dont do too much. the kids are just happy playing with sticks.

You forgot the mud and water.

The dads from my eldest son’s school class have gone every first weekend in September for the last nine years. It has always been a blast but can be some what trying of your patience.

The first year we went I remember arriving to see one of the little darlings walking back to his tent covered from head to toe in mud, and I mean like just a pair of white eyes peeking through the mud. I looked on in horror and then noticed his dad standing next to me. I turned to him with that look of horrow and we went

‘Just don’t, this isn’t even the first time! We’ve been here two hours and he’s already gone through four sets of clothes’.

See this is why marriage still has some merit (or of course buying a house in joint name). Takes away a lot of the guesswork when it all goes pear shaped.

How does one book though? I figure booking was a seasonal thing?

Here: (enter ‘Pen Y Pas’ as the location)

https://www.justpark.com/?&utm_term=book%20parking&utm_medium=ppc&utm_source=adwords&utm_campaign=*+Generic+-+Exact&hsa_net=adwords&hsa_ver=3&hsa_acc=9367384033&hsa_grp=137060304630&hsa_cam=718000473&hsa_ad=527642817016&hsa_kw=book%20parking&hsa_mt=b&hsa_tgt=aud-580087051095:kwd-297962688229&hsa_src=g&gclid=CjwKCAjwxOCRBhA8EiwA0X8hi9Ley8DIX4X_fwNFO0U5tTFH09K-hwPQEAjUJTM2exPo8Y-_SZOcCBoCOiIQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

I’ve only done it when I was staying at the YHA overnight (yes, £60 a night! Thank you!) and I did that through the app on my phone. I think if you want to turn up without having booked you’re playing roulette, even if you got there early. The shutttle service or park in Capel Currig and get a taxi is a much safer option.

hat are the classic mistakes?

1. Thinking it will be easy
2. Thinking it will be fun

I jest; it is immensely fun but ultimately very hard work especially if you are naturally inclined to being tidy and clean! I’ve camped with my two a lot, including pre-school and post school. An inflatable tent is a godsend as it makes life so much easier.

Some interesting comments here – people saying she’s entitled to more than you think being the most interesting one.

If her name is not on the deeds and/or the mortgage and they are not married then I would have thought she is ‘entitled’ to nothing. Clearly that’s not the same thing as acknowledging she has made some contribution but in that instance I would suggest that her cut is proportional to the total equity she has invested.

If the house was worth £350k and she’s ostensibly financed £7k then her share might more be reasonably calculated as 2% of the equity.

Oh and if you wanted to be especially forthright/(vindictive), you could just change the locks and leave her stuff outside. To all intents and purposes she’s a lodger with no right of tenure.

The aim isn’t to have everyone paid the same, it’s to have people paid *fairly*. The more information that you have, the more possible that is.

It’s an interesting thought and I’ll admit I haven’t thought it through from that angle before. I guess the obvious question is who decides what is ‘fair’?

I quickly realised that the folk who complained about compensation never did enough to warrant a decent rise or bonus.

Have you read about/heard of Price’s law?

If you don’t know what other people are paid, you can’t make an informed decision about whether it’s a low salary or not.

I changed jobs at the end of last year and made a 33% jump in basic salary. I have no idea if that is what others in the same role as me are earning or not but I know it’s a salary I am happy to accept and that really is all there should be to it.

You are your own agent in salary negotiations and your value and worth are there for you to set. I agree that knowing what everyone else is earning would make it more likely that everyone ends up earning the same but that’s why communism didn’t work (and why the public sector is so much more ineffecient – and I have no problem with that, it’s neccessary for this to be the case – than the private sector).

Again, all of this is not the same as saying that things are working effeciently and fairly at the moment – they are not. Social mobility has gone into reverse and to some extent there is a sort of ‘serfdom’ emerging among the millenials and Gen Z populations, which is the result of an indirect form of coercion, largely the result of the ridiculous property market.

I think it’s more because it would limit their ability to underpay people.

That would suggest you’re coerced into accepting a low salary, at least relative to your peers. No one forces you to accept the offer. Now please don’t get me wrong – there is a LOT wrong with the job market and the distribution of income right now; but salary transparency isn’t the answer to that problem.

