IHN – Member

For those crying “he’s doing it with my money”, I know that using actual facts is against the spirit of STW, but:

The state duties and staff of other members of the Royal Family (but not the Prince of Wales, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, or Prince Harry) are funded from a parliamentary annuity, the amount of which is fully refunded by the Queen to the treasury.

Quite fortunate that the queen was able to amass an enormous fortune by virtue of business acumen and a Royal lottery win, eh?

IHN – Member

Oh, and:

The Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry receive income from their jobs in the Armed Forces, from the trust established on the death of their mother and from their father’s Duchy income.
Something I’ve often wished is that my dad had stumbled upon a Duchy. It would have made our lives so much different.

Let’s have a republic.

footflaps – Member

as soon as the first bar of the music comes on the radio, it’s as good as a starter’s pistol and the race is on between Mrs S and me across the kitchen to slam the off button.

+1
+1. It’s garbage. Thankfully I’m usually washing-up at the time so can quickly press the off button. It’s more of an effort if we’re still eating. Annoyingly, I’m not that keen on Marc Riley’s 6 Music show at 7pm.

Why can’t they just broadcast the latest over-acted, strangely-accented excitement from Ambridge at 1am instead? The octogenarian listeners will probably still be awake or they can learn to use iPlayer.

Unless someone’s work is their passion and they absolutely love doing whatever it is they do, I can’t understand why anybody would consider continuing to do it in exactly the same way if they didn’t need to.

I certainly wouldn’t choose to sit in an office working for somebody else for ~40 hours a week if I had the means not to need to…

The main thing that winning pots of cash would provide is time.

Most of us exchange a fair chunk of our life, ~40 hours per week for decades, to employers in return for sustenance and things we feel we need.

Some people I know have said that if they won the lottery they’d carry on with the same job. I certainly wouldn’t….

Although it seems to have become part of our working/middle-class culture, having a ‘9-5 job’ is not the only way to live.

Personally, there are skills I’d like to learn, subjects I’d like to learn about, things I’d like to make, experiences that I’d like to have and places I’d like to go to that I currently don’t have enough spare time for. Yes, I might buy some things, but not for the sake of appearing ‘flash’.

I’d also like to think that I’d help have the chance to help other people through my own efforts and probably set up some sort of philanthropic trust to give other people opportunities that they would not otherwise have.

A few years ago I was biking in t’Alps.

I had commented during the holiday about what appeared to be a lack of fat people whenever I visited France.

One of our number was injured at Morzine and went to hospital in Thonon-Les-Bains.

Whilst waiting for our friend, we found an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.

What appeared to be the entire fat population of France were in there, we assumed it was some sort of annual conference.

I ate a fair amount.

————————————–

Pound Bakeries of the world Part2:

There was a Pound Bakery in Altrincham. I bought my, ahem, wholesome, artisan-crafted lunch from there on occasion (in my defence, I was cycle commuting) Sadly, it closed down.

I’m nit sure if there’s a connection, but there is a Waitrose in said town …rare in the North, although I suppose it is in Cheshire…. It hasn’t closed down.

deadlydarcy – Member
On a serious note…that a year flies by and that getting out of Uni and getting a job could wait a few years while you bum around the world doing the shit you’ll never have time to do later.

Indeed.

& don’t spend most of your 20s (if you have no dependents/responsibilities) in a job that you don’t like or enjoy because you don’t know what else you could do and you’re too cautious to take off and try something else that you might be better at.

ps. If you buy a Mk4 Mondeo, legend has it that the 18″ wheels/sports suspension are very hard riding.

My Mk4 car has 16″ wheels, which won’t win any Top Trumps, but ride well and have cheaper tyres

Mk3 estate was a good size, comfortable, nice place to sit and very good handling (suspensions might be getting tired now. I fitted new rear shocks to mine after one leaked at 80k miles which revived the handling).
The TDCI 130 was adequately powerful (120mph cruising across Europe), but not as smooth, linear or economical as the Mk4 (Peugeot) TDCI 140. There’s a reputation for unreliability, but I had no issues. warming up a turbo diesel properly and not thrashing from cold can only help. The 1.8 (or 2.0, but quite thirsty) petrol might be a good used buy if you’re not too worried about performance when fully laden.

