This thread reminded me I’d not listened to Jane’s Addiction for years. Stunning stuff…

Ask your consultant – it’ll be case by case I should imagine.
They also don’t always want to take metalwork out – it means more surgery which presents risk of infection. Right now the NHS has severe cost pressures too.
I opted to have the plate and screws out of my collarbone and glad I did as it’s more comfortable

The Police have done themselves no favours with this really, have they?

a) Cycling at 5mph is actually very difficult so a 5mph limit is unjustifiably low – arguably it creates more danger, not less
b) I ride through Hyde Park regularly and I’ve never seen a sign – so clearly the limit’s not well-enough advertised
c) I also run through there regularly – c 9mph – so it’s a nonsense to suggest 5mph on a bike is a danger…
d) Enforcing 5mph will just lead to more riders on the main roads round the Park which are pretty dangerous – the traffic is very fast and aggressive around there.
e) There’d be less risk all round if they’d designed the cycle lanes away from the walking areas – they’re all shared use spaces mainly used by tourists who’re enjoying being in the park rather than looking out for cyclists – so time spent educating pedestrians would likely have a bigger impact on overall safety…

You do wonder just how cycling has increased so much in recent years given the sheer amount of insane resistance from so many quarters, including the Police… You can only imagine how many people would ride if it was perceived as socially acceptable and safe… and free from moronic harrassment like this

I’ve got some Endura 3/4 from a couple of years ago. They’re certainly warm enough and coverage up the back is fine. Bit tricky at the pee stop but aren’t all bibs?
Pad is a bit nappy-like when you’re off the bike but they’re dead comfy to wear and strangers think you’re a freak for wearing lycra in the first place so I doubt the nappy thing will make people think any worse of you 🙂
They’re not the best fit around the calf but it’s not noticeable when riding.
I don’t think they’re as good as the Endura bib shorts I bought 10+ years ago which are still going strong but they’re perfectly fine vfm

I’d be looking the at 2015 Genesis range – some lovely looking bikes there.
Get something that takes full mudguards if you don’t want to wreck the drivetrain and if you ride with anyone else. The raceblades are short and still spray into the face of the rider behind – which is a safety thing so they can see where they’re riding, not a ‘being nice’ thing

Croix De Fer 30 ordered yesterday

If I didn’t have all the bikes I already need I’d be following you down the shop with my credit card in hand. The 30 is possibly the ultimate commuter bike.
Although the Day One Di2 comes close too- an interesting concept, certainly

I can only assume you’ve gone to bad gigs or to see bands you’re not that bothered about. Great live music moves you like nothing else… but not all live music is great.
Live music IS music. Mankind has been playing music to itself for centuries and centuries. Recorded music has been around for mass consumption for about 50-60 years only…

You can’t crowd surf or mosh in the lounge either. Tends to hurt 🙂

I can only assume you’ve gone to bad gigs or to see bands you’re not that bothered about. Great live music moves you like nothing else… but not all live music is great.
Live music IS music. Mankind has been playing music to itself for centuries and centuries. Recorded music has been around for mass consumption for about 50-60 years only…

You can’t crowd surf or mosh in the lounge either. Tends to hurt 🙂

IIRC the reason the new laws were brought in was in part because of the number of train delays when the signal men came into work in the morning to find all the copper wiring between them and the signals had ‘been scrapped’ by persons unknown in the night…

Some free market…..?
Whaddya mean?

Deliberate shortage of supply from lack of building for years and years, followed by deliberate adding in more money when prices become unaffordable rather than letting prices fall as per free market supply and demand – Funding For Lending and Help To Buy.

Falling house prices will make people feel poorer even though rising house prices make people actually poorer as they’re left with lower disposable incomes. The market’s being manipulated – otherwise prices would have fallen back to historical income multiples after the 2008 crash… how else do you get 20% increase in prices (in London) whilst during the same period wages are stagnant. The London population didn’t increase 20% last year so clearly there’s more than your free market supply and demand going on…

It’s surprisingly naive IMO – if governments have as much control over markets as they seem to think, they’d have prevented the 2008 crash, surely? How they think they’ll prevent a correction in house prices is a mystery

+1 for Road ID.

