The journal

Written in the garage

What the letters on your plate mean, what to buy someone who already owns the car, and what happens in the nineteen hours it takes to draw one. All of it by the person who draws them.

A flat parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, propped against a Christmas tree on a dark wooden floor with fairy lights out of focus behind it
Gifts30 July 20266 min

How to buy for a car person without asking them anything

The present is the easy part. Getting the seven characters off the back of their car in December without them noticing is the part nobody writes about.

Read it
  1. 02Number plates7 minEvery number plate format Britain has usedSix formats in a hundred and twenty years, plus one part of the country that ignored all of them. Here is every scheme, what it looks like, and how to tell which one you are looking at.
  2. 03Number plates6 minWhat your number plate actually saysTwo letters for where it was registered, two numbers for when, and three letters that mean absolutely nothing. Here is how to read yours, and a decoder that will do it for you.
  3. 04Ownership7 minBuying a 350Z, from someone who has drawn every panel of oneTwo engines, three power figures and one part that fails on all of them. I spent nineteen hours drawing this car panel by panel, so here is what I learned about it while I was looking that closely.
  4. 05Gifts5 minThe trouble with buying presents for car peopleThey already have the thing they love. It is on the drive. That is what makes them so hard to buy for, and it is also the way in.
  5. 06Behind the art5 minNineteen hours for one carA photograph shows you the day you took it. A drawing shows you the car you remember. Here is what actually happens between those two things, and why the paint can change afterwards.