What is it with hit and run – are they just not man enough to take responsibility for hurting someone?
Heal quickly and glad you’re not too badly hurt OP. Really hope they find and jail the driver!

Anything that makes you feel weightless/flying/floating works on bikes, boards etc
& going so fast your brain struggles to process it

try skydiving – it’ll blow your mind

If that train had come through a moment earlier the impact would’ve been horrific…

Too many to think of, but if you could take that combination of adrenaline, dopamine and endorphins and inject it into people and explain this is how it feels when sport goes right, and they could have this feeling everyday if they did some sport, I suspect you’d be able to solve the obesity crisis pretty swiftly 😀

For me, one of the biggest benefits of sport right now is the ability to get away from all the attention-grabbing screens we have in our lives and just get out and be physical in the real world. (yes I get the irony of posting that on a mountain bike forum!)

I hope there are others out there, who have just had enough of the ‘same old’ Labour/Tory spin.

You can vote for him if you agree with his stated policies but I really wouldn’t vote for him if you think he’s anything different from the Tories and Labour – he went to Dulwich College (public school) and worked for years in the City. He’s far far closer to the Establishment that his ‘man of the people’ image will have you believe.

FT profile

I really doubt you’ll get anything much different to the bluster and spin we get from the others….

It’s like something out of the Daily Mash! You do wonder if some of the UKippers are basically having some kind of breakdown 😯
tbh I think there’s quite a lot of people in UK who’re gradually realising that we’re really not as rich as we thought we were and they’re rather struggling to come to terms with it

+1 for CFH here – 1991-95 were my uni years and the time when I was most getting into music. I slavishly followed the NME and Melody Maker buying all the indie guitar band stuff and these days, I listen to very little of it – I think it was very parochial and hasn’t really stood the test of time…

Where was the era’s Beatles, Stones, Bowie etc?

I’m spending a lot more time these days listening to blues, and all the stuff from 60’s and 70’s which was a truly ground-breaking era for pop music.
I’ve got one of Brian Wilson’s solo albums on Spotify now (from 2008) and in the quality of the tunes and depth of lyrics it’s totally on another plane to mid-nineties…

Most of the 90’s stuff was looking back to 60s/70s era for its inspiration rather than progressing to anything really new.

IMO even though it wasn’t my thing, dance music in 90’s and noughties was more progressive than all the indie stuff – a genuinely new form of music.

Of those artists above, Radiohead are one of the few who really went on to produce anything really original… although there were some great tunes in the Pulp album and Leftfield was pretty ground-breaking for its time.

And let’s not forget that Liam Ghallagher can’t even sing in tune and somehow he’s one of the most-celebrated ‘artists’ of the era!

I believe one of the reasons Enron collapsed is they’d sold off all their assets and were renting them back to themselves – thus reducing their fixed costs. It also meant they had no assets and eventually it became clear the accounts were misrepresenting the actual worth of the company and they went bust.

If someone is too dim to be able to run a company profitably they’re probably also too dim to realise they can’t game the system for ever…

Karma will turn up to the party one day and spoil it.

If there’s anyone close who you care about that you think might suffer from this then maybe let them know your concerns, otherwise I’d stay out – as you may or may not have the full picture and you don’t want accusations coming your way

I may be being dim but why hasn’t the loan amount been being paid off?

Was the idea that a loan was taken out using the house as security, and that the loan would be paid off once the house was sold (probably upon death).

It seems obvious to me that the law of compound interest means the amount due to be repaid would simply grow and grow over time if no ongoing repayments were being made.

If my above understanding is correct I’m surprised such a loan is possible – say the loan repayable continues to increase and house prices fall – to an extent that the amount you can sell it for is less than the loan – who does that debt then fall to – the estate?

IANA financial adviser but these looks like a scheme doomed to putting your relative in a really weak position – banks do not lend money for fun after all!