Road ID[/url]

The rubber will perish after a couple of years but it’s dead cheap to replace with another one

According to Wikipedia ‘Interesting’ Steve Davis is a fan… 😯

IIRC they started in 1969… plenty of catching up to do.
There’s no-one else quite like them – just try tapping your foot to the beat and you’ll find out they change timing almost from bar to bar – must’ve been a nightmare trying to drum for them 🙂
For starters, find Heaven Born And Ever Bright and Songs For Ships And Irons which was when they were at their closest to getting accepted. Sing To God wasn’t their best IMO. Cardiacs Live gives you an idea about their gigs. Me and a mate managed to start a “Jim” chant once…
UK music press absolutely hated them because they refused to be part of any kind of label or scene, which is probably what Tim and Jim wanted 🙂
They’re actually quite influential. Blur got them to support them at their Mile End gig (1994/5?) and the crowd had absolutely no idea how to cope with them so they threw bottles. Heathens…

TrailRat – you’re kindof right. Basically I’m struggling to afford to buy anything at current prices, and neither can a lot of people…There is however a lot of evidence of falling prices (in London at least) if you track asking prices on Rightmove, and selling prices on Land Registry…

They abolished joint mortgage tax relief and advertised it in advance. As a result there was a surge of demand in an already overheated market that, once the tax change came in, resulted in the botom tier of demand being kicked out of the market with a resultant crash.

This is kind of what happened in London last year – prices hadn’t dropped since 2008 but no-one was buying. Help to Buy led to a surge in demand, which has driven up prices beyond the reach of all but the very wealthy, leading to a sudden halt in demand as there’s hardly anyone who can get the sums together to buy, especially now lending is being restricted…

Mudshark – that review of news headlines is interesting – we’re seeing exactly the same again – as sentiment has gone bearish and the figures are published which prove that demand is falling away and prices are dropping – certain vested interests either comment in very vague terms that ‘this is a slowdown’ or ‘price rises are easing temporarily’ or ‘growth of xx% forecast over the next xx years’

A bit of googling shows that hedge funds are all shorting stocks related to housing – e.g. Foxtons, Rightmove (they have to publish particularly large short positions that they take)

Plus, Foxtons share price has dropped from 399p in Feb to 165p in Sept – and the private equity firm who bought them sold 50% of its stake.

So very clever people who spend their days getting rich on speculation and investment are expecting prices to fall, not rise, which is in opposition to press releases from estate agents and mortgage lenders who stand to lose – the same trick they tried in 1989

I’ve been riding bikes since the mid-70s when I was a kid but only started club riding in 2009 so I don’t know what club runs were like back in the day, but:
I have to say we’re not doing a very good job of communicating to new riders, briefing them and dealing with the times when they ride poorly.

My club has had numerous conversations about improving briefing for new riders and for the seniors to help teach the new riders but it’s not happening. I think in part there’s a reluctance to be seen to be too serious or too formal.

I tried myself at the weekend to let a new rider know about through and off but he just didn’t think there was anything he needed to know even though he’d just let the rest of us to all the work over a 3 mile fast stretch… I gave up rather than wanting to come across as too preachy…

Ultimately it’s the club’s fault if it’s not bringing new riders into line but I don’t know how you can enforce that.

Plus a lot of the ‘groups’ you see out aren’t club runs – just lots of smaller groups who happen to be in the same road at the same time and you can’t do much about that – much as you can’t hold one driver responsible for the fact they’re on the road at the same time as 20 others and creating a traffic jam…

One of them got his comeuppance though as he stacked it hard pissing about in Harrogate.

Charming 😯

OP – quite seriously you just need to accept that UK roads have changed and there’s more people riding than there used to be, and find a way to live with it. I really don’t understand how you can get quite so upset as to come ranting on a forum about something which was at most, a minor inconvenience.

Overall this growth is very much for the better – we’re a very fat country and pollution is a major health risk so any increase in cycling and reduction in use of cars is good for everyone… the costs to the NHS (ie: us the taxpayer) as the population at large fail to look after themselves are very very significant – and we have more than enough debt as it is.

