Hello, it's Richard. Johnny's not here for this one, I'm afraid, because he's gone away for a few days,

and we forgot to record an Otisot before he went, so it's just me on my own, I'm afraid. And worse

still, I thought rather than answer questions, I would instead shamelessly

hijack this episode and use it to plug my new book. I think I've mentioned it a couple of times on

the podcast, but in case you missed that, it's called Petrelhead, and it's a collection of some of the

columns that I've written for Evo magazine over the years. I've been doing that column now since 2003, so that's a lot of words have piled up. And for the past two or three years, I thought I should really just cram a few of them into a book or something. It's taken me until now to get that sorted out. But the book's on sale now. You can get it from Amazon or you can get it from the Smith and Sniff

merch shop. And it's not just the stuff that you've read in Evo because I've written a little

sort of introductory paragraph for each column just to explain what I was thinking at the time

or to clear up some references that have got lost to the mists of time in the last 20 odd years

or sometimes just to explain the reaction that came after I'd written the column

because there are at least a couple of them where some people got a bit angry with me.

Also in the book there's a couple of longer features from Evo.

One of them I went and drove a Ford R.S. 200 and another where I went to drive a Bristol, Bristol Fighter. So I've stuck those in the book because I don't write a lot of features for Evo, but I was fairly pleased with those two. So what I'm going to do is just read out some extracts from the book. And if you want to switch this off and put a different podcast on, now would probably be a good time to do it.

The first column is one from 2019 that got quite a lot of reaction at the time. And as I've said in my little explanatory paragraph in the book, I had this horrible feeling that if I died the following week,

the only thing I'd be remembered for is that bloke

who wrote that column slightly too much about his testicles.

It's called the Alpine of Agony.

You'll have heard how the Alpine A110's combination of likeness and rightness

has earned the admiration of Evo's Tillerman. "'And that's all well and good. "'But what's it like if you've just had a vasectomy? "'To find out, I went to a central London clinic "'and invited a large, medically qualified man "'to have a good rummage amongst my underparts, then realised with dismay that I'd booked to

borrow a low-slung French sports car almost immediately afterwards. The first thing to cross your

mind upon seeing the A-110 is just how little it is, and also how much your balls hurt. You can

immediately sense that this is a car from which all excess has been banished, and this impression is

...