Neither… Nikwax Analogy wipes the floor with them both…

Thankfully I managed to get my landlord to ditch the agents he was using as they did bu**er all when the boiler broke down one winter. It was only fixed when the landlord sent someone round to do it.

Since then he’s been brilliant, let me pay late when I was skint before I get this job, sorted out the windows and installed double glazing, put in a new boiler when the aforementioned one when totally tits up, and gave me two bottles of wine for fitting a new element in the oven, lets me dig up the garden to grow veg…

All in all, a really nice chap…

Oh, and the rent hasn’t gone up in 5 years now… :o)

grumm… I think it might have been a little less icy when I did it as we didn’t need crampons until we got to the plateau where it had all iced up. The ridge itself was just covered in snow so pretty easy to move along, although I am not sure I’d want to do it in ski boots… or were they ski mountaineering boots? I think the ridge goes about Grade I doesn’t it?

And that gully doesn’t look too bad, probably a good little route when it’s nicely iced up…

Looks fantastic… I remember doing Sharp Edge on a very similar looking day a couple of years ago, it had been a good number of years since I had last done it and I’d forgotten just how ‘sharp’ the edge is… especially in the snow. Am very jealous…

Oh, and watch out for Fred, I’m sure he’ll be around soon telling you off for going out in the mountains in the snow.. ;o)

Went through this last Jan when my Dad died just before that Christmas…

My Mum doesn’t qualify for most things, but ask about a bereavement payment, we didn’t even know it existed until I found a leaflet about it amongst all the things given to us with the death certificate. It worked out at about £2000 I think.. and they paid very quickly as well. I believe there is also a weekly allowance, but my Mum didn’t qualify for that.

And I seem to remember you need to go to a Job Centre Plus to get these sorted out.. at least that was were we ended up.

molgrips… well, it is a book of lies after all… ;o)

The Boggies are Lakes based I believe… although do venture out that way…

And I would volunteer, but I’m as unfit as an unfit thing at the moment, so wouldn’t be pretty crap as a guide as I’d be the one at the back coughing up a lung and pushing up all the hills!

Surely just buy the appropriate Haynes Book of Lies and that would tell you everything you needed to know…

Barn Farm is pretty good too… and has a cracking pub just down the road too :o)

Fallcliffe is owned by the University of London Mountaineering Club which means it can be a bit of a bugger to book unless you are a BMC affiliated club.

Try Thorpe Farm Bunkhouse just outside Hathersage… have used it a number of times and it’s not too bad.

There is also a bunkhouse in Bamford on a farm which I have used but can’t remember it’s name, it was a little nicer than Thorpe Farm, but also probably more expensive too!

Wasn’t there a thread about this before the site got hacked? The ST bods were saying that the trail guides were going to be for legal stuff only, and any dubious stuff would need to be removed.

In which case, I don’t see any problems with publicising good rides, and I would, if I had any really good rides that didn’t involve at least some dodgy stuff… and unfortunately most of the good stuff isn’t entirely legal.

I dunno what the hell some of you are feeding your dogs on, but our collie cross only costs us about £60 in feed a year, if that… we buy the 15kg sacks of working dog mix like Gilpa, which seem to last around 3 months. Had no problems with it so far…

TJ… if you are quoting Mildred, then get it right… they said:-

The Animals Act 1971 provides that the keeper of an animal is liable for any damage it causes, if he knows it was likely to cause such damage or injury unrestrained.

The bit you seem to have just glossed over is the section that says, ‘if the owner knows it was likely to cause such damage or injury unrestrained’.

In this case I’d say unless oldgit knew the dog was likely to try and escape the garden, and had a habit of killing birds, then quite how he is supposed to know the dog is likely to do that is quite beyond me, so I would imagine he would not be strictly liable under that act.

I would venture to say that it would be a good idea though for oldgit to try and sort something out with his neighbours…

miketually… to be fair on the coin tossing one, they did show you how that was done in the same show. Just as they did with the big horse racing one too..

I just love my Globals… have had them about 10 years now and they are still going strong.

And just be careful with some of the Japanese knives, you can’t use a normal steel to sharpen them as they are harder than the steel! You need to use a ‘ceramic steel’ or water stone instead.

If he can stretch to a little bit more, I reckon you won’t find a better bike for the cash than the Malt 1 Deore Disc special from Merlin… it’s an absolute bargain for £450…

Oh, and have a look at this site which gives you info about the local exchange, and what broadband speeds you can expect for the different service providers…

How about cable via Virgin?

swoosh.. oh I completely agree about the Lakes and the Peak, and generally stuff that’s not on my back door, I’m far more circumspect about where and what I ride.

But around Nottingham it’s pretty much all fair game as far as I am concerned, and just about every ride involves footpaths and cheeky riding to some extent or other, especially as all the good bits aren’t bridleways… :o)

ebygomm.. looking at those routes they seem to miss out even the legal good bits! But I’ll agree with you about some of the mud, especially after the horses have been out.

Somehow I doubt you’ll get a Shimano freehub for a set of Campag wheels! I have the same wheels on my Pompino and although cheap, they seem to put up with a good lot of abuse!

One thing that may be possible, Campag cassettes come as a set of individual cogs and spacers, so if you can find the spacing for a Shimano cassette, I would imagine it would be possible to change the Campag spacing to suit…

Other than that, someone in the US makes a widget that allows you to mate Campag and Shimano, but the name escapes me at the moment…

geetee… you are Simon F Barnes and I claim my 5 pounds!!

It depends, is it one of the ‘magic’ ones that doesn’t seem to rely on any laws of physics to work?

:o)

Ooooh… that’s a new one on me, I’ll have to try and find one to have a look, I thought you were talking about the old East Midlands guide, which is okay.

For the most part I just used an OS map and went out riding to find the good local stuff around Notts… a mild laissez-faire attitude to rights of way is helpful around here as well… ;o)

we’re either under 1m of water or in clouds of dust. gloop lasts for one day in-between these two norms

So therefore, might you agree that here in the UK, where we tend to have gloop for large proportions of the year, and gritty gloop at that (which works as a wonderful grinding paste too), that discs might be somewhat more necessary?

Also, how are carbon frames user servicable? I’d have thought good steel frames would be more up your street at least as you can get pretty much anyone to weld them up if they do fail!

Ride through gloop for a week?

ro, are you in the UK? Do you ride a bike during the winter at all? And with weather like last summer, the summer too! If you do then please tell us how you manage to not ride in gloop, as I certainly can’t when riding the bridleways near me…

Anyway, back to the main point. As will most disc brake problems, it’s the inital set up which can be tricky, but once set up they can pretty much be forgotten.

I’d say you’re gonna be hard pressed to beat Merlin’s Malt 1 Deore sale bike… full Deore disc groupset with Rockshox Tora forks for £450!

I’ve had a similar thing happen on my Inbred using Deore discs and it’s because the caliper isn’t quite lined up parallel to the disc surface… causes a rather interesting vibration up to ones posterior!

I quick fiddle with the allen keys and it’s usually all sorted, although it can be quite tricky to get it right.

I’ve used DVDShrink before to rip a DVD and re-encode it so that it fits onto a single-sided DVD, although that doesn’t always seem to work on all DVD’s. In that case I’ve used AnyDVD to copy the DVD to my HDD and then used DVDShrink from there…

This is just to backup my own DVD’s mind.. ;o)

5thElefant… on the same ratio the US would have had to have killed about 275,000…

Am not sure even they have managed that yet!