I’ve never understood why companies don’t operate a simple pay band structure.

Because it’s limits their ability to hire talent when they find it. Good people cost more than mediocre ones. I will however add that most organisations are woefully bad at identifying talent and to some extent performance outcomes among work forces are the result of factors other than talent.

Top tip – if you;d like to improve your photography, stay away from both photography forums and gear related photography websites. It depends on what you’re interested in of course, but most of those sites (DP Review being a prime examples) are interested in gear, not actual photography.

Lensculture is a good example of a site that is actually focused on image making.

It’s a fascinating subject but in short, yeah, I’d be pretty angry if my salary got shared in this way. Whether pay should be transparent is not as straight forward as you might think.

If you make all salaries transparent then one unintended consequence of that would be to severely restrict the job market. People don’t tend to move unless they get a decent lift in salary, it’s not always the case but it is one of the factors, so if you make all such pay increases transparent then ultimately you’re going to create either resentment or else you’re going to limit the ability to award such pay increases.

You might argue that limiting the movement of people in this way shouldn’t be anything to worry about, but in an Anglo Saxon economy such as ours, that would be a real problem. Because the way our form of capitalism works, it relies very heavily on there being relatively high levels of movement between companies – it stimulates radical innovation for example (and is why Anglo Saxon economies are so good at inventing new things, whereas Alliance models of capitalism, where there is very little movement of people, tend to excell at process refinement. Germany and Japan are good examples of this and why their cars are so much better than ours!)

So yeah, pay transparency might seem like a good thing but it creares a whole host of problems.

Even here in the UK, earning less than $300k is ~99.9% of everyone. There’s no satire here and no one has mentioned poverty. It’s just an observation about general consumer behaviour that tends to be true.

But I have no issues with lockdowns to buy that time for development of vaccines.

Yes I completely agree with this but the one variable that you didn’t highlight was that no one knew how long the vaccine would take to develop. Your point is well made but requires the virtue of hindsight.

The challenge that people like Lord Sumption were positing at the time was done so when no one knew how long the vaccine would take to develop (or if it would even be possible) and what most people were worried about was an indefinite period of restricted life. There were also arguments being made that risk profile was very narrow and based almost entirely on age and co-morbidity factor and that indefinite lock down to protect a small group of the population was excessive.

Personally I think the balance was found in the subsequent lock downs we had, which allowed for more freedom of movement, especially the forming of support bubbles, which was a smart and very neccessary move.

I always wondered how many of the people who were so happy to themselves away were the ones with large houses and/or no children (I’m talking very annecdotally); the point being that lock down was a damn sight easier for some than others.

How many teachers dying, teachers families dying and teachers suffering is acceptable?

This is as absurd a question as me asking you ‘how many child suicides and children suffering with mental health do you think is acceptable?’

But console yourself with the simple fact that the risk of mortality having contracted the virus, even pre-vaccine, to anyone under the age of 60 was only the same as their risk of mortality within the next 12 months from anything, cancer, RTA, heart attack, brain tumour etc.

This was always understood and always established in fact and never disputed. It was however, and I accept this, not the same thing as worrying about hospitalisation rates and capacity. That was the real problem; if hospitals became full and people needing treatment were being turned away (and then dying because they lacked appropraite treatment) then that would have been a truly nightmare scenario and politically catastrophic.

THAT was the reason we too the restrictive measures we did – time was the only vector we had control over; it’s a virus and it can’t really be stopped, only mitigated to either a greater or lesser degree and the data from around the world is demonstrating this to be true – case loads spiked everywhere at some point and the only vector we had a choice over was ‘when’.

Here then is the point we likely agree on TJ – if we had double (or some other unknown and potentially unknowable metric) the capacity in the NHS, we would not have needed lockdown at all. Perhaps the real problem was that we were being told NHS capacity was critical just three months before we even knew what was about to happen:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/10/have-the-tories-cut-17000-hospital-beds-over-the-past-10-years-labour-jonathan-ashworth

I agree we needed to take measures to slow the rate of infection. I don’t agree that mothballing education should have been one of those meausres and I base that on the direct, personal experience I have had with the impact on mental health, and child suicide rates, that this measure had on our children.