I wouldn’t be faffing around with trying to game your way out of this situation, you could end up in all kinds of HMRC/legal trouble. I’d be getting the house sold and downsizing to pay off the loan and get out of the situation…

It may be an evolutionary combination of current tech but I’m impressed that one of the biggest barriers to human beings functioning well together – the language barrier, has been overcome by AI.
A lot goes wrong when two people misunderstand each other from poor use of language, as anyone spending time on STW will know! More than a few conflicts have arisen over the centuries because of poor communications…

Renders obsolete a role you’d have thought only a human can do – face to face translation…

Benevolent dictator is the only system likely to work. But who defines ‘benevolent’? One person’s ‘fair’ is someone else’s ‘unfair’.

Personally I’ve no idea who to vote for this time – one side is, in my view, incapable of managing the country as well as not reflecting my own principles and philosophy, the other is telling lies about their success and has taken decisions which are directly negatively impacting on my life, and I couldn’t vote for them with a clear conscience given the impact of those decisions on society as a whole… rock and hard place.

We really need to find a way of expressing this as a vote (or not-voting or spoiling the paper) isn’t effective at capturing the nuances which lie behind our voting intentions.

On the other hand, I can’t help thinking that there’s a link between falling living standards/lower incomes and our strength of feeling about our government ie: we weren’t so angry when we thought we were wealthy. In that respect I think we, the electorate should take a closer look at ourselves and ask if we’ve simply ended up getting the politicians we deserve.

The emphasis we ourselves put on being consumers and being entertained isn’t exactly healthy… I never aspired to owning 4 bikes when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s but now I rather expect to be able to if I want to…

Last time the economic tectonic plates shifted like this we ended up at war. I hope we don’t again but there’s surely something very big shifting in the model of western liberal democracy and it doesn’t look like the genie’s going to go back in the bottle.

Falling cost of technology, widespread availability of sophisticated communications, social media and a general cultural trend away from command and control towards self-organisation, could well shape our future in a much more positive manner, but unlikely to get to that utopia smoothly IMO

It’s a grey version of one of the fake comedy boobs that Lord Melchett was wearing at Blackadder’s stag party

Buyers are giving up as prices too high

The bottom graph is interesting – there’s basically no buyers coming in at the bottom of the pyramid as they can’t afford current prices based on their current and future expected salaries.

I suspect sellers are hoping if they wait, prices will resume their previous rise after the election…

Personally I’d take the advice above – price sensibly (and fairly) rather than to ‘make a profit’

I used to have some Sciroccos which are cheaper than the Zonda and they were great – very free-rolling.
I now have Neutron Ultra which are amazing – very fast 🙂

Glad you got out OP – there’s way too much bullying going on in UK plc IMO – in some places it’s the whole culture!

A few thoughts:
1. Play by the rules of your contract – if they’re bullies then they’re not nice people -do not under any circumstances give them any excuse to make your life difficult, sue you etc etc
2. It’s never worth burning your bridges and being difficult even if it’s legal – you never know when people you currently work with (and get on with) might be a future colleague, boss or someone you need help from
3. Playing a straight bat and playing by the rules wins you the moral high ground – and feels far better than sinking to their level

Good luck in the new job!

trail_rat – Member
convince the rest of your generation to keep it out of property until the market corrects for the massive price hikes over the last 15 years.

Like the goverments gonna let that happen. Any party that did wouldnt be in power very long.

Not that i agree with it but the voter public would lynch em.

Well Osbourne’s doing his very best but prices are already falling in parts of London and if a government had that much control over the markets, why did they let 2008 happen? And the housing busts in late 70s, early 80s and early 90’s ?…

To the OP – first thing to do is pay off any debts, and don’t get any more, be disciplined and live within your means and any spare, put into a private pension a) you get 25% straight back as tax relief and b) by the time you retire, state pension is likely going to be dead and buried after the current ageing population makes it unaffordable for taxpayers to fund at anything like current levels.

