Nobody says it but what these kind of sugar taxes imply is that the problem is mainly with poor thick people. They’re not capable of making rational, informed decisions so they need poking with financial disincentives, which are largely irrelevent for the well off.

It helps to prevent these peole from crowding up busy trains, from cluttering up roads in London and it defends them for their insatiable lust to consume alcohol and pop.

Hmm. Presumably its just much more of a slog on a mountain bike because of weight and body postion? I’ve never ridden a road bike so not sure how diffrent it is.

KeyLet hasn’t changed. This is the nice man who runs the company:

KeyLet boss

It’s a wonderful example of capitalism – a system designed to take as much as possible in return for as little as possible.

What’s depressing is that the Welsh Assembly recently carried out a review of the rental sector – months of committees, reports, experts quizzed etc.

And the end result is that letting agents now need to sign a register and attend a training day. It does absolutely nothing to protect people from the rampant greed and abuse of the industry.

A 1975 documentary about a fella whose job is dealing with naughty kids in Blackburn:

It’s this:

Bad day at the office for Mr Rowland. Sounds like he’s sick.
Luckily, You Tube commenters don’t make a big thing of it.

The quote above is a sweeping generalisation, and, frankly, has little connection with the real world.
A fiction, in fact…

Of course it’s a generalisation. You can’t really talk abount anything, other than your own personal experience, without generalising.

But saying it doesn’t apply to me so it has no validity is a bit daft. Very few of us think advertising has any effect on us – but it obviously does.

Which explains why so many spend their lives consuming comics, orc fantasy novels and space cowboy movies.

What exactly is wrong with escapism anyway?

Nothing. It’s something everyone does, in their own way. Some people read/watch fiction, others don’t.

But the popularity of SF and fantasy could be viewed as a symtpom of a society which creates so many unhappy, unfulfilled, stressed and scared people.

Rather than trying to change any of this, we’ve just found ways to make it more palatable – by blocking the world out.

Simon Pegg talked about similar kind of thing recently:
Obsession with sci fi and fantasy

What a horribly depressing thought. I wonder what our culture would resemble if we didn’t love fiction? Anyone?

People may start to engage with the world around them rather than escaping from it via books and movies written for children. They may start to see that narrative, creativity and imagination exists in all facets of life and not just within the pages of a book.

I little bit of me has just died knowing that you have no imagination. It’s sad. There’s so much written work, so much art and so much music that you’re missing out on.
Your childhood must have been a bit hard too.

You could flip that around and say that people who read fiction are filling a gap left by their own lack of imagination and creativity.

I feel the same. It’s like when somebody wants to tell you about a dream they had. It’s not just books for me but movies and theatre as well.

32 hours and Galloway Forest Park.

Some optimistic Welsh miserablism for St David’s Day. This is Datblygu, the song was later covered by Super Furry Animals on Mwng album.

if it lets people recapture their youth without having to resort to vintage MTBs then that’s got to be a good thing.

I dont see the need to spend £800 on a CX bike when you can get a decent early 90s mountain bike for £70.

Another cover of a Tim Hardin song. It’s Bobby Darin, shortly before his death. He used his light entertainment show to promote a love for music, chess and left wing politics.

It could be any cover done by Tom Jones. He has the karaoke foghorn voice required to destroy songs of any genre. This is a good example of how to make an average song painful:

Good article that. Think it’s just capitalism.
It’s a strange system which feeds on things that people like/value/enjoy and it sucks the life out of them.

Swingers.

…to me in Wales the EU is that bit more independence from the Westminster gov’t and something we benefit from as a certainty and as such I can’t see any reason why I would want to vote to leave.

Agree with this but Wales will remain completely invisible during the whole process. Saw it this morning on the Marr show – Sturgeon, Farage and Cameron.

As a Welsh learner, found out that copa means top or summit.
So I used that. And I only post if I’ve got summit to say.

Lots of suggestions here:
What do I need to install?

Ruffle up hair.
Wear tie as a headband.
Roll sleeves up.
Tuck trousers into socks.

Heard a businessman on a train to London say:

“The trouble with Simon is that when you put him in a box he can’t get out of, he just crumbles”.

Poor Simon.

Your posts won’t get sent to all of your followers – unless you pay Facebook. They use an algorithm thing to filter content, so you’re never sure who’s seeing what.

so what are you saving for? in what way can it make you feel secure?

Because as a freelance, it means I can work without fear.

I can do things on my own terms. If I don’t want to do something or I don’t think something is worth doing – then I don’t have to do it.

Without some savings, it’s hard to do that because you’re always scrabbling to pay rent/bills etc.

money is only any good when it is being spent, so spend it…move on and earn some more.

Not sure about that.

The only value I have for money is to not have to worry about it. So the financial security of having some savings is more important to me than a big telly/nice car etc.

As a freelance, I work enough to pay rent/bills and then do stuff I enjoy.

I do all my writing with a thing called Scrivener. It’s a glorified WordPad, with hardly any formatting options, but it’s ace at organising docs and arranging your work.

It is a nationalistic idea but no more so than any other project which is aimed at improving a nation’s infrastructure. HS2 is also.

