@Cougar, your theory means “The religious shall inherit the earth”, as they out-populate the non-believers, who self-pollute and sodomize themselves to demographic destitution.

I remember flying back into merry old england with an irish friend, coming back from croatia.
Usual rudeness in queues, picking up bags, etc.
My Irish friend said, “English people are c***s”.
I found it hard to disagree, and still do.

Thanks Chris, good to know.

Door slamming, slamming cupboards, chest of drawers, etc.
Don’t mind it during the day but it gets a bit tiring at 6am every morning.
The “friendly word” has been tried to no avail.

I just knock the lasses up on the local council estate and let the taxpayer take care of it all 8)

I tried to self-diagnosis route. Then the physio. Then one of the country’s top knee specialists, which I paid for privately, including xrays (now waiting on a mri through the nhs).
I think the answer is going to be, more physio.

A friend of mine once had a date with her pre-George days.
True story.
He said she was very ambitious and spent a lot of money on clothes. He also thought she had a bit of a masculine jaw, but he may have said that since she rejected him.

badnewz
Not read the whole thread, but just though I’d mention that Dawkins being “at heart an attention seeker” may not necessarily be a disadvantage for the “Professor for Public Understanding of Science”.

I mean .. rather than a hermit or Trappist monk at least?

Most academics are introverts, so admittedly the ones who are happy being on the tele are the rarity and tend to be looked down upon inside academia.

Insofar as someone like Dawkins has promoted “public understanding of science” and attracted people to that world, all well and good. I think he was doing this with some televised lectures in the 90s.

I studied for too many years at Oxford and it was well known Dawkins was at heart an attention seeker. Only time I met him was at the Computer Services where “three phones” Dawkins was trying to get one fixed to continue the expansion of his Media Empire.
As someone above said, people are bored of the New Atheism so he needs to find a new gig, but he can recycle the old rhetorical methods by swapping religious believers for Leave voters.

Well, it looks like someone has the argument they’ve been looking for.

I’m an innocent bystander!

But if we fall short of 10 pages I might add some quotes from The Marriage Foundation to get us over the line.

I predicted a 10 pager…

Anyone been compared to Hitler yet?

Judge not that ye be judged etc etc on this issue for me.

Jim wants a bail-out.
The banks got one, so why not give it a go?

Something tells me we are looking at a 10-pager thread here.

I don’t mind hearing about people and sometimes donating to them if they are long-standing members on here.
But we can’t be expected to give money to everybody in the world.

Hello, manufacturer and exporter here. Yes, there’s perhaps a small bump to export sales, but much UK manufacturing is higher-end goods where price is less of an incentive to purchase. I don’t think I’ve got any more overseas sales from the fall in Sterling, at most a few customers have perhaps ordered a slightly more expensive version of what they’d be ordering anyway.

However, lots of the component parts and materials I use are imported, and costs of them have gone up – Rohloff hubs, Shimano parts, even steel tubing. So prices have to go up for everyone, and it’s worse especially for customers in the UK.

And, as Mr Shand up there says, Brexit hasn’t even happened yet. At the moment we’re only dealing with the fall in Sterling – once you add in the cluster**** that falling back on WTO rules will cause, with tariffs, varying standards etc it’s going to be even worse.

If it’s such a disaster how come manufacturing data has been so strong post-Brexit vote?
Tariffs is an issue but WTO rules are fine to fall back on whilst we negotiate good deals with European countries. The EU is falling apart, with or without Brexit, so it is better to be ahead of the curve.

Thank god now the pound has tanked that the value of property has dropped 40%, especially in London, such that it’s now totally affordable. Furthermore, foreign investors have been totally put off buying property.

Prices are falling in central London, for the first time in six years. Foreign investors will still buy but capital controls in China, and the stumbling Russian economy, mean the situation is changing.

40% falls over the next four years are entirely possible, which will be good for first time buyers, especially as they will be able to move into the flats which were manically put up at the end of the bubble.

Gosh, oh golly, crumbs, I’m done for, Sir looks jolly batey.

@kimbers,
I’m going to have nightmares of my first primary school teacher, Mrs Kent, now, who used to spit over the kids whilst correcting their work with her trusty thick-red pen!
Ashoka Mody is not politically affiliated and his articles mainly appear in the Independent.

