The issue with less Police, is that it is not a case of just more Police presence on the streets, taking down large drug rings or gangs, requires intelligence gathering

The problem with policing drugs gangs is that if you take out a gang from an area you just create a space for neighbouring gangs to move into. Then a violent war starts over the ‘new’ turf.

Heavy handed policing of drugs doesn’t fix the problem it just makes it more violent.

The book Good cop, bad war does a great job of persuading you that the war on drugs is utter rubbish.

Also the podcast Stop and Search by LEAP UK is particularly informative on this matter.

But back to the matter at hand. These things are probably always happening but one is bad enough that it gets picked up by the press, it gets clicks and they see there is an appetite for reading about it so they report all the other ones and try and whip up a moral panic to sell papers/get more advertising revenue.

I moved out of London a year ago and fled to Shropshire. Unfortunately by being way too specialised in my field I can only work in London, or A handful of companies elsewhere in the world. So I work from home 2 days and then 3 days in the office. Drive down on a Tuesday morning back on Thursday evening. Cost of rent on a 3 bed cottage, 2 nights a week in London and petrol is still less than renting a 1 bed flat in SW London.

I did this for a while, making 3 different meals a week using only a few fresh ingredients I’d bought that week or had in my store cupboard (box under my desk). Very boringly I kept a diary of the costs and meals made. Including store ingredients it worked out at around £3.50 per day. It was more of a technical exercise to see if I could do it but it worked out cheaper, more filling and far more tasty than the usual Marks and spencers sandwich and crisps.

For example

Fresh ingredients;
Stilton (150g)
Pears (x2)
Watercress (90g)
Panini (x4)

Meals made;
Pear and Stilton salad with croutons and a honey dressing
Honeyed pears bruschetta with blue cheese dressing
Stilton sandwich with watercress pesto

There’s a book by Rachel Maylor about making meals based on only having a kettle, toaster and microwave. linky

I travelled around Central Europe last May to a few mountain ranges.
Czech Republic, sumava national park. Below zero at night (wild camping) and still a bit of snow around. Lovely walking though on the plentiful xc skiing routes.
Poland, High Tatras. Near zakopane. Lovely and not too cold. Zakopane is a shit hole though.
Slovakia. Low Tatras. Wet as hell with bears and wolves. Very remote.
Austria, Kaprun. Snow up high rain and sleet lower down. Probably the closest I’ve come to needing mountain rescue through my own utter stupidity. Very bad idea to try and walk off the mountain.

If it was me I’d be heading much further south in April. Possibly Corsica or Sardinia.

Whats the going rate to rent a room in sw london for 3 to 4 nights a week. Cheapie hotels seem to be c 50 to 100 per night and you cannot leave stuff there.

Luckily i work with a very good friend who has a spare room. I cook for him, drive him to work and give him £150 a month for 2 nights a week. If i was using hotels it would be unsustainable, air bnb at £40 a night would be vaguely acceptable.

Before this i was living in London but commuting from hamburg 3 weekends a month so I’m no stranger to a long painful commute.

I do roughly the opposite of this commute. 155 miles Shropshire to South West London tuesday morning to thursday night. I leave before 5am and am at work by 8-8:30.
(for me) it’s really not a problem i quite enjoy the relaxed time in the car, overall my commute time is less per week than when I lived in London, it’s much more comfortable, the costs are not too dissimilar and i no longer have to live in london. I’m winning all round.
the M40 is great but dealing with manchester could be a bugger.

Try working on a windows VM through a Mac keyboard.
Took me about a month to work out how to unlock it as ctrl alt delete doesn’t exist.

My 120k mile 58 plate one got carted away on the back of a truck on saturday. Was misfiring and lighting up all the red lights on the dash. Finally refused to start a couple of weeks ago. Fault reader showed up problems with the no1 injector and ECU memory. I’m expecting a big old bill. :(

I’ve designed a few overlay schemes for large football and sporting events, they are incredibly complicated and even more so on a congested inner city site such as Cardiff. The champions league final is probably the most complicated after the world cup final, I’m glad i had nothing to do with this one.

Security is obviously a major part that causes significant disruption and there will be an extended secure line (ticketed area) away from the stadium perimeter, within that outer secure zone there will also likely be 10k+ people in hospitality and sponsor areas, 1.5k media personnel including workrooms and huge amounts parking for outside broadcast trucks and satellite uplink, large backup power generation, staff and accreditation areas and so on. Although the millennium stadium has a large capacity it’s very compact so very few of these things will be within the stadium.