I’d be fascinated to know what Jude does so how much personal risk he faced. Its easy to be blase with others lives.

You don’t deserve to know TJ, especially not after the tirade you launched at me via the personal messages.

We didn’t close the supermarkets because, you know, people need to eat. Is that really so difficult for you to comprehend or are you just, once again, trolling?

You’re being very confrontational and I’m not sure why? These are valid questions to ask; we cannot assume we did the right thing and if/when this happens again, we should try to make better decisions.

The child suicide rate now seems annecodtally high – I knew of three in my home town in the last 12 months and three more of my close friends have children on suicide watch having already made attempts to kill themselves. That is annecdotal but seems impossible to ignore.

There was indeed a tidal wave of mental health before Covid – no doubt the result of social media – but that does not vindicate the potential negative impact that closing the schools had; indeed, given how fragile our young peple were, some might argue that taking away the one part of their life that is consistent and reliable was just about the worst thing you could do. It’s a valid question to ask and explore. Is that so hard for YOU to understand or are YOU just trolling.

simply incorrect go check the stats

I was referring to the mortality risk having caught it, not the risk of catching it. Clearly the more social contact you have the greater your risk is/was of catching it. Mortality is a different risk and this was something we were able to deduce relatively early on based on the data being published by the ONS and NHS, both of which I explored in some depth.

So what was the alternative?

Well that’s easy to answer, not closing the schools obviously. They weren’t technically closed anyway so I’m not sure at all what we achieved by telling two thirds of the kids they couldn’t go and one third they could and then bastardising their education via remote delivery, which really didn’t work at all except in a few rare cases.

We didn’t close the supermarkets did we? And we didn’t do that because some measures outweight the down side of their potentially positive effect. If keeping the schools fully open contributed to slightly elevated transmission levels (and there’s no evidence to say that that would have been the outcome but let’s assume it would haev been), that would have been a price worth paying, in my view.

The risk to those under the age of 75 was low and under the age of 60 it was no higher than your average, background mortality risk so teachers were not, ‘technically speaking’ at risk by being at work, certainly no more than anyone was in a supermarket or bank. Of course, the novel nature of the virus, and the ability to draw very distinct lines between infection and death (lines that are harder to draw between say lock down and dementia and death, or lock down and undiagnosed cancer and death etc etc even though those outcomes were certain to have happened), meant that our response was more political than scientific.

Slight amendment there for you.

It’s a good point, it’s not just trait neurocticism that drives (or drove) our behaviour in the pandemic, but also our level of trait agreeability. So your correction is additive, not subtractive.

ts not anxiety / neuroticism when you see people dying from it all the time

Maybe not but that might also be confirmation bias. The UK annual death toll is about 600,000 IIRC, of which in 2020 Covid was the most frequently cited cause. If you work in a medical setting and see first hand how that wave of the epidemic killed the number of people it did, then of course you’re going to have a very different perspective or feeling on it to someone who didn’t share that perspecive.

The blunt point is that where we are at now is where we are now and without significant increases in the hospitalisation rate, there’s little political justification to start reimposing limitations on the general population.

2 years ago we were shitting ourselves at 50000 cases a day being a thing

Some people were, not everyone was and that has been the same story the whole way through the pandemic. Not everyone shares the same perception of risk or the same experience of anxiety/neuroticism. If you surveyed the population as a whole you’d find a fairly strong positive correlation between a person’s predisposition to generally worry about things (like covid) and their adherence to mask wearing and hand sanitisation. That doesn’t make it right or wrong, it’s just a very overt, manifest display of hard wired personality differences among the population.

I’ll take the bet that they won’t happen. I also know a lot of people who have it but I also know that hospital admissions are very unlikely to warrant that kind of sanction:

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare

Covid isn’t going to go away and there’s always a chance it mutates into something that does cause huge problems in the future, but that’s just not where we are at right now.