The high pound was holding the British economy back. It was helping to build a speculative bubble in the property market, especially in London. It was destroying our manufacturing and exporting competitiveness, whilst rewarding the parasitic financial sector.
Sorry if you have to pay a bit more for your mountain bike, but in the long-run a currency devaluation is just what the country needed.
More about this here[/url].

Very sorry to hear this. I’ve been worrying this week over things which now seem so trivial compared to what you are going through.
You are fit, young, and cancer treatments are improving rapidly. Good luck and vent all you want on here.

Smell of pine trees in spring

That BBC Breaking News button is going to take one hell of a beating.

There was a good episode years back when he helped a family with links to the local mob. Ramsey was truly bricking it when one of the collectors turned up.

It’s 1987 all over again!

to pause, fast forward and rewind them was amazing.

Especially if it involved boobs

To add salt to the wound, a friend of mine, his grandmother bought a house in Notting Hill for £10k under Thatcher’s campaign to sell off social housing. Now worth £2million!

@Boblo, very true, I’m not suggesting it is. It was a lot of money back then, especially when credit was hard earned. But still it wasn’t 6 x earnings, as is the case in much of the UK today.
I don’t begrudge the guy, he worked hard and saved. But even if you do that now, you would struggle, especially with the fact that jobs are increasingly short-term and insecure.

Been reflecting on the past year, when I moved from a PT to Full Time role.
– Ive put on weight
– I spend weekends just recovering, haven’t been out on a bike ride for a year
– I haven’t read a book for leisure
– I’m generally in a low mood
– I spend more money on booze and smoking just to try and relax

When I was PT I actually described myself as “happy”.

Workaholics love FT work, but many people resent it. I’m in the latter category…I need to make a choice soon.

@alpin, I was reading that story in a pub the other day. An older chap, Trevor, had just collected his pension and I was amazed how much cash he had on him. He retired at 60, is now 76, and bought his house for £4k way back when.
Undoubtedly that generation was very fortunate.
Generational inequality will go to top of the political agenda in the next 20 years, but younger people need to wake up and start voting.

It’s full time work which destroys you.
Part-time work is bliss. I’m currently in a FT role, but looking to move back to freelancer PT. I would earn about half the money, but have double the time to do the things I enjoy.

Surprisingly warm out, and set to continue next week.

Knee injury means just a pottle to the pub on saturday and some pre-spring bike maintenance.

Unless a proper real ale pub, most pubs including the big chains don’t know how to keep the ales. So you end up with really flat ale, that tends to give me a stomach ache too.
I stick to real ale in real ale pubs, but switch to lager anywhere else.

The modern father has to be a master of Time Management.

The pre-modern father just pissed off down the pub and let the mother get on with it.

I barely knew my dad growing up as he was working so much. I think his job got him down so he was also very quiet, looking back now you would say he was slightly depressed.
Now he has been retired for a few years he is a different person and we’ve had some more personal chats and he is the first person I go to when I have a problem, which I never used to do in the past.

I’d go for it. It’s not that far away, compared to moving to Oz.
And your child is young so probably the ideal time – would be harder if they were 10 years old.

The bloke was drunk, impressionable and stupid.
I went to Oxford and I thought the young conservatives attracted the really socially awkward people. But this will be searchable for the rest of his life so I think it’s just regrettable all round.

Great guy. Agree, rugby is light years ahead of football when it comes to tolerance. His story parallels Gareth Thomas.
I remember when someone told me our youth rugby coach was gay. Hard as nails Irish bloke who’d dislocated both knees numerous times, yet still played…saying that this was many years ago and we were told to keep it quiet, whereas now I’m hoping it wouldn’t be an issue at all. I think he had some problems with drink maybe because he felt he had to keep it quiet.

@Northwind, great post. You could argue that the current pessimism is actually a contrarian indicator that things are going to get better.
For work we have to attend these boring workshops about the state of current geopolitics. It’s depressing as ****, and delivered by older academics.
But there are signs we could be on the verge of a new industrial revolution, which will increase life expectancy, eliminate lots of nasty diseases, and allow technology to give us a better work-life balance.
The key as I see it is going to be the roll-out and acceptance of Basic Income. This will be the major political and economic issue of the next 20 years.

So long as things are ok at home, it doesn’t much matter to your kids what is going on in the wider world.
You like where you live, you have healthy kids, you have a good relationship with the other half? Then you are truly blessed.
Lots of negative threads on here, and I notice I tend to get down in February. Spring not so far away…