Sorry to hear you’re not well.
When I got signed off with stress it led to 2 really important steps
1. I resigned and got a new job. Didn’t solve the problem 100% but was a really important step to get away from an unhealthy environment
2. I realised I had a mental health problem which needed dealing with and booked myself if for counselling. That didn’t solve the problem 100% either but it has, over the years, changed the way I talk to myself and given me far more self-respect and confidence. IMO counselling really can change your life and if everyone did it the world would be a far far happier place.

See the current situation as a launch pad/opportunity for dealing with what are almost certainly deeper issues, the beginning of a journey, the end of which will be you as a happier person.

I like to face my problems head-on and as such have found self-help books a good way of feeling like I’m doing something about it, and making progress rather than sitting around waiting for someone or something else to heal me.

I found the best way to find a good book is go into a proper bookshop and just browse all the self-help books they have and bought the one that grabbed me.

However I can recommend:

Feeling Good

Life And How To Survive It

Families And How To Survive Them

Good luck with your recovery

I don’t get the tribal antipathy towards Paragon… I rode with them until a few years ago and there was nothing about them (or me) which suggested they were anything except your usual mix of people who loved riding bikes…

Check the schedules for Herne Hill track and the Olympic Velodrome, there may well be something on

I was also disappointed to hear this on Radio 4 evening news.
We lost 5 people on the roads today, having this very rare event on the major news bulletins is disproportionate to the overall injuries on UK roads and pavements…

That fall must have hurt though!

Actually, given he hit his head hard on tarmac he may well have been concussed. I wonder if the cyclist checked he was ok… one the one hand, it’s the right thing to do, on the other you’d be scared you were going to get a punch…

The cyclist’s initial comment was fair enough and the response was not. Scary how ill-informed the driver was, and how badly he took the comment…

Mind you, a good, solid primary position would’ve kept him behind in the first place, and a narrow, residential street with a junction coming up and cars parked either side is a perfectly justified place to take primary IMO and gives the cyclist more control over the driver and helps reduce the fear which then turns into anger…

If/when this goes viral the driver will get his punishment from any friends he has. Feel sorry for his son… really sorry. Can you imagine having someone like that as a role model…

Is that the Volvo that couldn’t have an accident and promptly ploughed stright into the demostration car in front of it?

no, read the link I put up in my OP – nine separate autonomous technologies available today.

Volvo autonomous tech

Do you think they’d be in-market if they didn’t work well enough?

How many news stories have you seen recently talking about the massive increase in Volvos crashing?

Take it much easier than you think you should would be my advice.
I was running PBs over 5 and 10k for 2-3 years, got tired of the intensity of the training and took a break for a year.
Went for a casual 8min/mile run a couple of months ago over 4 miles and had to walk the last few hundred metres as my quads totally seized up…

Off road tends to be gentler, as does flat rather than hills.

+1 for the yoga/pilates and maybe some swimming to get things working again?

There’s a lot of work to be done before they can realistically be let loose on the road.

Self-driving cars ARE loose on the road – in California. Collating data so there’s empirical data to be able to judge risk. IIRC there have been very few collisions and they have usually been human error, rather than an error in the self-driving tech.
You’ll also note the amount of autonomous tech available in Volvos in the UK… today.

The reason I put up the links is to show the number of live trials already underway in the UK ie. the ‘work that has to be done’ is already being done… autonomous tech is not a sci-fi theoretical scenario, it’s here, out on the roads…

And the whole debate about hypothetical decision scenarios misses a major point, which is that as self-driving cars will be driving within the speed limit and to the conditions, and not fiddling with their mobile phones/smoking/eating/falling asleep/not looking where they’re going etc, the biggest reduction will be in the base number of situations where there’s a risk of a collision in the first place.

Let’s assume in the UK that of all the times something could go wrong because of poor skill on behalf of the driver, that they do go wrong 1% of the time…
Let’s assume there’s 1,000,000 of these potential situations every day.
That means 10,000 collisions
With self-driving tech, let’s assume the lack of ability to stop the risky situation going wrong is no better than a human ie: 1% of all risky situations.
But because the car is tech-operated rather than operated by a stupid, emotional, angry, distracted human, the number of risky situations barely arise in the first place. ie: the car’s not speeding. Let’s assume only 1,000

1,000 risky situations x 1% = 10 collisions.