Please for God’s sake don’t get suckered into the the idea that UK house prices only ever go up and that they’re some kind of investment. The last 15 years are unprecedented – before then prices have bust roughly every 10 years with each bust bottoming out only marginally higher than the last one:

Where I agree with Trailrat on this is just how badly the electorate will deal with a house price crash – so many people seem to have staked their current lifestyle and pension on ever-increasing prices…. but note the pattern and symmetry of the graph above!

It gets harder and harder to keep to 2 pages as you spend more time in work but I would still go for 2 pages.

As you know from your own experience, the recruiter will have tens of these things in front of them and they’re trying to make a decision and they don’t want to be reading all day – make it easy for them to pick you.

There’s a good structure of 3 key responsibilities and 3 key achievements for each role – focussing on the most recent and most relevant for the role you’re applying for.

The further you go back in time, the less detail you need.

Have a chat with some of the ladies you ride with and get their perspective.
I was talking about lack of female participation in sport yesterday with a couple of the female riders in my club (we have a women-only group which was recently formed following increased demand).

Basically, there’s a massive under-representation in cycling among women – due mainly to there being many more barriers than men face – many of them cultural, some of them self-imposed to a degree, some of them around safety.

Having a big focus on women-only events is about getting round these barriers and driving up participation. Mixed events would not get round these barriers – clearly they’re not, otherwise we wouldn’t have such a disproportionately low number of women riding.

I’m in the ‘modern tech’ is isolating us from other people and from the outside world in general, and on that basis is/risks causing great damage to our own wellbeing and society overall.

But I’m also in the ‘keep up so so you can pick and choose the tech which suits you and helps you live your life’ ie: get to know what’s there, and make an empowered choice on what you use and what you don’t, and most importantly, how you use it. Just because you can dick about on facebook all day getting envious of other people’s ‘perfect’ lives, doesn’t mean you have to, especially if it stops you being grateful for all the great things in your own life.

It’s such a tech-driven world now that you’ll lose touch and come across as a dinosaur if you don’t, as well as losing out on the benefits of having internet access whenever and wherever you need it.

My parents have always been very conservative but they refuse point blank to get the internet in any form and they’re getting increasingly isolated from the outside world – just hiding away in fear of change and it’s not doing them any good at all.

I’m not sure using your car to hit someone who’s just kicked it is quite justified… a car will do more harm to the human body than the human body can do to a car…
Cars do funny things to people’s heads… you don’t get this kind of conflict and disproportionate retaliation on the street and public transport…

If stuff still has life in it I put it on classifieds – as much because I hate throwing stuff away which can still be used – feels environmentally irresponsible to add even more to the landfill…

You’ll be amazed what people will take off your hands (although sometimes for peanuts). I’ve just sold a 15-year old Panasonic discman for £12 on ebay. Still working so seemed poor form to just bin it.

The only downside is you get a few oddballs on here who post on your ad pointing out you’re selling a pile of crap!

A sure fire way of getting UK plc back to growth is to ratchet up manufacture of handbags, set up an online store and put a few ads on STW. There’s definitely a market for them 🙂

IMO the crisis is too deep for any party or political ideology to be able to provide a solution. We’ve overspent, massively and changes in our demography and our relative position in the global economy mean we have a much lower capability to pay off that kind of debt than we used to… it’s a bit like borrowing twice your salary when you’re earning 50k on the basis you’ll be getting a payrise next year so you can pay off the debt, and then being given a massive pay cut instead… you’ve made a wrong calculation and now you’re screwed.

We’ve come to the end of the post-war boom, which was as much as anything a matter of demography… it was always going to come to an end at some point…

I don’t think any political party or central bank in UK, Europe or the States has any idea how to fix this – otherwise they’d have done it by now.

We’ve an ageing population in poor health – we’ve got used to living beyond our means and have largely not set aside enough for our pensions… and the old ways of making ourselves wealthy aren’t going to work in this new world…

As one of my mates who recently moved to Abu Dhabi said – “Interesting times we live in. Come and join the action… It is not in the UK…”

I’m 42 and I don’t expect the ‘recession’ to be over in my lifetime tbh – slow, if any growth, static living standards most likely.