I think, it depends on whether you view Wales as a westerly region of Britain or as a country.

The Welsh Assembly has some kind of office in Colwyn Bay but it serves no real function. When the Assembly was being set-up there were various ideas about having a north and south base, also that video links could be used to create a north Wales ‘hub’ but they didn’t go anywhere.

Am I to take it that this sense of Northern Welsh abandonment extends further than just the sporting area of Welsh life?

Sport’s just one area but it’s a good example of how everything in Wales slides sideways. It’s hard to get any kind of a national league because of the problems of crap transport between north and south.

The idea of building a decent motorway or railway to link up north and south is still viewed as the kind of madcap idea only rabid Welsh nationalists would support.

Main roads in Wales

Rail network in Wales

my entire family who are fiercely welsh think of Plaid as a load of idiots, they are labour voters and always will be… although worryingly UKIP had made an impression on some family members.

We are more pissed off that Cardiff and the South gets all the investment.

Thing is, they’re getting exactly what they voted for.

Labour’s vision is One Nation – that’s Britain. With Cardiff viewed as a British city rather than the capital of a nation.

The Welsh Gov’s economic minister, Edwina Hart, has said that north Wales should look towards the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ for its jobs/prosperity.

So hit the A55. It’s not her job.

They don’t. The majority of the Welsh population – 2.2m out of just over 3m – live along the M4 corridor, along the industrialised south.

I was referring to the statistic that 90 percent of the Welsh population lives within 50 miles of the English border. It’s different to Scotland.

A more interesting question for me, is – given the rise of Scottish Nationalism – why is there no corresponding rise in Welsh Nationalism?

Think it’s a combination of reasons.

The different histories – Scotland was a fairly modern nation at the time it became part of the union. Wales was absorbed into England much earlier, so has never had its own proper infrastructure or institutions.

Because of that, the Welsh language and culture has always played an important role in defining Welshness. And it’s why attacks on the language have been so damaging. The UK Government decided in an 1847 report that to ‘civilise’ Wales, the language needed to be removed.

The subsequent decline of Welsh has helped to create a divided country. The majority of people aren’t taught to speak Welsh, so are locked out of many things that help make the country. It means that, culturally, you don’t have much to grab hold of – it’s mostly sport, inflatable daffodils and…Tom Jones.

Linked to that is the lack of any real Welsh media. There has never been a truly national newspaper. There’s no national conversation – the news agenda is set by right wing London media. Less than a third of people can name our own First Minister.

Then there’s the spectacular failure of Plaid Cymru. No Alex Salmonds – instead a succession of nice but drab leaders, incapable of presenting a vibrant or coherent vision for Wales. They have completely failed to break the perception that it represents only Welsh speaking communities.

And geography. The fact that so much of the Welsh population lives so close to the border. That around one-in-five people in Wales are from England – including lots of UKIP types. And that north and south Wales is so divided by a lack of transport links.

Ach…Wales is just broken.

Never really noticed him at the time but recently spotted this performance.

Just cracking. Raw, honest and manages to look like a normal person.

WTF?!? Has she got nothing more going for her than the fact she happened to be born in wales? Had she not got a message for any for potential/swing voters? Inspirational advice for young people? Even just take the opportunity to slag off the tories?
Nope. Just a jingoist, small minded fluffy pile of crap.

As someone who would like to see Wales move towards independence, I agree. I find it depressing, but no great surprise, that UKIP are about to over take them in popularity.

So you should really be asking yourself who is to blame, not what nationality is to blame.

Nationalism, patriotism. Is a diversion. On this island it has always been about class.

Class and nationality can’t be easily separated. The British Empire brought with it a set of ideas about soceity, money and markets.

In Wales, one of the arguments from London for removing Welsh from schooling was because it was seen as a language of emotion – not one for trade and business. So it was best removed.

There was also a disdain for Welsh culture, it was viewed as nice but of no real value. Instead sport was promoted because it helped to breed those competitive qualities needed for the marketplace.

These ideas have helped to mould modern day Wales.

But it’s not 200 **** years ago! It’s now!!

Why the hell do people want to constantly bring up the past? Do we all HATE Germans? I don’t, they’re just people.

Because it still effects people on a day-to-day level.

If you’re so into just getting along then why create barriers between yourself and the most powerful country in Europe, Germany.

Why not stop English from being taught in schools – replace it with German to help foster togerthness and to remove barriers. Stop teaching English/British history and start teaching German history.

It sounds daft but a similar process took place in Wales in the C19th and continues to impact on the country today.

It’s difficult to explain without getting into some fairly serious science and bamboozling people. But the evidence points to it, almost all scientific papers on it say that it exists and once you read some of these it becomes very difficult to deny.

Thing I can’t get my head around is that reasonably accurate climate data goes back around 300 years. And changes in the climate take place over billions of years.

Can we all not just get along…………

If that was the attitude adopted by Britain over the past 200 years, maybe we could. But it isn’t.

Britain, via its empire, has a long history of charging around the world and not getting along, treating others with utter disdain – dividing nations and dismantling cultures.