I know I’m using hypothetical figures here but the debate isn’t about how the autonomous tech performs in a collision-avoidance situation, it’s that it avoids the collision-avoidance situation in the first place, likely to lead to a dramatic fall in collsions and the hypothetical ‘how would a self-driving car cope with the situation better than a human’ question is null and void

ET

safer innit.

exactly. ‘not safe’ being the #1 reason given by non-cyclists for being non-cyclists.

Not sure if it’s these…

… or these

Just looks lovely. And means I can get out and ride some of the bridleways close to me in winter

Would work better spoken than written…

I had a Shimano one on my commuter. It wore out in less than a year. I replaced it with a Whites Industries. More expensive, I grant you, but much better quality and also has a nice all-important clicky freewheel 🙂
Rode it all through last winter without any kind of maintenance and still going strong

shake a tree

something sticky under the ‘h’ key?

That’s not funny 🙂

Currently sitting at home missing summer with a broken wrist, recently with added titanium.
Not the first time I’ve been plated, previously my collarbone. My advice would be just take it easy and don’t rush. Don’t focus on what you’re missing, focus on resting and recovery. 100% recovery of your muscles and strength and flexibility/extent of movement for the rest of your life are more important than rushing back right now…

My op was 2 weeks ago and been told 4 weeks to fully fixed bone and then physio and not to expect to be riding for 3 months after physio starts…

Don’t be too shocked about how much muscle you lose and how much strength and flexibility you lose, it comes back with physio. Be very disciplined with your physio, it pays dividends in the future. I paid for a sports physio rather than NHS as I wanted someone who’d understand my desire to get 100% strength and movement back… well worth the ££ IMO.

I would find other sports to do whilst you recover to keep yourself fit and sane. Maybe swimming?

Just be patient and give yourself time to recover…

It’s not all bad, my physio got me doing loads of core strength exercises just to keep me busy and it kind of changed my life, a strong core makes you feel better just day to day and gives you a lot more power and strength on the bike… I wouldn’t have learnt that otherwise

So cliched… couldn’t he have come up with something more original than getting caught in a coke and hookers sting by a Murdoch tabloid?

Shows how unimaginative our ruling class has become! Open goal for Murdoch too…

Leasing is about selling cars to a country that hasn’t got enough cash to pay for them outright. It’s not a consumer proposition, it’s a route to profit for the manufacturers.

I had a mate working at Ford before the 2008 crash and he said their finance division made more profit than the manufacturing division did…

Worth reading this…
Signs of a cloud over Europe’s hottest car market

This quote about dealers self-registering suggests the dealers are getting desperate…

But dealers say, in private, that the market is being pushed too hard by manufacturers — not an unusual refrain but a view shared even among some carmakers.
“The market isn’t quite there for the volumes of vehicles that the car plants are supplying,” says John Leech, head of automotive at professional services firm KPMG.
ASE Global, a data research company tracking statistics from the majority of UK dealerships, says this is prompting a worrying rise in self-registrations — where dealers sell the cars to themselves to make up for private demand that is weaker than the official numbers indicate.

Personally I’d wait till early next year if you can and see what happens with interest rates and also the BTL-ers’ response to the changes in the last budget.

There’s few people who think houses are at fair value at the moment. It’ll take some time for sellers to accept this I suspect but given an interest rate rise reducing the amount both owner-occupiers and BTLers can pay, and a few more over-stretched BTLers selling up + a little more negativity in the media about BTL and I suspect asking prices will begin to become more realistic…

As always this article doesn’t clarify whether it’s talking asking or selling price and it seems odd that some areas would drop so much whilst others increase so much. From what I’ve seen of the data, it’s asking prices but it suggests the situation in London is no longer constant sky-high increases.

Falls in London?

I don’t think my parents meant to treat me and my brother differently but in a very middle-class way they prized academic achievement which came to me more easily than my brother. Not helped that he had a problem with reading and writing (possibly dyslexia) and also, IMO is on the Autism spectrum to some extent.

Either way I think he resented me and what seemed like my easy achievement and that he felt he was treated differently for his lack of it. We fought a lot as kids as a result and we’re still not very close as adults. He’s 45 now and I’m 42.