Cycling is going through unprecedented growth in popularity and looking like that growth will continue as more women and kids are persuaded out too. By definition that means there’s a lot of new and inexperienced riders.

Riding in a group is not necessarily easy and riding in UK traffic with poor driving skills so prevalent is threatening – you need to give people some time to learn their skills riding in this environment.

Mainland Europeans are famously much more friendly to cyclists than we are in the UK and if they can be, so can you.

Best thing you can do as a driver who’s upset by all this is to go out with a local club run a few times and find out for yourself how hard it is to ride in a group and to manage that group – and how it feels to have an impatient or poorly-skilled driver around you – you’ll learn a lot about how to drive around groups in future

This is the important thing:

You’re confusing aggregate trends with the experience of sub-populations. There are too many people made unemployed in the past who never got a job again. As Tom_W1987 says, visit some mining towns or simply look up the statistics of where the economically inactive are.

At a macro level, jobs will be destroyed and jobs will be created but not at the same time necessarily or requiring your skills. If it’s your job that’s destroyed, do you have the ability and time to retrain to one of the new jobs?

e.g. a London cabbie – what else can he do when self-driving cars take his job. does he have transferable skills and is he at an age when he can retrain to a new job at the same income level and does he have the savings to live off in the meantime. Doubtful.

The new jobs will be in the software and hardware design of all the kit that does the self-driving – likely to go to a recent graduate…

We’d be better off trying to work out how nice we are to other people and how much we give back to our communities… and willy-waving over that instead.

Got to be Hell of The North Hertfordshire – March I think. 115m in total starting from South London – riding to the start point somewhere in North London then God knows how many offroad paths around Hertfordshire (on the winter road bike) and ending up back in Brixton for tea, medals and beer. Epic, scenic and a lot of fun

+1 on the hard to understand now how ground-breaking and limit-pushing it was for its time and how MP has suffered from its own success to some extent – being endlessly over-quoted or being set up as genius always makes stuff harder to appreciate…
What did Monty Python ever do for us?

Saw them once at The Roundhouse in Camden – they had a small tree on stage which they waved about randomly for some reason… either way they seemed to have got a lot of deserved praise when they first started 10 years ago and have since faded into the background a bit which is a shame cos they’re very good

Just realised that the building across the Thames from Lucy’s flat in Not Going Out is my old office in St Katherine’s Dock 🙂

I saw the non-Harry Enfield half of the Double Take brothers in Shaftesbury Avenue. I didn’t realise who he was initially, took another look and acted in surprise when I worked it out
I think he thought I was being funny

another +1 for setting out on your own doing what you’re already experienced and good at. You get paid for delivering good work, not whether your face fits and how well you play the corporate game.
I’ve had real problems fitting into places over the years (there’s some level of autism in our family I think) and ended up being ‘managed out’ of a large corporate 4 years ago without actually knowing quite what I’d done wrong…

Either way I decided that contracting couldn’t be any less secure than that, got back in touch with a previous client from when I was in ad agencies and I’m still here as a contractor having worked on multiple projects and paid far in excess (about double) of what I would get if I was perm.

There’s a growing army of people going independent and few seem to regret it. With wages likely to be stagnant for many years and increased job insecurity, it makes sense to strike out on your own and be master of your own destiny..

Mine are quite good actually:
1. The great-nephew of Lord Kitchener (the bloke with the moustache on the ‘your country needs you’ WW1 recruitment posters) was at my parents’ wedding
2. I was at school with Gary Barlow and used to deliver his newspapers
3. Daniel Craig’s stepmum was the landlady of my local back home for years until she sold it a couple of years ago
4. I knew a James Bond stuntman – he was the one who played Halle Berry when they got out of the back of the Hercules on those one-man rocket things. Needless to say as an middle-aged ex Para he wasn’t much of a likeness 🙂
5. Oh and my mum looked after Damon Hill for a few hours when he was very little and his Dad was racing at Oulton Park

No but they’re great places to go and hunt for random CDs that you wouldn’t otherwise buy – a bit like when you used to rifle through CDs and vinyl in record shops and spot something you’d heard about but weren’t thinking of buying. Got some really interesting music that way over the last few years so it’s a good way to discover stuff