You would hope that the powers that be in Cardiff have done their sums and worked out that the exposure and additional spend within the city will more than make up for a few days of relatively minor disruption.

that bridge would have been fixed by now.

We are not so good at fixing bridges. I used to live next to one on the south circular in london and would regularly hear the crash of another lorry smashing into it. Surprising really given how many giant flashing low bridge signs there were in the run up to it.

17 times in 6 months

Thanks all

I’ll be using a virtual machine. Basically all files held and computing done on the sever in the office and just an image sent back and forth. Or something like that. I don’t think my use will be a problem at all. If it stops working temporarily I’ll be able to get files emailed (assuming 3-4g works) and work off the desktop for a while. Or go to the pub and steal their wifi.

The wife will be using adobe creative cloud and probably downloading and sending illustrator, indesign and large PDFs regularly and doing a fair bit of tutoring over video links. She also likes watching Netflix while working. She’s lovely but quite bandwidth hungry.

Looking around Shropshire so B4RN not available yet.

Cheers nick. Been with the same mortgage provider for 3 years so hopefully it should be ok. Tempting to just stick it on a 5 year fixed straight away though.

I fly a lot and use BA even though easyjet flights are slightly cheaper on the same route. Once you’ve factored in the cost of getting to Gatwick instead of Heathrow (£13 instead of £2.70) additional food at the airport, a wine while I wait for the inevitable Friday evening 1 hour delay and the chance of getting to the other end after the public transport from the airport has stopped, BA begins to look cheap.

They’re not bad but they seem to work on such tight turnaround times that at the end of the day they’re normally delayed.

It’s a wonderful place but don’t go anywhere near the Reeperbahn. It’s festering cesspit of lads on tour *****. It’s really hateful.

If you’re going out for a drink, head slightly north of the Reeperbahn to St Pauli or Sternschanze. They’re much more pleasant with better bars and virtually no stag dos. Although German beer is pretty good if you like that sort of thing, finding anything other than fizzy yellow beer is difficult (mostly the local beer Astra). There is some craft brewing in Hamburg and the brewery Ratsherrn has a bar called Altes Mädchen (sternschanze) which has a very good selection of their own and imported delicious brown beers. You may baulk at paying 8-9 euros for a pint of young’s best bitter though, I know I did.

Find a bakery for breakfast and have a franzbrotchen (normal). Delicious local pastry.

Almost everyone speaks English which makes it very easy, annoyingly so if you’re trying to learn German.

Any specific details you need?

From what I remember of some BBC4 documentary, that shot was done by mounting the camera on a dolly and zooming out while moving the camera towards him. I think. There might have been something about adjusting the aperture size as well which is why the background ‘goes all funny’*

*technical term

And you recommend Putney ?

The Founders Arms is awful and I feel I need to defend the great pubs of Putney. There are;

Dukes Head (probably MrSmith’s recommendation)
Bricklayer’s arms
Half Moon
Prince of Wales
Cat’s Back
Coat and Badge
Jolly Gardeners

There’s even a wetherspoons on the river if you hate yourself

Friend and old colleague of mine is an architect based in Godalming. Does mostly residential stuff around Surrey. Can’t recommend him highly enough.

Linky

Which stadium, huws?

Olympique Lyonnais. Been working on it since 2007.

I’m Welsh and shall be supporting them heartily.

And as a double bonus (and to reiterate my boast from a few weeks ago in the other euros thread), I also designed the stadium* they are playing in. GO ME! 8)

*I promise I’ll stop boasting soon

So I decided to investigate the claim that they were all career politicians by having a look at the London MEPs, for that is where I live. list below.

Jean Lambert
Teacher 1972-1999

Seb Dance
Student Union
Action Aid
Labour party Advisor

Charles Tunnock
Consultant psychiatrist 1982(approx.)-1999

Lucy Anderson
Councillor
Greater london authority
National union of teachers

Gerard Batten
Salesman British telecom 1976-2004

Mary Honeyball
Charities and local councillor 1978-2000

Syed Kamall
Business analyst and academic 1989-2005

Claude Moraes
Lawyer, house of commons researcher and director of NGO 1987-1999

Is the crowd segregation Russian proof

Not a chance. But that’s tournament overlay so nothing to do with me.