The Mk4 estate is wider and longer. It fills UK parking spaces. The width is accentuated by the way the doors bulge outwards halfway down, obscuring the ground. (I’d read about it and didn’t believe it, but the Mk4 is the most awkward car to park that I’ve driven), but it’s not that bad.

The boot is even bigger than the Mk3, but it might not be necessary for most people. The roof line is quite low, so a bike with long forks/high bars won’t go in upright (unlike they would in my old Mk1 Focus estate.)

The handling, ride and grip are very, very good for a big car and it is surprisingly ‘composed’, although it does feel slightly bigger/heavier than the Mk3 when threading it enthusiastically down a twisting road. It requires a little bit more ‘smoothness’, but most people probably wouldn’t notice this ….or care.

The Mk4 interior is very spacious and nicely-laid out, albeit with a few too many bits of shiny chrome for my tastes, but I don’t care that much (at all)

The TDCI 140 is a great engine with a good, broad torque curve, even if it doesn’t have a headline-grabbing peak bhp. Economy is good if serviced properly and driven on long runs. Not ideal for dawdling around town.

Mk3 Mondeo is a great car to own and drive (Mine had only a split rubber inlet hose in 110K miles). The size was just about right for me.

Mk4 Mondeo is also a great car to own and drive (better in some ways, not in others), if a little too wide/small windows. The engine is superior.

A lot of people know that they are great cars although a lot of people do turn their noses up at a Ford (or a Skoda). This puzzles me. Why?

I work in a company in which half of the people drive ‘expensive’ German (or Land Rover) cars and SUVs. The others, in similar jobs, drive a mix of ‘non-prestige’ cars. People don’t look up to the flash car drivers, everyone gets to work and back, most of the cars have more luxuries than you need or can shake a stick at, it just costs some people more than others.

Add a sheet of dense foam and a sheet of plastic board to your (large)camelbak (full)bladder pocket and keep the straps tight?

I landed on my 2/3rds full camelbak a couple of weeks ago following a full-on, over-the-bars, down a slope somersault. It hurt a lot, but my upper back was unscathed.

ps. It didn’t stop broken ribs which I suspect was caused by contact with the handlebar stem.

Hoy you lot, lay off Cheshire.
It’s a fine place(with the exceptions of Crewe and Winsford)

Yes let us ne’er forget that Cheshire contains The Athens and Rome of the North, otherwise known as Runcorn and Widnes.

rocketman – Member

Have done the IAM course it was pretty good mostly common sense tbh no ‘miracle’ riding tips. The examiner bloke was a policeman & a real motorcyclist he made good progress where appropriate and while he didn’t condone ruthlessly breaking the speed limits he didn’t hang about either. Smooth, smooth, smooth & v fast

Same here. I’d read the books beforehand and practised the mostly common-sense approach before I joined-up and took the course. My riding was reasonably good beforehand, so there was nothing complicated or ‘road-to-Damascus’ in IAM, but it was good to be observed, assessed and given some advice/feedback about some things.

The test was the best part. My examiner was as described above

I’d recommend doing it.

freddyg – Member

Another IAM rider here. Well worth the £120 (or thereabouts) I paid for it. The only downside to joining my local IAM group was the club itself. Not particularly welcoming of new members and an odd attitude to non-IAM motorcyclists. However, this was not the experience of a mate of mine at the other end of the country. His club was superb.

I didn’t sign up to IAM to join ‘a club’ and, having tried and failed to get involved with them afterwards, didn’t bother renewing IAM or club membership the following year.(I like motorbikes, but I do prefer getting out mountain biking on a nice Sunday morning)

Th membership was generally ‘older’ and I didn’t have much in common with many of them. I and one of the observers (early 30s at the time) were by far the youngest people I encountered.

