CNPS

Well, in true me-style, I bumbled around Richard Herring's site and found this.
(sorry, you have to read it, I don't have the verbal ability to reproduce it tonight - it's all about Consecutive Number Plate Spotting, or CNPS).

Today, as part of our staycation we went off to Blair Drummond Safari Park as a fun day out for all the family. More on that later...

Being on the motorway and all gave me an excellent opportunity to commence number plate spotting (I've always been a bit of a number plate nerd - I used to know where they all came from) and started looking for my 1. Not so easy. Many things became apparent, not least that there are very very few old style numberplates remaining. As I look at my antiquated heap of rattles and its 51 reg, I can understand why. Other things that became apparent however were:

• There are vast numbers of private reg. How come so many people have money to waste?
  
• There are some really cool older cars
• There are some really crap older cars that are on the road presumably by some deal the driver has with the road.
• Driving while checking the reg of every other car isn't all that safe. I demonstrated this by leaving the motorway by mistake in a contraflow.

Anyway, there was a sad lack of any registrations to be seen with the number 1 on the plate. As such, when I spotted the registration "LIONS 1" on a jeep in the safari park, I had a small fit of joy, did a celebratory dance and shouted "I'm having it! It so counts!" in full earshot of the birds of prey talk we had just vacated on account of the children misbehaving. Very dignified.

Initially, while walking across the car park, I jubilantly counted an 02, 03 and 04 before deciding that this was cheating and to concentrate on old style registrations only. Halfway home we passed an H1 XXX so I decided that this was for real, just in case LIONS 1 didn't count, so would have discounted the others anyway. At the same time, 1 ROT pulled up behind us, and as we pulled into home, I realised that our neighbour has A1 XXX. Stuck on 2 now, but having re-read the rules, I have decided that I am not an extreme player after all and I will now be counting new style numberplates, saying as how they only count for a maximum of 18 numbers (and that's if I'm still here after next Sept). It is also not advised to do when driving, which would be common sense for anyone with a brain, not so for I.

I am now itching for an excuse to go out and look round car parks and the likes for the next numbers. If I can count new ones I could be up to 9 by tomorrow. Goodness!

(Seriously, I am quite thrilled by this new hobby, I shall ignore the fact that RH wrote the thing referring to numberplates up to 52 (we're about to get 58) and think of it as "new").

Yeah, the safari park. Better than the zoo, but still distinctly underwhelming. I guess this is why under 3s get in free places, they get nothing out of them. Nice animals, close up to a baby owl being the highlight all round, damned expensive.