We offloaded my father’s tools to a charity which refurbished them and shipped them out to Africa. I get the feeling there are quite a few in different parts of the country which do this so a bit of Googling might help you

I replaced a Mk 1 Enigma Evoke a year ago because it had significantly dated and couldn’t handle through axles and wider rims/tyres, but I replaced it with a Mk 3 Evoke, which is just lovely.

I also have an Etape which is now a bit old school but it’s my winter bike/commuter so I am less bothered by that; in fact I rode it a 40 mile round trip to work today.

All in all, a Ti bike tart here……..

“Does running for elected office in the UK require proposers and seconders?”

Yes it does, because someone asked me to support them. I said No because of conflict of interest though I think they needed ten names from within the constituency. But presumably a made-up candidate can have ten made-up subscribers (I think they are called)….

Edit- Here you are https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/guidance-candidates-and-agents-uk-parliamentary-general-elections-great-britain/nominations/completing-your-nomination-papers/nomination-form/signatures-subscribers

I might just be able to help you- you have a DM (well three actually because I cocked things up!)

My mother buys nice pork pies from her local butcher, then heats them in the oven. DO NOT do this!!!!

My father spent his NS, I guess in the very early 1950s, teaching other National Servicemen to read and write…… In the UK of 70 years ago, that was probably not a bad use of time for all involved.

95 kg here. I’ve run 32 mm GP5000 tubeless on the road bike for the last year at 65 psi front, 75 psi rear, mostly on some pretty terrible Manchester/Derbyshire road surfaces. One major puncture which sealed itself in about 2500 miles.

Enigma Evoke Mk 1 moved on a year ago at 7 years old and about 10000 miles

Replaced by an Enigma Evoke Mk 3 which has done about 2500 miles in its first year

Enigma Etape set up as a winter/commuter bike. 7 years old and about 6000 miles in all weathers

Stanton Sherpa Mk 3, 8 months old, which has been ridden all through the winter. About 1200 miles

Stanton Sherpa Mk 2 frame with a complicated history. About 4 years old and about 2000 miles in a previous guise, but just rebuilt as a lightweight bling bike.

Most miles around the Dark Peak and I am no ballerina, though the MTB riding is pretty tame. None cracked so far, all a pleasure to ride. Evoke Mk1 probably the least satisfactory due to an unwise wheel choice.

A few swifts and house martins back in the Dark Peak over the last day or two.

I suggest people might want to have a look at David Mackay’s book (downloadable free from https://www.withouthotair.com/). He was a Departmental Chief Scientific Adviser and I always felt had a very objective view of energy matters. The book is a bit dated now but the basic facts and arguments still stand.

One thing which is not clearly appreciated is the scale of our current use of fossil fuels- only about 20% of current energy use is electricity, much of which is generated by burning gas, and an awful lot of the remaining 80% is also fossil fuel. When you start to think about a 100 GW grid, or large scale hydrogen production and distribution, things get prohibitively complicated and you find you need a North Sea full of large offshore wind turbines or a Wales covered with solar panels. It is very difficult to devise a credible net zero energy mix which provides energy in the quantities we require at reasonable cost.

Of course, one of the difficulties in all this is that opinions reflect ‘heart’ or ‘head’ and there’s no point trying to rebut ‘heart’ opinions with ‘head’ arguments, and it’s very easy just to talk past one another.

@Tom-B One of the things I like about DTPs, CDTs…. is that they are much more structured than the normal PhD experience. While they are all different, in our CDT we teach relevant technical material, much of it delivered by industry; we put on events- workshops, student conferences and the like which open up networking opportunities for students (we even have a ‘careers fair’ in our annual student conference); the students work together and develop into a mutually supporting group and there is a group of academics, from which we draw supervisory teams of two or three, which reduces dependency on an individual supervisor. All in all, it is very different from the rather isolated experience I went through many years ago, and which a fair number of people on this thread describe.

We have run a CDT for the last 15 years, graduated over 200 students from the programme, and my two finishing PhDs this year have both got jobs lined up already (one in Government, one in industry), 6 months before they finish.

I do rather agree with the comments about academia- it is very much a vocation and you’ll know if you have it. In our field, finishing PhDs are fortunate in that there is high demand and for most the PhD ends up being a combination of conversion course and Level 9 apprenticeship.

It sounds as if you’re joining a ‘Doctoral Training Partnership’ or similar. I have been around academia for a long time and supervised quite a few students (2 non-completions in the last 20 years) and DTPs and similar are among the best things I have done. They address many of the weaknesses of the traditional PhD approach. There is lots of good advice in this thread already but drop me a DM if you want to establish direct contact.

A few years ago, being bussed out to the airport in Beijing, we were in four lanes of solid traffic which had another four lanes of solid traffic merging from the right. On the hard shoulder to our right was a bloke riding a sit up and beg bike (with a basket!) at walking pace and he just sailed off into eight lanes of mayhem. Oh, and it was pitch dark….

Done

As a regular cake maker, I’ve become convinced the flour needs to be mixed in gently by hand.

Yesterday’s Plum and Almond cake

Long time Whaley resident here. Happy to talk/DM if helpful

Couple of months back- front and rear wheels straight over it at speed. Surprised I didn’t chop it in half and can’t believe it survived.

I’ve been puzzling over this recently. I’m a Guardian reader by inclination and that’s my main news source but they’ve run a series of investigative pieces recently on a topic I actually know about. The content was really quite poor; they gave right of reply but then ignored the reply; and they seemed to accept information unquestioningly if it suited their narrative but ignore information which didn’t.

So I’m asking myself if this is their normal standard of journalism, and if I want to continue subscribing?

The Albert, 52 Victoria St

Payroll have cocked up (I hope) and my nice little bonus appears to be a 20% pay cut…..