RoSPA people appear to commonly believe that they are superior to IAM as they have graded passes that require re-taking every few years.

From my experiences of RoSPA (car, but I didn’t bother with the test) and IAM (bike and a 1 day ‘corporate’ car course) I’d say that there is actually very little difference between the 2.

Incidentally, the bike versions seem more user-friendly, more about positive outcomes and less dogmatic around rules about the specific use of the controls -possibly due to the slightly less-close observation possible.

See also: Any American ‘beer’.

Not all US beer is horrible. I’m quite partial to this:

It may be called Boston Lager, but it’s definitely not US/Euro Fizz.

It does warn about speed cameras,

That can be very annoying (And is illegal in France…) I prefer the using the eyes method. UK speed cameras are very visible.

pings an alert when you’re driving above the speed limit, which can be useful, especially when you’ve just come off a motorway and haven’t slowed yourself down to urban driving yet

I’m sure you don’t really need that, do you?

Handy? Yes, can be.

Need? No.

Do I use one? No, although I have in the past.

For inter-town travel, UK road signs are up there with the best. If you plan your route so that you know whereabouts you are heading, what the waypoints are and have a map (I often use prints from Google Maps), then the urban bits aren’t often that bad either.

Sat-Nav has become a way of life for a lot of people. Many, many people have no idea of the route they’ve taken to a destination. If the sat-nav fails, then they are completely lost and have no idea about how to find their way.

I may well be odd, but I enjoy navigating (in the UK and beyond) and find it quite satisfying to find my way around with a combination of a memory of the ‘shape’ of the route, some observation, a bit of thought (& working out in which direction I’m heading), some local knowledge if it is an area I’ve visited before and, if all else fails, a map. Years of practice probably helps too.

Of course, if desperate, Google Maps on the phone will show approximate position, although I’ve never used it out when out and about.

I had one of my XC ratchets done a couple of months ago. The (very helpful) chap at Hope didn’t mention that their stocks were low. My rear ratchet is nice and quiet compared with a Pro2.

I’d have thought that it would be worth it for Hope to make more ratchet rings.

There must be 1000s of Hope XC rear hubs out there. Built-in obsolescence…

ps. New tyres always feel better than old tyres that are past their best.

For what it’s worth, for the last 15 years I’ve averaged about 45,000 miles a year (all over Europe and UK in all weathers) . Pretty much all on “ditch finders”

And I’ve yet to find a single ditch.
In my more exuberant youth I did have a leaving-the-wet-road-into-a-crash-barrier-incident that I attributed to the (Dark Horse/Road Horse?) ditch-finders fitted to my car by a previous owner. They were very a shiny, hard compound, but I now realise that the driver may also have been partially to blame…

I did replace them all with Michelin, which were noticeably better, although the lessons learned probably had more of an effect 😉

I used to buy Michelin, Continental etc. Fuel ‘quality’, tyre pressure, the engine and how it is driven seems to make more difference to the fuel economy.

I generally wouldn’t go any lower spec than Falken/Kumho/Toyo

I agree. I’ve used Kumho Ecsta for the past few years and found them to be quite good for performance in the wet and dry on my enthusiastically-driven estate cars. I’ll either stick with them or possibly try out some Uniroyal Rainsport next time.

I used Toyo Proxes on a previous (higher performance) car. They performed quite well, although the side walls were relatively soft and easily damaged from driving on stony tracks (the car wasn’t suited to them either though).

Romany Travellers are descended from groups of nomads who made their way from India over many centuries arriving in Europe c12th century, to Britain in the 16th, 17th c. So yes they don’t usually look very Indian but they have intermarried for about 5 centuries.

How does that explain the pseudo-Irish accent, then?

