Trying to work out how badly my National Express coach might be affected

It might add a bit of time onto your journey but, given that it feels like every National express bus feels takes about 400 hours to reach its destination, it shouldn’t be too big an impact.

You do know supermarkets deliver food nowadays?

My dog really, really loves a tennis ball.

Surprised to hear this as always popular with fans and riders.

is this correct though? I was told by someone on the race circuit that it was actually very unpopular with riders

I have a feeling and some expectation that we are going to be hearing a lot more about him over the coming months.

I’m a big fan of Passenger clothing and have a few of their heavyweight shirts. Their summer stuff is a big logo heavy but winter spec clothing is right nice.

Like a significant percentage of the male population, I’m colour blind. So I stood on a beach in Northumberland last night whilst my wife gasped at the display whilst I was getting overeating bored and cold. I saw different shades of light but nothing exciting at all.

I hope they do a making of as there are no credits and I wanted to know who the music is. Does anyone recognise it?

Without You by Rainbow Arabia (courtesy of Shazam)

That is one hell of a workplace.

I’ve done it, can’t explain why but just got really confused. Best thing is to not think about what side of the road to drive on but, instead, make sure driver is near the middle of the road rather than near the kerb. This translates wherever you are driving a car (assuming you have hired locally and not driven uk car overseas)

I got a decathlon one that ticks all your boxes, think it was £12. Battery seems to last forever and I can’t think of a train to spend any more money.

Who fills the vacuum?

Lib Dems are kicking at the heels of Tory. Might not look like traditional left/right Gov/opposition but why the hell not? If that is how people want to vote then great.

I like the M&S Italian style beans, quite good value and taste good to me.

I’m all in for this absolute car crash of a leadership election. It all helps in the agenda of punting Conservatives to to the far back benches as the third party and a footnote of horrible history for a generation.

I still cut my hair and beard using the dog clippers I bought at the start of Covid. £20 and they do the dog as well

Our house is a case in point, it’s on the corner of 2 roads. One road shows it from July this year, images from the other (smaller) road are from 2020. Very odd to see all the leaves suddenly fall off the tree when you move round the corner!

Our street has had 2022 images since a month or so after they were filmed. There is a cul-de-sac off teh end of the road which hadn’t been updated. This is now showing new images and our street has reverted back tot old one. Its really odd.

Maybe someone has asked them to take down the latest image.

I thought that sort of thing was managed by blurring?

I’ve got loads, Mountain Equipment, Rab, Helly Hansen (turning out some nice kit nowadays), Fjallraven, Fjern.

Fjallraven are long in the leg so might suite your shape well, they are spendy so also work nicely for the gift idea (i.e. you might not want to buy them yourself). They can be quite warm though.

Sat here now wearing Rab Torque Mountain Pant. Fits most of your requirements except the two tone colour, mine are just black. Again, quite slim in the leg, I use mine on the bike as ankle is cut close enough that that they work well as bike trousers.

I think the standard thing here is recommend Macmillan. They have excellent resources and will be really useful.

Bookmarking this thread, cheers

Also, 13 Minutes to the moon was epic and an absolute must listen.

I changed broadband provider a while ago and the supplied router and extenders were absolute guff. I was going to change router but if you do that you pretty much lose and support from the provider and changing router actually looked quite tricky (for a non techie).

Following recommendation on here I went with TP-Link Deco M4. Its been flawless. Easy to set up, three units cover a large house (extended so external walls inside etc) and also covers garage and garden. Still got original router but Wi-Fi turned off, everything just goes through the mesh. Looks like my system is currently on Amazon for £99, I really can’t think of a good reason buy anything else.

Tired, we need a trigger warning when you are posting a picture of those pins.

I don’t commute so I don’t need a Brompton

I already have a gravel bike so I don’t need a Brompton gravel

I already have too many bikes and have absolutely no good reason to want or need one of these

I really, really want one and bike to work is about to become available to me again…..

If you are going back for a second viewing you are already invested and probably looking for reasons to buy it, rather than for reasons not to. So try and take a parent / friend / colleague who can be impartial and point out things that you may not want to see

Look out for people flying a national flag in their garden

If it is terraced or semi detached, try and suss out sound insulation with neighbours, do you want to hear them arguing, watching TV, shagging?