It might chill us all out a little. Maybe we’ll get a bit less materialistic and go back to thinking about our communities again? personally I think people are craving a little simplicity and getting off the mad treadmill we’ve been on for the last 20 years..

When I first went in 2000, most people had little tents. Last time I went, a couple of years ago loads of people had mahoosive family tents with Gazebos etc.

This is the Glasto equivalent of everyone pointlessly buying 4x4s and to damn with the consequences to everyone else… which in this instance means unless you turn up on the Wednesday, you’ll struggle to find space for anything but a 2-man tent…

2 smaller tents would be my advice, but don’t expect to set them up ‘homestead’ style where you’re next to each other!

There’s a bit of an incline on the cycle path up through Hyde Park from Hyde Park Corner which can catch you unawares. Does that count? 😀

Is there any link between low productivity and the rise in access to the internet, mobiles and social media, by any chance? 😀

The recession is over for the better off in London and the Home Counties, which is all that matters really.

I’m not convinced about that – I’m in London and whilst many have work and are getting well-paid and there seem to be plenty of jobs going, I’m not sure it’s going to last. It just doesn’t feel right – the optimism seems to contradict all the data – US slowing down, China slowing down and dropping interest rates, India dropping interest rates, a lot of the money in London is foreign money and could leave at a moment’s notice, housing unaffordable even to the well-paid middle classes reduces the spare cash in your pocket…

That the Tories are having to play games to keep the economy looking ok (repeated tricks to push house prices up for e.g.), looks like an admission of defeat to me.

I think any optimism is mis-placed… in London as anywhere else

If the recession is over, how come we’re still at rock-bottom interest rates and facing falling prices after years of billions of £ being thrown into the economy by QE? Hardly the sign of a strong economy!

This comment to a story in The Economist sums it up for me: even the party supposed to be competent on the economy is clearly struggling to get us out of the mess and I can’t see whatever muddy mess of a coalition/minority government that we end up with, will be stopping playing party politics long enough to actually form a coherent plan and deliver any better…

I suspect the damage to the wealthy Western countries has gone much deeper than we yet know and our time as the ‘winners’ in the global economy has ended and we’re seeing a massive equalisation of wealth across the world.

I think it’ll become clearer over the next 20 years or so that we reached our peak standard of living and economic superiority in the noughties (and even that was based on massive amounts of consumer debt). In terms of sharing global wealth this is surely a good thing but I don’t think we’re going to enjoy the experience, having grown up with more than we’ll have in the future.

When house prices (an illusion of wealth) correct, the amount of debt we’re carrying will become clearer – which will be rather uncomfortable for many.

“Why are the Conservatives’ economic record and leadership strengths not yet translating into a lead?”

1. Because their “economic record”, such as it is, is based on pumping newly-printed money into banks – the same banks that caused the credit crunch. This has inflated property and stock prices but has by-passed the ordinary voter entirely. Tory’s USP is supposed to be economic competence. Fail.

2. The Conservatives are traditionally the party of national security. The Tories plan to cut defense spending to 1.8% of GDP, below the 2% NATO says is necessary to defend Europe from Russian neo-imperialism. Fail.

3. The Tories make clucking noises over Putin’s aggression in Ukraine (a country to which NATO gave security guarantees) but welcomes oligarchs and their money to the City. The document photographed on it’s way into No.10 to the effect that sanctioning Putin would be bad for business and should be avoided gives the lie to Cameron’s bluster and makes him appear a mere creature of the City. Fail.

4. Giving a short-term boost at the cost of long-term damage to the balance of payments by selling the family silver (Eurotunnel, Hinkley Point, HS2, NHS) to foreigners – in some cases foreigners who have no love of Britain (China) – is a wrong thing. Fail.

No idea what I want to do! I’ve been working in marketing for 20 years 🙂 Don’t know anything about coding yet…

I keep reading that understanding coding is increasingly being seen as a fundamental skill – especially for our kids, so I figured I should find out more about it. I’ve enjoyed doing the Code Academy stuff so I’ll carry on with that for now – about halfway through so far.

