19 Jan 06 - Status: 11

Woah... what a difference a day makes. I went to the Birmingham NEC on Saturday, for the Autosports exhibition. First off, Alan McNish (he's driven in F1 and Le Mans, among others, as well as doing pitlane commentary for ITV's F1 broadcasting) chose cerulean!! Cerulean!!! Hurrah! (Or "scottish blue" as he called it).

Then it turned out that Mr Coulthard is a popular, popular man, but luckily I got into the queue early enough to guarantee that I'd see him. I'd been waiting for 45 minutes when who should turn up... but Johnny Herbert! This was exciting because he's my racing hero, and it's always great to see him. Luckily I was able to jump out of the DC queue in order to chat to Johnny, and then go back to my spot again. I didn't want to miss Johnny because of DC, but I didn't want to miss DC because of Johnny either!

Johnny did make me laugh. He studied the Crayola box to see which colour he wanted... then he delved in to pick one out. And he picked Carnation Pink. !!! The look on his face was a picture, and I just had to laugh out loud and tell him it was "very manly". After he signed his name, I suggested to him that he draw a picture too... he just *looked* at me, and I grinned and was like "oh go on, you know you want to!" So he took great, great care and concentration.... and drew a little stick man in the corner. He looked oh so proud of himself! He's a funny one!

Anyhoos, so I went back to my spot in the queue and waited about another 20mins or so for Coulthard to arrive. He was only signing for 15 mins, and there was a huge queue of people, so the guys in charge were telling us to Be Quick. So I made him choose a colour, but I wasn't going to attempt to banter with him about drawing pictures. And yet as I watched him, he did his autograph... and then put on a face of deep concentration and started doing little marks on the paper... and I was like 'hmm... what's he doing?'... then suddenly I realised, and so I suddenly announced at him "oh my god!! you're DRAWING!!! I didn't even have to TELL you to! Most people I tell them to, and they don't, but you ARE!" He looked up and just GRINNED proudly at me, then went back to finish his little drawing. When he'd finished, I told him it was more impressive than Johnny's stick man, which made him chuckle. What a nice guy! YAY for DC!

Lastly (or indeed, eleventhly), I got Mark Blundell, again a driver and a commentator guy. He made some comment about "does crayon last?" - good god it had BETTER!!! Can you imagine the tears if I woke up one day to find it had disintegrated into nothingness?? However, I'm fairly confident that it'll last a while... and if it does start to fade, I'm sure I can figure out a way to laminate the pages or something silly to protect it. This book is going to make me smile like a silly person for years to come. One day my grandchildren will look at it and say "WHY did you make them write in crayon, grandma? were you a mentalist?"..... Good times ahead.

PS - Happy birthday Jenson :-)