To be honest, it’s long overdue for us to deal with this. I keep meaning to tell him I think he was treated like crap by our Dad, and the day my brother tried to thump him out of sheer resentment of the bullying he was receiving, I really wanted to cheer him for it, it was long overdue… and I was definitely on my brother’s side.

The biker though did the only thing possible, jump – anything else and he’d have probably come off worse. And bikes are easily fixed.

Relying on quick thinking by bikers to prevent themselves getting crushed in this situation is not really the answer is it?
a) it’s victim blaming, the biker’s road position was entirely legitimate and normal
b) it’s not dealing with the source of the risk – a lorry too big to get round the corner without driving on the wrong side of the road

If a skilled driver can’t operate a vehicle that size and design in that environment without creating that level of risk for legitimately-positioned oncoming traffic either means higher levels of training, redesign of the vehicle or size/length limit for vehicles in urban environments.

Saying bikes are easily fixed ignores the high chance that a less quick-off-the-mark rider may not have survived… and certainly is no basis for reducing the risk…

“then ride accross the bridge, looks doable on google maps”

The clue is in the song title “Ferry, ‘cross The Mersey”

Speak to a financial adviser and explain you want an income-generating investment and you have £200k and see if they offer you property as the best option. I’ll be surprised if they do. In any case the managing agents have seen you coming, their fees will eat massively into your income…

UK has this obsession with property being the best investment ever for some reason. You have much more choice than that… sticking 100% into an asset class which is in a bubble is not a wise choice, especially now the Chancellor has it targeted for raising tax…

Investing in established plcs which pay good dividends is usually a good recipe for a regular income. If you want growth then small companies in sectors with a strong growth forecast are a better alternative.

Nickjb’s post is a good illustration of why expecting to make money from property is a stupid idea right now.
£250k would have got you a reasonable 2-bed flat in a SE postcode in London 2 years ago, now it’s the asking price for a parking space in the centre.
If that’s not a sign of delusional/irrational market I don’t know what is.

Problem we have with property is that following the financial crisis, the waves of speculative international money, supported by loose loans to BTL speculators, artificially low interest rates to reduce the cost of debt and taxpayer subsidy to allow the rest of us to keep up has led to an irrational belief that the market is guaranteed to go up forever and ever… ie: if it didn’t pop then, it never will…

However, you take away all those props and things will begin to look different. The last Budget should give you a few clues if you look closely enough

+1 for the whole packet. The only solution that works is to avoid the biscuit aisle in the supermarket. Shopping online helps too.
And I’m obsessive about my health. No wonder we’re all so fat if the whole packet has become normal behaviour 😯

Garibaldi are Squashed Fly Biscuits

Perhaps people who took out a mortgage recently on a variable rate and stretched themselves to the limit? But I took out my first mortgage this year and made certain that we’d be ok if things changed, and I imagine most other boringly sensible people would have done too…

That’s what BoE are hoping too, but this debt projection suggests not. Plus the sheer amount of debt we have suggests not a high enough % of the population are as boringly sensible as you (and me) to prevent another bust…

A few recent articles from the FT too on the state of housing – well worth reading the comments for additional viewpoints. Maybe only pessimists read the FT?

Speculative investors head for the exit in Nine Elms

QE feeding house price bubble

I’m no expert but if I was you I would also be looking at a BTL property. In an area with high rents and where the price of property is likely to go up a lot in the long term – i.e. London.
I’d buy a flat somewhere along the proposed route for the Bakerloo line tube extension in SE london – if/when that opens (10-15 years time) you will be laughing even with capital gains tax.

As if! That’s where I live and £200k won’t get you anything round here any more. Literally.

A couple of years ago, a 2-bed flat for £250k maybe, but now, nothing.

Put BR3 into Rightmove and a max price of £200k and you’ll get 5 results, one of which is a restaurant…
For Catford Bridge you get 4 results, one of which is a retirement flat and 2 are shared ownership…

‘Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do’

Mervyn King I think it was, admitted that half his job was about setting and managing expectations through what he said publicly, as much as it was about what he did with interest rates and other tools…

For my money, Carney has been making noises about interest rates for so long without following through with action as a way to encourage people to pay down their existing debts, reduce their future borrowings and to get themselves onto fixed rate mortgages or out of BTL so that when they do put rates up, the ensuing recession and housing bust will not hit too many people, just those who’ve been too daft to stop using debt to fund a desired lifestyle, or think BTL is some kind of get-rich-without-working scheme.