Meanwhile there is an epidemic of mental health problems emerging, and it’s not hard to draw a line between this and lockdown, particularly among children.

Have you ever tried Randall & Aubin? It’s not a ‘sit down restaurant’ as the tables are high and you sit on stools, plus you can’t book (but you rarely wait very long); it doesn’t sound fun I know but it’s charming. It’s seafood btw in case that’s a deal breaker.

Anything we learned?

We should never have closed the schools. That was a travesty and the price is now being paid by our children – two suicides in my son’s school so far, one close friend with a daughter missing (she’s previosuly been sectioned) and another on suicide watch. There’s a tidal wave of critical mental health breaking among our children.

I really didn’t recognise Wiggo at first – he’s filled out well and looks so different, not in any bad way, just vastly different to the twig like powerhouse he was back in 2012.

They might have a delayed fuse…..

There is no legal requirement to isolate in the United Kingdom for anyone under any circumstances. Even if you have Covid you’re not legally required to isolate.

I didn’t see that so thanks for sharing. The Studio looks very well specced, just a shame the design is so abysmal. For a company that has built a large part of its fortune on cutting edge industrial design, this is disappointing.

The thing about monitors is that excellence (or perhaps more correctly ‘accuracy’) is still not cheap; if you absolutely need to have the most accurate colour rendition possible you’re going to pay considerably more for that than one which is a little wayward or has fewer display options. I use a 32″ BenQ SW320, which was around £1200 when I got it five years ago, but it’s required for photography work and rendering colour consistently. It’s colour reproduction that tends to drive price rather than resolution.

If you don’t need that colour accuracy though, then there’s loads of better value choice than the Apple.

So glad I have 50/50 custody of the kids and therefore avoid all this! if you’re not going to have the kids more then it’s reasonable for her to ask for more maintenance. But if the reason you’re not able to have the kids more is because she’s denying you access then perhaps you need to counter the claim with one of your own?

That is lovely Mikkel!

1 in 4 men have a criminal record for crimes that required a trial at crown court (i.e. not just a FPN for speeding and a trip to the magistrate). For women, that’s less than 1 in 20.

Do you really believe that figure? Because even without looking it up, if you spend any time thinking about it you realise that it’s patently absurd. It has to be otherwise how would societies remain stable over time?

However, it is absolutely true that men commit the overwhelming majority of all crimes, serious or otherwise, but the total percentage of the male population accounting for this is more like 4%. Ifg you’re likely to commit one transgression, then you’re almost certainly going to commit many more because the behaviour is to a large extent pathological (to men).

There is a very simple (personality) explanation for this – men are generally less agreeable than women, by about two standard deviations. We’ve measured this across populations all over the world and it holds stable for all cultures and contexts (I work as a business psychologist BTW, testing and measuring people for senior job applications usually at senior level, so know this subject reasonably well. yes I know it’s fraught with error and very high confidence intervals but so is life 😆).

The most disagreeable people in any population are overwhelmingly male and they overwhelmingly account for all the crime committed in a given society. The reason that very low levels of agreeableness is so strongly with crime is because that personality trait results in a disregard as to what other people think of you. A lot of our behaviour is moderated by the social pressure of what others think of us and the need/desire to be accepted; the higher your experience of that phenomenon, the higher your agreeableness (and the more your behaviour will be seen as something that is pleasing to others). When you do not experience this pressure, it’s much easier to be quite the nasty SOB.

BTW this lack of agreeableness (you could also call it empathy) in men compared to women is also the cause of a whole lot of other problems and challenges that have been exposed more recently, not least war, violence, harrassment, nuisance like behaviour etc.

More than coincidence IMHO.

I was thinking the same thing!

Would you rather be raped or have all your teeth pulled out, electricity passed through your gonads or water boarded? The idea that one is worse than the other is of course a ridiculous Hobson’s choice but illustrates the point that we still value men’s lives less than women’s/regard women as weaker than men (there’s two ways to see the same problem but equality if a fickle beast).

I’m pretty sure women are as capable as men in many military roles.