I sense there is actually a flight from London going on which could leave a lot of sellers high and dry until they lower their expectations due to simple lack of buyers.
And once the news comes through that prices are falling more than over just one month, you can expect buyers of all sorts – FTB and foreign investment – to sit on their hands and wait – it’s what people do in deflationary environments – why buy today when it’ll be cheaper in a month. The exact opposite of the panic buying this time last year…

The flight seems to be coming from multiple sources:
1. Owners who’ve been here for years selling up and moving to the sticks for a bigger house and no mortgage. It’s realistic to do this as you can work from home more easily and therefore a long commute is not such a downside to the decision as you don;t do it every day and even then you can work on the train. It means one more house on the market in London and one less buyer, somewhat changing the supply/demand balance.
2. FTB who simply can’t afford a thing buying further out – Bromley, Sutton, Chelmsford etc
3. Companies employing graduates in the regions rather than the graduates moving to London – companies simply can’t afford to pay the salaries the new graduates need to live in London anymore

We have to think through the implications of this for London. If you live in London you tend to go places after work – gym, eating out, drinking, shopping etc but when you live out, the long commute home and the need to get up early tomorrow means you go straight home. So any significant flight will have an impact on all kinds of areas of the London economy…

A crash will kick confidence badly but a steady fall over 5 years back to an average price more like 300/350k instead of £500k would be healthy. If only to remind people that house prices don;t carry on upwards for ever, which a lot of people now believe as that’s all they know from the last 15 years

Beautiful looking bike that looks just like a bike should, if you get my drift.
Jealous you got out for an autumn daytime ride too!

Condor Fratello. Dead comfy, beautiful and will just keep rolling

Even the Tories can’t face real austerity!!

Gideon’s manipulation of the housing market this time last year is increasingly looking like an admission of defeat in being able to tackle the real problem of where to find growth. Even then it looks to have gone pear-shaped as London prices are falling already…

Being born in the early 70’s my experience has been that the Tories have a track record of being stronger on the economy than Labour so this really isn’t a good sign… more of a lost generation than a lost decade IMO

It’s looking increasingly like a standard state pension for all won’t exist by the time we retire (I’m 41) so I wouldn’t bail about of a private pension provision if you’re in one. |Don’t forget you get 25% back as soon as you put your post-tax income into a pension, which is better return than a non-pension investment and even a BTL

I would seriously hold off buying in London till after the election at least. All the data is suggesting buyer demand has just come to a grinding halt – buyers just can’t afford a thing even by borrowing loads, lenders are tightening their criteria, share prices of the estate agents are going downwards at speed and selling prices fell 0.7% last month (an annualised 8% only a few months after all the noise was about continued rises for ever and ever according to the more excitable estate agents and media)
I know of at least 2 friends trying to sell who had offers which then fell through, and asking prices are definitely dropping.
+ after all the recent data showing prices were falling there have been a couple of press releases from property investment companies claiming 30% increase in prices over the next few years (see today’s Evening Standard). You have to ask yourself why a property investment company would publish a press release designed to scare people into buying now just after official data has demonstrated prices are falling…

I believe Ghandi said something like ‘be the change you want to see in the world’

If you want people to be considerate, be proactive about your friendliness and courtesy rather than waiting for other people to do it…

Honestly, it can work. Few people are moronic enough to return a friendly ‘after you’ with ‘sod off you git’

It works well when you’re riding towards oncoming traffic where you’re in a narrow part of the road and they look like they’re just going to carry on driving towards you regardless of the fact you have priority and there’s clearly not room for you both to pass – a proactive ‘thank you’ wave and a smile tends to get them to stop…

You can do the same with pedestrians dithering around shared use paths – an early and ultra-polite ‘excuse me’ given with plenty of time tends to do the trick. Even if their response is miserable, you can choose to ignore it or just give them a friendly ‘thank you’ to offset it…

I wonder if there’s a discrimination case in there? Obviously it would be a bit overkill, but it might get the message through to companies to train their staff better if they think they might get sued for being so insensitive…

It’s mainly an emotional intelligence thing IMO, thinking sensitively about how to treat other people and understanding that something they’re doing which you don’t like may not be deliberate and the problem may actually be your own expectations that everyone else should act according to your own unexpressed ‘rules’.

