I saw my first rubbish personalised number plate for quite some time yesterday. I used to see them all the time, but the frequency seems to have dropped off. Perhaps word of my scathing attacks on the PNP-bearing vehicles of Oxford has spread, and drivers are eschewing the opportunity to transmit a compact message which isn't quite what they mean. The one I saw yesterday was J889UAR. I wouldn't even have realised it was a PNP if the letters and numbers hadn't all been run close together like that. It was on, if you need to ask (which you probably do) a Jaguar.

Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway) there are a couple of problems here. In the first place, whilst a 9 can look somewhat like a g, it really can't look like a G, and if the A and R are upper case then consistency demands that the G should also be. Secondly, an 8 really doesn't look like an A. Even the most illiterate txt msging buffoon can see that, and if they can't there's a handily placed A between the U and the R just to ram it home. An 8 doesn't really look like any letter. (Amazingly, it mostly looks like a number.) So we have fundamental flaws with the approximation of the numbers to the letters they are intended to represent even before we come to the main issue, which is that were they perfect substitutes the number plate would STILL say JAAGUAR. Perhaps the car is owned by someone so posh they elongate even the first A in Jaguar. Or maybe a South African. Or, more likely these days, someone who just doesn't know how to spell Jaguar. Even though it's printed on the back of their caar.

I'm just bitter because I've been stuck on 345 for weeks. It's 18 days since I saw 344 (of which I saw two more this morning, just to rub it in.) Admittedly I haven't been giving it my undivided attention, but even so you'd think the law of averages would have thrown one my way. From my new office I look down on maybe a hundred vehicles in the various car parks of surrounding businesses. I bet one of them is a 345. But I can't even go and check, because this building is practically all glass and I'm not ready to reveal my innate obsessiveness to my work colleagues, many of whom I seem to make uneasy already. Shuffling around looking at car boots with a notepad is not going to improve matters. Incidentally, when I look up from my new desk, by a complete fluke, I look directly at The Kassam Stadium. Not only that but at the South Stand, where I sit. Slowly, slowly I am being called to my destiny. (Not sure what it is yet, but I'm pretty sure that if I have a destiny it's not to eke out a survival standard of living doing what I am now.)