is just anathema to me. This may not have been the case when, in previous decades, the device of choice would have been a human secretary: the level of mutual understanding in talking to someone is much easier than talking at something that, no matter what you are sold, will not think.

I know I shouldn’t be so worried. I am using my computer for “productivity” purposes, not something general. People would rather talk to something if it feels enough like talking to someone, and if this is presented as a preference over choosing apps from a screen, or filling in details yourself, then ease of use will win every time. There is every possibility that Microsoft Copilot, introduced as an element of Windows, could supplant Windows altogether. What I want a computer for, as someone who retains a subscription to use a word processor program – Microsoft Word, like most other people – is a “specialty” case, in comparison to general consumer computer use. I just resent having to pay more for wanting that.

WE SHOULD BE ON BY NOW [545]

The offending item...

Sometimes, rabbit holes lead to nowhere.

The major appeal of the BBC’s “Antiques Roadshow”, for me, has been the level of detail provided by its experts about the featured items, both about their origin and place in history. Their monetary valuation is inconsequential – if the sentimental value is higher, it’s just a number.

But one item left me perplexed. In an episode recorded at Belfast’s Botanic Gardens, first broadcast in May 2025, expert Adam Schoon shows three brass items to host Fiona Bruce, inviting her and the gathered crowd to guess their use. The largest item is a clock dial, with one large hand, but instead of a standard twelve-hour face, this dial counts to sixteen. The engraved “P” on the face links to an either/or guess: was this dial used to record the number of partridges dispatched by a shooting party? Or is it an early 19^th century dial used to display the departure time of a stagecoach to prospective passengers? Why a 16-hour dial? Schoon said, “it didn’t go all night”, so therefore must only show the hours at which that specific stagecoach would leave.

That was all the information given, apart from confirming it was a stagecoach departure clock - apparently partridges could be killed in higher numbers. The clock dial is intricately engraved with a pattern between the dials, but they do not show increments of an hour – you can only indicate the “top” of each hour, from 1 to 16.

But this just refused to make sense to me. Another brass item shown in this guessing game was an Elizabethan (16^thcentury) laundry tally, used to count various items in and out of the laundry process, but this is also done using ten dials that count to 12, like a regular clock. Remember that counting to twelve was more prevalent until decimalisation in the UK – twelve pennies make a shilling, twelve ounces in one troy pound, twelve inches make one foot. Until the advent of computing, I can’t think of a previous need for a hexadecimal counting system, at least in my part of the world.

Describing the time using a twenty-hour hour clock, from 00:00 to 23:59, also only gained more widespread use in the 20^th century, even if clocks with 24-hour faces had existed for centuries before. Could it be that, wherever this clock came from, the only possible departure times were between 01:00 and 16:00? Without being told where it was displayed, I can never know.

Searching any of this information online proved to be a dead end. Searching “16-hour stagecoach clock” only confirmed that the Royal Mail stagecoach from Bristol to London eventually reduced its time to just sixteen hours before steam trains took over from then, accelerating the journey time even further. “Stagecoach clocks” only reveal pictures of similar brass clocks that show standard twelve-hour faces, or ornamental clocks being drawn by ornamental horses, while “carriage clock” creates a minefield: am I looking for a departure display clock, or a hand-held watch that is buffered by metal or wood to prevent its mechanism from being knocked during transit in a stagecoach, or did I want one of those little ornamental carriage clocks that your grandmother had on her mantlepiece?

Even worse as a search term is “stagecoach”: since the deregulation and privatisation of bus services in the UK in the 1980s, the Stagecoach Group has become one of the largest bus operators, and any search for information about stagecoaches from any period in history, or even the 1939 western film “Stagecoach”, will have to try to exclude services that are available right now.

What I am left with here is either a mystery, or nothing at all. It may be just a quirk that this clock face, made to display very particular times in a very particular location, made its way onto television, and left me feeling a little too intrigued... So the coach wouldn’t depart after 4pm, but it could leave at 1am...?