While reflecting on the year ahead over Christmas, I came across an interesting article on the future of the oil market. It was predicting a significant swing away from oil usage as the century progresses so much so that Toyota, the world’s biggest car company, has decided to end all production of petrol and diesel cars by 2050. Quite a wakeup call: I have often wondered if my next vehicle will be a plug-in. Now I wonder how the Morgan Motor Company will evolve in this scenario and that’s not to mention cars that drive themselves that are predicted to be with us soon. There was one interesting quote by Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, a former Saudi oil minister, from The Telegraph 15 years ago: ‘Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil – and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones.’ Nevertheless, I feel sure 2016 will be an eventful year as we head out to what eventually will be a brave new motoring world.
We have now taken delivery of a new batch of the Thames Valley Centre Car badge, as depicted in the logo associated with the Centre’s reports in Miscellany. This is the round badge design. The badge comes in a choice of one of five colours: red, white and blue, remember those Minis in the Italian Job movie, plus green and black. If you order a car badge you can choose one of these five colours, but as we can only order a limited number of each colour, choice of colour will be on a first come first served basis. We are taking orders now, please be quick as we feel these badges will be popular. Please contact Mike Aldrich if you would like one. Tel: 01628 676 619. Email:
To kick off our activities for 2016, we are proposing a visit to Maidenhead and Cookham Commons which was one of the walks we have had to reschedule a couple of times last year. Expectantly, the walk for this month will be on February 28th – I hope the weather will be calmer around this time of year. I look forward to seeing you there nice and dry. Postscript: I did see mention, by the same team I assume that predicted a barbeque summer, that we are going to have the hardest winter for fifty years. By organising this outing, let’s hope that this isn’t the corollary. I will ask Mike Aldrich, who is a local, about any nice pubs for lunch we could go to afterwards.
As a bit of advanced notice, we are planning to do a review of events at our next AGM in April. So if you have any ideas for things you would like us to do as a Centre, please do bring them along. Of course we always welcome new proposals which we are pleased to receive anytime. If anyone wants to run an event then you can rely on the full support of the Thames Valley Centre Management Committee. Between us we have quite a lot of experience and we would be pleased to help. If we all just organised one event a year then we would have more than enough fun things to do to keep us busy. I look forward to hearing from you all soon.
Take care, see you all soon – Roger.