Hopefully they have the data which shows now is the right time to go up. Anecdotally and looking at the levels of personal debt we have I’m not so sure…

As much as I want higher rates to give me a return on my savings and to bring house prices back down to where I can afford something, I don’t think the situation’s going to be very pretty at all…

Not sure how reporting to the Police will help! Where’s your empathy STW?

Sounds like far more of a mental health issue to me… my Gran started to go a little bit nuts after my Grandad died and she spent her whole life alone. Not as bad as this but she sounds like she needs help rather than being reported to the Police as some kind of criminal…

Maybe push back to social services/take it higher, along the lines of someone paying a visit and making an assessment of her mental health somehow. Maybe point out the effect it’s having on you and that you think involving the Police would be deeply unhelpful but if it carries on then you will.

At a time of cuts I suspect they’re pushing back where they can, so you just need to push back harder…

I wouldn’t assume putting it in property means you’ll have more money in future… don’t forget the last Budget whichput BTL firmly in the sights of the taxman…

Speculative investors head for the exit in Nine Elms

Also, read this and the comments beneath…

QE creating housing bubble

Far better to stick it in a low-cost index-tracking ISA and leave it for 10+ years…

Western economies + Japan + China are all in a massive crisis. Debt and ageing populations reducing ability to produce GDP and pay off that debt, whilst also increasing the cost of supporting that ageing (non-economically-productive) population…

In a crisis IMO ideology is not helpful, it reduces access to policies which may well be effective

We need a technocratic, non-political government in place for 5-10 years. Worked quite well for Italy with Mario Monti it seems. Look where ideology has got Greece in the last few weeks…

In some ways, Gideon’s game-playing and stealing Labour-style policies has meant he’s following a more centrist path than he might normally have done, which is a good thing.

However, it’s not hard to find a photo of him looking Machiavellian so I suspect he’s not doing this for any reason other than political gain…

I assume the Police are going to be involved and the driver will be losing his licence and never to be allowed to drive a truck again? He clearly wasn’t looking where he was going if he ran straight into the biker like that…

Also, note total lack of emotion from him… maybe he was in shock but he didn’t look like a man who realised he nearly crushed another man to death… not ideal to be driving a truck like that in London if you don’t understand the implications of getting it wrong…

FWIW the assumption that all the people around you are about to do the very stupidest thing they can think of, has kept me safe so far. e.g. if there’s a vehicle in a side road coming up to the junction and you’re on the main road, take primary, make eye contact, clear yourself of their A pillar blind spot and give yourself space in case they pull straight out… as indeed many do. ie: never just ride on past, assuming they’re going to stay put.

In London you do need your wits about you, I’ll admit… there’s too much going on for even the most skilled driver to pay attention to…

<edit> cameras are doing a great job of highlighting how lousy the quality of driving is in the UK… the more stuff like this gets uploaded and shared, the more pressure builds to get it dealt with… it takes it above the level of individual anecdotes and provides proof…

Why should it pass? it’s all riding bikes 🙂
Road bike for road and MTB for off road and life is good

Maybe I’m a geek but I think that’s pretty cool… if designers are taking the practical aspects of cycling kit and making them a design feature it tells you how far cycling is normalising/becoming fashionable.

Not quite the Amsterdam dream of everyone riding in normal clothing but better than geeky hivis and lycra being the norm

I got the impression most people in Liverpool parked their cars on small piles of bricks, one at each corner 🙂

(Sorry Weeksy)

You never know, they may have been knowingly employed for a reason. Players can get things done that decent people can’t or won’t.

You can bet that plenty of City employers know which of their staff are psychopaths who’ll knowingly break the law to pull off deals…

And the populations of Reading, Henley and Maidenhead perform a similar service for Londoners.

And all the sheep and humans in North Wales do it for Brum, and the sheep and -humans in Cumbria and Peaks do it for Manchester 🙂

I’ve worked with someone who in the past has shown questionable morals to the point of bullying and lies and I know people who now work with this individual.
I decided that anything I said could reflect badly on me as some kind of machiavellian political character and kept my mouth shut.
It depends on how well you know this company tbh…