Is it the case that there are 2 distinct ‘groups’ of people who just happened to both live(d) in caravans?

Irish travelling workers and Romany people?
If you have to go back a very long way and there was actually a lot of inter-marrying then the argument for a distinct race is not strong though.

Does only one of these groups have the problems described in this thread?

I wouldn’t have thought there was that much inter-marrying as I can’t imagine that many of the wider population would want to join the travelling community.

Shame the topries removed the council responsibilities to proivide sites eh

I’ll accept that a lot of councils do provide them, but why should they provide sites to people? Especially if they stay for a long time.

If I wish to stay somewhere I get my money out and pay the market rate for the privilege. I’m not sure how much the council charge the travellers.

I don’t like any people turning up anywhere and leaving a load of rubbish and excrement when they leave.
ie. Sh*tting on somebody else’s doorstep.

Nor do I like any people stealing.

I dislike these things whether they are carried-out by people who live in houses with wheels or without.

If the perpetrators are ‘travelling folk’ who have chosen to opt-out out of society and all the benefits and responsibilities that entails, I do not buy the argument that that they should be free to do whatever they wish. Many of these people appear capable of keeping their caravans clean, but many also appear incapable of using a bin and have no issues with making somebody else’s property a mess.

I have noticed that ‘permanent’ Traveller sites (oxymoron?) are often very tidy. ie. The people using those facilities presumably don’t sh*t on their own doorsteps. I’ve always wondered whether those same people tidied up after themselves when they were travelling, before they became ‘non-travellers’.

The ‘race’ thing is peculiar as the ones I’ve encountered appear physically very similar to other northern Europeans and tend to speak with pseudo-Irish accents.

The IRA were fighting for what they believed to be their freedom from an occupying foreign power.

The IRA were terrorists from the viewpoint of the British government and people who were victims of their actions.

Children of people who have been determined/ambitious, hard-working, lucky, “clever”(?) and “successful” are presumably more likely to continue that way than the children of people who were not of this type and not exposed to that kind of life whilst growing up.

In recent decades, a lot of people from formerly poor families have been able to achieve much more than than their predecessors.

Improving opportunities for all should be the aim. Of course not everybody will take them.

Maintaining some sort of feudal system because there are other kinds of inequality in our society isn’t a strong argument in my view.

Being a bishop should not exclude somebody from the Lords, but it should not result in automatic inclusion.

If you need a pickup, get a pickup.

If you just ‘fancy the idea’ of a pickup as some sort of open-range-cowboy-lifestyle statement or otherwise, get a pickup.

If you’re looking at it practically, get a van and a car or a large MPV.

ps. I wanted to hire a Hilux Crew-cab to drive around the Andes (for open-range-cowboy reasons 😉 ). There were none available so I ended up with a little 1.6litre petrol Ford 2wd SUV(South America market only) which was actually quite capable on dirt roads at 4000m.

It is difficult to know how the Lords should best be populated, but in a democracy of equal opportunities:

Hereditary peers should have no place in the Lords.
CofE Bishops should have no automatically given place in the Lords.

The reality is the Lords has a hereditary head-of-state, the aristocratic remains of a feudal system, representatives of a minority ‘established church’ and hereditary peerages given away/sold in the past and life peerages of varying merit.

Here you go: The ultimate lifestyle pickup:

Estate car-like to drive, but without the boot!

You don’t necessarily need a 4wd for “a bit of off-road”.
The forestry commission use(d) these:

Berlingo XTR. 2wd, but with an LSD, raised suspension and decent tyres.

Get a car for driving on the road, a Van(or trailer) for carting stuff about and a proper off-roader for off-roading.

tarquin – Member
Crap for driving in and around, takes ages to get to the motorways from the western side.

That’s what I was going to mention. Preston may *look* close to the motorway on a map, but it can be quite a drag to get to the centre or the docks area from the M6.