I suspect I’ll get a clearer idea what I want to do once I know more about the possibilities. I’ve been given a Raspberry Pi so I quite like the idea of doing something with that, just don’t know what yet…

Dunno if etiquette is changing but people I’ve known for years do stuff on Facebook they’d never have done pre-social media – emoting/boasting/meaningless ‘look at me’ type stuff – all that Facebook Image Crafting as per the link from aP above.
I’m 42 so this isn’t just the Youth! It’s Keeping Up With The Jones/Keeping Up Appearances on steroids and pretty unhealthy on every level tbh…

IMO there’s an inverse correlation between how interesting someone’s life is and how much they post on Facebook about it ie: those of my friends doing the really interesting stuff are too busy doing the interesting stuff to then post on Facebook about it 🙂

What about a martian?

although they drive flying saucers not cars so that might not work…

teamhurtmore – Member
pretty shocking that anyone’s trying to defend Clarkson IMO
Out of interest how many people have?

I haven’t read much of this thread, it was a generalised comment – mainly about the 1m idiots who signed the petition rather than anyone on STW.

Although, David Cameron did, if I recall. Bloody idiot getting involved!

The good news is, 39m adults in the UK DIDN’T sign the petition 🙂

If the guy was being thumped by Clarkson for 30 seconds, Clarkson is clearly a very poor bully if all he managed was to split the guy’s lip.

30 seconds is a long time to be hitting someone and pretty shocking that anyone’s trying to defend Clarkson IMO, it’s really nasty stuff. If you get so stressed over the lack of a hot dinner that you end up beating someone for 30 seconds, you’ve got some serious emotional/maturity problems

1. Riding bikes
2. Sitting in the cafe stop last Sunday on our club run and realising there were more cyclists in there than ‘normal’ people – by some margin
3. Spring weather – sunshine, blossom and birds singing
4. Living in the first world and having enough of the basics sorted to be able to appreciate these things
5. STW, for giving me a sense of perspective on all sorts of things 🙂

Fast cars are generally going to cost a lot more to buy, tax, fuel and insure, as well as any frustration from wasting 90% of their capability…
Most cars spend 22 hours a day parked up so the more £££ you spend on it, the more you’re wasting…
Buy a cheap car and a really nice bike for the same overall ££? In town, cycling’s generally faster anyway 😀

Self-driving cars are well into development… the solution’s on the way 🙂

Def get legal advice. IANAL but do you have anything in writing telling them you weren’t paying the o/s amount until they responded to your concerns?

Worth a Google of the company name to see if they have form? Might help your lawyers if they have a habit of it?

Do it. You’ll learn a huge amount. None of us are as good as we think we are at driving…
I went on one 4+ years ago. I knew what I’d done wrong – missed the fact that I was in a 30 limit (industrial estate in North Wales at 11pm on a Friday) didn’t see the camera and went through at 35 so I wasn’t sure what the course would teach me. Totally wrong!
You’ll realise there’s a huge amount you were never taught in the first place, and because there’s absolutely no renewal of your knowledge or re-assessment since you passed, you’ve forgotten most of the little you were taught in the first place!
The highlight for me was what they said about aggressive drivers – they’re angry and aggressive when they get out of bed in the morning – there’s nothing you’ve done with your driving to make them angry and nothing you can do to make them less aggressive, so best just pull over and let them go…

Unless you’re a perfect driver already there’s a huge amount you’ll learn IMO.

bigrich – Member
Magneto-Rheological Suspension Control
I know what each of those words mean individually, but that makes no sense.

I work in marketing and sometimes/(often?) I’m embarrassed by the utter guff put out by my colleagues…

Personally I’m happy to stand up through the bumpy bits – seems to do the job well enough 🙂

worth looking up how to measure your resting heart rate. IIRC sitting down is not it – something like checking heart rate on 3 consecutive days as soon as you get out of bed and taking the average is better – and likely lower.
Speak to your GP if you’re worried?