Radiocarbon dates are often related to ‘Before Present’ (BP) where ‘Present’ is taken as 1950. So this year would be -74 years BP

Hope this helps but doubt it does

19 rides in December, 18 windy, 17 rainy, but over 500 km covered with 14000 m ascent. It’s definitely been Type 2 fun, and I now think I have dry rot!

I like to get over 5000 km in the year and, after pretty much all of January off ill, followed by not feeling particularly well until May, it looks like I’ll recover to finish the year on about 5600 km distance and 132 km climb, which is decent for me. Also dropped the 14 kg which I put on while I was ill. Little wins…..

Sellafield got me yesterday. Unbelievable!

I have an F232 fork on the newly built up bling bike but only got to ride it once on a short shakedown ride before the weather turned grim and I suspect the bike won’t be going out again until spring. It seemed to ride well enough but I didn’t really mess around with it or give it a good workout.

Thanks all. I don’t quite have the confidence just to crack on so plug or patch it is. Removing latex from my right shin has been ‘interesting’- like waxing but worse.

I’m in Whaley Bridge and the route can be anything from ‘Straight down the A6’ to ‘Long Hill-The Street-Bollington-Bramhall-A34’ with several variations in between.

@fossy Close enough to have similarly fun commutes though. I recall your mention of the Jacksons Lane assault course

@fossy Is that the Aquatics car park, in which case we have the same employer?

Nuclear bod here too, and we are better than some but it is very dependent on leadership from the likes of the Station Manager.

In a different setting I have done the Public Interest Disclosure thing which did work and stopped a truly stupid and dangerous project, but also revealed how spiteful my then senior management was.

It’s all about the people.

We lost internet intermittently at first but then completely but still had landline. Problem was a tree rubbing the phone line in a field about 100 yards away. If I recall the explanation, the internet only used one core of the two in the cable, which had failed, but the landline could use either, so still worked.

I hope not. If you thought undergraduates were treated as cash cows to be milked, you really don’t want to know about Masters programmes

@greybeard I nearly agree. The contract has to be two way though because the student has to put effort in. Its more like a coaching relationship than customer-supplier in my view. Othwerwise you get ‘I’ve paid my money. Where’s my degree?’

I absolutely agree they’ve had a bum deal. My own institution has somehow sorted out all the final marks at Faculty level (ie two levels above the Departments which do the teaching and examining). We in our Department have not yet even seen a final mark list for our own students so God only knows what’s gone on. Doubtless some sort of scaling, normalisation, compensation….., but it does mean they all have a degree classification and get to graduate.

Like ahsat, while I am very hacked off with the way the institution has treated its staff, particularly those earlier in their careers than I am, I decided I would teach and mark as normal because I felt that was too damaging to the students who, as others have said, have had a pretty crap experience.

All in all academia is not a happy place for anyone really at the moment

The steroid paste recommended above is the biz. It is sometimes available from New Zealand so have a Google.

Closer to home, Peroxyl mouthwash is pretty good. Often disappears from the shelves for months at a time but we recently ordered some over the Web from Boots

First bike ride- no real idea how old I was; probably 6 or 7. On a silver bike with 24″ wheels where my dad ran behind me to hold me up, then I realised I was going quite quickly and he’d let go, I panicked and crashed. I remain good at crashing. Stuck with road biking into the mid-1990s.

First mountain bike ride- while working in Spitsbergen in the early 1990s, I had the use of a Townsend Topeka to ride up to work sites. It weighed a ton, but riding with a pack and a rifle, weight isn’t really a consideration. Then discovered recreational mountain biking in 2015 when I bought a Whyte 529. Costs have gone up considerably since then……..

We have something similar near our house so we had contractors and the utilities firm out to investigate a communal land drain which has backed up and flooded around some houses upslope (next door genuinely was an island for a couple of days last year). There is very little information and all we discovered about the land drain is that it doesn’t run as everyone thought it did but disappears from our garden downhill towards next door at a depth of 8 or 10 ft. To investigate further requires a mighty machine which comes on a 20 ton wagon, but the bridge to access our road has a 7.5 ton weight limit, so we are all stuck.

For minor motoring offences a long way back they will cut you some slack if you aren’t exactly correct on dates. Poly’s advice is good.

Couple of house martins briefly in the Goyt Valley two days ago, and a swallow around one of the farms this morning

We had it done in two goes a couple of years apart. For the first job we approached two designers. Each did a site visit and produced some freebie sketches for two or three different options, and we chose one designer on the basis of those. For the second job, we went back to the firm who’d done the first job but they were no longer operating and referred us to someone else they knew and trusted, who we used.

We then paid for a more detailed design which included designs for groundwork, stonework, planting plan, indicative cost and schedule and those were about £ 2500-£ 3500 for each job. It is a difficult site, 200 m altitude, steeply sloping, roughly triangular and no vehicle access to the rear.

Once we decided to go ahead, we signed a contract and the designer acted as project manager- finding and coordinating contractors, sourcing materials and plants and keeping the whole job on track. I can’t remember what the designer charged for this part of the work but I am sure it would have been significant (guess another few £ k in each job). There were a few variations along the way, like the wall that didn’t have any foundations so needed some because it was keeping much of the hillside from moving into the back of the house. From memory the first job had 3 people on site for about 10 weeks and the second had 3 people on site for about 6 weeks.

The landscape architects definitely did as much as a ‘normal’ architect would in a building job and I have no regrets about what we paid them. We also love the end result. But I get your point about not being valued- someone across the road approached the guys on site and asked if they could do a bit of stonework for her. Her idea of a fair rate for the job was a fiver!

TLDR: a good professional designer will cost but is well worth it especially for jobs like ours which had a lot of heavy groundwork and hard engineering