There are numerous countries with women serving in front line combat roles; the problem is less to do with physical capability (after all if you can pass the physical you can pass the physical right, assuming that the requirements are the same), the problem is more as highlighted above. We still have very different standards as to what we can tolerate happening to a man versus a woman and that makes commanding a mixed gender unit very challening. I’m not saying those standard are right, far from it; I think that the sooner we are comfortable with both men and women losing limbs, being eviscerated in a muddy field, suffering extreme PTSD and falling into mental dispair and homelessness, or indeed, coming home in a bag, the sooner we are to give up on the idea of war and conflict all together.

The problem, more acurately put, is that we are still comfortable with those things happening at all and thus war is still regarded as a reasonable means of solving disputes.

30k is a lot to spend on a hifi. Do you dance to the music it plays or sit in a specially placed armchair ?

It’s all relative – some people spend that on a car when about half the amount will do the job just as well but as with music, this ignores the fact that the utility offered by a more prestigious/luxury/performance car goes far beyond simply getting you from one place to another.

to answer your question though, the latter; I have no TV, just a really great place to experience music and feel the worries of the world melt away.

£30k is a lot for sure but I know people that have spent three or four times that and since they can afford it that’s their choice and yes, the difference is vast (though for someone like me the room is the biggest limiting factor).

I want to be free to pass on my viruses on public transport and to my work colleagues whenever I please

You’ve been doing that since the day you were born.

These days I don’t have the time or facilities (nor all the skills in terms of darkroom work) to do in film what I can in digital…

This is where I have to confess that I process my negatives digitally (sort of obvious really as otherwise I wouldn’t be able to share them here, though I guess I could be scanning a hand made print). Most fine art photographers I know and follow, with a few notable exceptions, do the same. I would love to have the time and skill to create true, craft like handmade prints but also recognise that this is a skill set so deserving of special attention that most past masters of the photographic art (Avedon immediately springs to mind) would work with someone dedicated in this area rather than do it themselves (again there are exceptions, Don McCullin being a very obvious one).

BTW Colournoise, your username now has added meaning!

I don’t ever feel one is more ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ than the other

I think it’s the process that is authentic but as I said, you can shoot an analogue like process on digital and so yes, one is not more real or more authentic.

I think the main reason people still shooting film are doing so is because they find it aesthetically more pleasing.

Have a look at the work of Nicholas J R White – he’s a large format landscape photographer with a beautiful portfolio.

His Black Dots project was excellent: Black Dots

And Dust and the Vein is mesmerising: Dust and the Vein

But really all his work is sublime and worth enjoying

Struck me that I was very much the fast food, instant gratification end of things!!

Potentially but you can still shoot digital using an analogue process, which is how I used to approach shooting portraits with my digital camera before I moved back to film. I used to use the smallest storage cards I could find (a 2GB compact flash cards would hold no more than 30 images on my camera, so it was like shooting 3 rolls of 120), tripod mount the camera, use a cable release and a light meter with full manual exposure but always shot at ISO 400. The analogue process really worked well but it lacked the ‘craft’ feel that true film offers.

I shoot 120 now on a 6×7 format (so ten frames per roll and a more moderate £2.20 per frame). Large format is a whole other ball game of patience, chance, error and surprises. I know a few (world renowned) portrait photographers who have tried to move from 120 to large format and found it a very challenging and deeply frustrating experience. For portraiture, I think 120 is a good compromise.

Of course, if you’ve ever seen the work of Richard Learoyd on his room size camera obscura and direct to positive print paper that measures in the metre square range, you’ll also know that especially for portraiture, bigger is most definitely better!

I’m in the same boat but less because of a loss of mojo (although I have lost that many times since I started riding seriously around 1986; I always found it again) but more because of time. Riding a bike isn’t exactly an hour in the gym and the suggestion to:

Get yourself on Zwift and join the race series on here.

…is something I tried but there’s another real issue with that and that’s the damage that this can do to your, ahem, genital vascular supply (which at this age isn’t something you really want to be adding to!)

Accept that you’re an ex-cyclist, find your mojo elsewhere and remember that life is too short to feel obliged to do anything you don’t want to do. If you find your mojo again great, if not then give yourself a pass and just be content.