Excellent travel-in-dodgy-places/Journalistic Books:

Richard Grant:
Bandit Roads
Crazy River
Ghost Riders

Tim Butcher:
Blood River

James Brabazon:
My Friend the mercenary

Going back 150 years or so:

Wales, Lancs, Scotland, Somerset(they had a Breton name) and Bucks/Northants (Norman name). No evidence of Irish, despite these people all merging together in Liverpool.

Despite/because of this Great Britain (and French) ancestry I am a fair-haired Northern European who looks as if he could be from anywhere between Moscow and the West of Ireland.

I have very flat feet and have NHS-provided orthotics that I use in all of my footwear.

I worked there on/off for 2-3 years, living the full Alan Partridge Travel Tavern experience.

I can’t quite explain why (although the Partridge bit didn’t help!), but I didn’t like the place at all -Much less so than other places I’ve spent time in, some of which haven’t been particularly nice.

It may be superficial (and I may well be wrong), but there didn’t seem to be quite the basic friendliness from the locals that you get in most places in the UK, north and south.

One positive: As others have said, riding a road bike around the quiet roads of the amusingly-named villages in the surrounding area can be quite nice.

Given the choice, I’d live nearer to Nottingham.

thisisnotaspoon – Member

I’ve got a 150mm Pitch, it makes trail centers (on the whole) boring, it much prefers fast open rocky tracks where you can drift the bike through corners and use the travel in rocky bits,
From what I’ve seen, most people don’t ride anywhere near as hard as that, trail centre or otherwise.

There are always a lot of fairly flash bikes in the car parks at Llandegla etc. but, even so, it is rare that anybody ever overtakes the motley bunches (riding a variety of hardware) that I ride with.

It’s an arms race.

Salesman are trying to make sales.

Most people don’t even bother trying to set-up their suspension.

I’ve not been to Cannock, but other trail centres can be ridden on pretty much anything with 2 wheels.

Rigid and hardtail bikes can be ridden on mountains, including the “Greater Ranges”.

The rider makes more difference than the bike.

toby1 – Member

Did no one else grow up in this country FFS?

It’s ALWAYS like this!

Glasto weekend, usually one of the wetest of the year.

Buy a waterproof – move on!

To admit, in February, that it’s not going to get any better (only 5-10 degrees warmer) despite the evidence, would be to give up hope.

but I haven’t seen anything like the depths of snow I saw in the late 80’s since.

Knee-deep wasn’t as high then as it is now. 😉

In the early 1980s I remember watching people on Blue Peter building igloos on their school field whilst there was only a light dusting of snow/sleet outside our house on the Lancashire Plain. I think there may have been a few cold-ish winters in the 80s, but people then were talking about the winters in the ‘olden days’, and the warm summers.

I also remember some warm and some very wet summer school holidays.

People still talk about the hot summer of 1976.

1962-3 was cold apparently.

1946-7 was cold apparently.

These dates stand out because they were unusual.

slimjim78 – Member

Im starting to think that we may have to accept that Aug/Sep/Oct are now our ‘good’ months.
More blind faith!

hugor – Member
pretty shit summer really!

In the UK we cling on to a myth that after a winter of greyness and murk, the summer will be great, like a 4 month long episode of ”The Darling Buds Of May”

It gives us hope, although the evidence isn’t there

-It’s a bit like religion(although a lack of faith from some people may explain the popularity of foreign beach holidays…)

What appears to happen is that Autumn and Spring often aren’t too bad and the summer (in North West England) is generally quite wet and not particularly warm.

Winter varies between being ‘mild & grey’ and being ‘cold & grey’.

…One barbecue in April does not a summer make.

ps. Of course, back in the day, the UK must have been situated somewhere in southern-central Europe, as winter were apparently all cold, crisp and snowy and all summers were hot and dry, (with drinking water presumably appearing from the ground). It must have moved to the North East Atlantic only in the past 60 years or so.

Please please please can we have a long dry 2nd half of the year.

More evidence for the religion argument!