Sadly emotional intelligence can be a difficult thing to train into people and, like commonsense, it’s distributed amongst the population unevenly!

Now, fast forward to last Friday, i’m riding to work, traffic is light, there are 2 vans maybe 200m behind me and a car heading towards the junction i’m turning into by a bus stop, he’s a good 200m away too.
I turn in and its covered in diesel and i hit the deck quicker than i can blink. bike gets mangled and i’m lying prone (but un-injured) in the middle of the road.
NO ONE stops, not one. The guy approaching the junction who saw me crash slows to let the vans past, then drives round me as if i was road kill without a second glance. if anyone had been behind him and not seen me crash, they probably would have driven straight into me.
The only person to see if i was alright was a chap at the bus stop who looked up from his phone for 2 seconds to say “alright?” and that was it.

I’d like to see a serious psychological/neuroscience study into what happens to people’s thought processes when they get into a modern car – this lack of empathy/understanding of other people’s needs that seems so prevalent is almost psychopathic in it’s lack of basic human kindness… I suspect there’s something about isolation from the outside world that comes from the sheer size and level of protection which fully detaches drivers from any sense of connection with the outside world. I’ve said it before but the level of discomfort and inconvenience on rush-hour trains and the Tube is quantifiably worse than driving but you never see the same levels of anger and aggression – and my guess is that you know you’ll get a punch or at least have to deal with the consequences of your bad behaviour with a bunch of dirty looks and tuts from the people around you 🙂 You have no protection if you act like an anti-social git, so you don’t act anti-socially – simple.

That said, I actually think cycling is winning at the moment. Massively. New cyclists I talk to are really quite shocked about the treatment they receive. I think they’re more powerful than me when the complain about it to friends and family because they’re ‘normal people’ rather than mad-keen cyclists…

The sheer numbers I see commuting and out at weekends in London shows that despite the ranters, the aggression, the negative media, the lack of political leadership, the masses are getting increasingly keen on cycling. People are ignoring all the negativity and getting on with it anyway…

Wide passes and staying back till there’s space is getting noticeably more frequent IMO – last year and this year especially. There’s definitely a trend towards deliberate courtesy. The aggressive drivers are, I think, getting worse in the levels of aggression, but they really are in a minority (and I suspect they know it). Social norms are very powerful and actually a campaign suggesting that being anti-cyclist and an aggressive driver puts you in a disliked minority that everyone else looks down on could be quite powerful…

Imagine just how far it will go when and if we finally get the politicians, police and media onside…

tbh I think this austerity thing may do us some good. We’ve got kindof materialistic over the last generation and a readjustment is healthy IMO

However, that graph isn’t very jolly and I suspect there’s a lot of Western expectations about continued wealth going to be rather dashed over the next few years as people realise what we have now re flat/falling living standards is the new normal for the 99%.

If all the clever people who’ve been staring at the problem since 2008 haven’t been able to solve it yet, it kindof suggests they’re not sure what the solution is, no?…

I don’t think you can even get a shoebox for £120k in London anymore. Even Yuppies are pretending that West Norwood and Catford are ‘desireable’ to hide the fact they’re living somewhere they never ever thought they’d live in their wildest nightmares 🙂

Get onto Rightmove using the Property Bee add-on and see how many places are dropping in asking price or sales falling through and ask yourself if it’s actually a good time to buy or not…

Def think about renting in the area for 6 months+ so you can check it out…

Why does anyone think their perspective of what is ‘right’ should be forced on anyone else?

If you prefer to wear a helmet, wear one. I do.

But not sure I have the right to dictate to anyone else they have to do the same

scaled
More interesting question for me, why do skydivers wear helmets?

Mid air collisions with other divers, poor landings that end in face plants, and even smacking you head on the door frame (or worse, the wing/tail!) of the plane you are chucking yourself out of……….)

A boot in the face at 120mph does tend to hurt + a full face in winter stops your face freezing or getting peppered with the sharp end of the raindrops when you’re falling thru a cloud