*boast post*

Boast 1
I was once sat at a table for a work thing in Newcastle eating free croissants when the guy next to me (ugly, wearing a tracksuit) leant over and introduced himself “elluu aaarm Peeeedaa Beeeeardsley!” I didn’t have a clue who he was up until that point, I was not much better informed afterwards. Seemed like a nice chap from what I could understand.

Boast 2
See that stadium they’re currently playing in. I designed that.

My duvet was on the washing line. :(

49×15 for me, mostly because the bike also gets used on track and I’m too lazy to change the gearing. The Mighty cols of South London are doable, just.

Well that was simple. Came apart easily, cleaned it up, and then worked a tiny amount of vegetable oil into the cam. Returns properly now. Very temporary fix but the bearing in the hub are pretty much toast so it’ll need a proper service soon anyway.

Bodgetastic.

“fully synthetic” extra virgin

heading quite far into the alphabet already but for W.
Womack & Womack. Teardrops – extended mix, from an album called 12″ club classics – 80s grooves

seven and a half minutes of disco bliss

Gothenburg, exceptional beers. Loved it.
Porto, exceptional wines. Loved it.
Bergan, rainy. Haven’t been yet but expect I’ll love it when I eventually do.

Just spoken to a colleague who’s an architecture tutor. Her opinion is that any of the more design led courses will require art A-level (or equivalent). Without it they would require a foundation course or one hell of a portfolio. If it was me again I’d be doing what Yak says so as not to limit my options.

What I actually did was what interested me at the time, Art, History of Art and Design and Technology. Still managed to fall into architecture somehow, mostly through luck after university.

I ride most days in London and don’t find it that bad, 15km each way, almost all of it on the south circular. Although the traffic is faster I prefer the wider multilane roads as drivers tend to give you a bit more space and complain less when you take some for yourself. I do ride as fast as possible at all times which seems to reduce the number of impatient idiots. London drivers are generally very good around bikes.

I’ve often pondered on what the inevitable crash will be and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’ll be a pedestrian crossing without looking while I’m filtering. Hopefully it’ll be slow enough that neither of us gets hurt.

No you won’t

YAY! I’m not going to die… yet.

Thanks all. You’ve made my escape plan feel more realistic.

You’re not wrong. On either count. Big scooter would probably be very sensible but I’ve also got a Mondeo and that’s enough sensible for one man.

Generally it seems it might be unpleasant but doable with the right kit. Spent the last 5 years cycling through London traffic so I’ll have to remember that I’m a bit wider.

Any recommendations for the wiggle/chain reaction of motorbike kit?

We also have heated cupboards at work for drying damp kit.

I’m more than happy to throw money at warmth, comfort and safety. And if the weather goes to shit it’s only Surrey. The train to work is quicker than my current commute, just bloody expensive and unpleasant.

I fly most weeks and have got my packing down to the absolute essentials.

I use an 11 litre Inside Line Equipment apex day pack. It’s tiny but can take some pants, socks, a few t-shirts, a 13” laptop, an iPad and a book. Enough for 3-4 nights. And it fits in the gap above all the other massive bags in the overhead lockers. So I can stroll on at the last minute.

Getting out of the airport as quickly as possible is the most important thing for me. I’d avoid checking in a bag if at all possible.

Hipster lumberjack you say. Took an age due to an incredibly blunt axe.

I’m more than happy with the solidity of the relationship, if it was someone else that would probably have been my first thought too but it hadn’t even crossed my mind.

I’m aware that it’ll be hard, expensive and annoying but it’s not far off the overall cost (£70-£100 return if booked in advance) and time of friends who commute from Brighton to London daily. It’s about 40 fairly direct minutes from Gatwick or Heathrow to the office by train or tube. The additional cost of renting a room (possibly from friends) will also have to be factored in but it’s not insurmountable. It seems doable, just need to work out if the company I work for will accept me working from home 1 or 2 days a week, which could be a potential spanner in the works. Although the only other option is I take my specialist knowledge to a more accommodating direct competitor, but I’d rather not.

Neilco has it right. Two ambitious people (her more than me, I’m pretty relaxed) working in quite small fields, we’ll make it work somehow.

In terms of biking I’m almost entirely road based now (the shame) so I can handle flat. May need an aero bike though (can of worms).

Did your knees explode?

It was running such a tiny gear (32×15) and I only ever took it out on very gentle rides so no knees were exploded. Locking the back wheel was super easy. (Skidz are for kidz)