Check broadband speed, an essential check nowadays

Look at orientation of the house for sunlight. Any seller who knows their stuff will have every lamp and light turned on but how much natural light do you get and are you okay with it

If is a rural area check any local development plans, is that nice field behind the back garden going to become a massive housing estate?

If you have kids, or are planning on having kids, check out the local schools. For me this is the most important thing.

Every house purchase comes with one compromise, usually size of house versus area. You just need to be clear baout which compromise you are happy with.

I went though this a while ago. I prioritised making sure I had system generated secure passwords for stuff I still use, in particular any sites that are transactional. I don’t really care if my password leaked for some random forum years ago, I do care if that is a shared password that I use on important sites. Deleting the old forum account will make no difference, updating other passwords will.

You can’t really blame Apple for setting up family systems that are designed around the assumption that the family are Apple device users! Of course they will make the system more friendly for users of their ecosystem.

I set out to buy an Octavia estate a while ago and ended up with a Focus estate instead. Better spec for the money and plenty big enough. Just drove Borders to Aberdeen and back and car is showing 57mpg for the trip. I’m happy with my decision.

I don’t understand the hellscape comment.

We have had parental controls on our kids devices for years, dead easy to set up and adapt. As they have got older we have loosened things significantly, now only have screen time come on overnight to help them get better sleep (they are teenagers).

If you have family set up and are all on iPhones it is intuitive, user friendly and effective. Just another of those things that Apple do very well.

We didn’t make Boris or Liz prime ministers – that was all solely down to the Tory party’s internal system…I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have made it if a public vote had been taken

Are we ignoring 2019 General Election then?

Billionaires spaffing money on a fancy trip whilst over excited Space X employees whoop in the background and commentators try to convince us this is the next giant leap for mankind (despite space walks now being around for over 60 years). I love space, I love science but I find this slightly sickly.

Space X stuff stopped being fun when the rockets stopped blowing up.

It is so complex, so huge and so challenging that I wouldn’t dare suggest how to fix it. But a decent start would be to whack huge tax in unhealthy stuff, and use that to heavily subsidise healthy stuff. Make it cheaper to be healthy than unhealthy.

I’d also suggest trying to establish a cross party approach, similar to a war cabinet, and remove the NHS from party politics.

A friend of mine is a joiner and said that for many years he and his colleagues would staple pages of grot mags inside cavity walls in the hope that someone would discover them in the future.

I just tried to watch the original video, its even worse with voice over. Its like a day time television charity ad. I was expecting her, at any time, to say “that for just £5 per month, you can support other struggling Royals….”

That video was nauseating, is that what she really released as her big cancer free reveal?

I hope any other cancer sufferers on extended NHS waiting lists, struggling with benefits or continuing to work out of necessity despite being really ill, takes a lot of comfort from that soft focussed idealised view of a tax payer funded life of luxury.

Sorted now, the payment site seemed to have an issue with cookies or something else technical. Accessed it in the end via a private browser and everything worked as it should.

BigJohn, I agree, the translation stuff is superb. I translated the letter using my iPhone camera and each website translated to English as I was using them. Clever stuff.

It was hire car

Thought I’d better share my favourite photo from Kelso. I bet he’ll be boring people for years telling them about the time he met me.

Wi-fi dishwasher, a classic example of a solution to a problem that never existed

That video is brilliant.

British Cycling pre drive the entire route with local authorities and then traffic light issues to identify what needs to be fixed, what would be nice to fix and what is okay. The overwhelming majority of the Scottish Borders stage was green light, with only a tiny amount of areas needing re-done. Apparently BC were very impressed with the surface, despite local Facebook commentators regularly getting furious about the roads.

My wife is a GP and a few years ago I helped her practice with a review of business processes. When it came to practice meetings, which they all complained bitterly about, I got them to change the meeting duration to multiples of 12 minutes which was, at the time, the length of each patient consultation. It really worked for GP mentality and they soon adjusted the weekly meeting down to 2×12 mins