Don’t get me started on their taxpayer funded staff parties…

Wait, we get taxpayer funded staff parties? 😯

In my fourteen years in the NHS I have never known this happen. Although I confess I had a cheap-as-chips finger buffet on my induction day at a 1500 bedded district general hospital at the height of nu-labour’s funding bonanza: however I worked for the same trust four years later and you brought your own lunch so someone obviously recognised that wanton jizzing of publc funds and put a stop to it. Nowadays, if we want to make like a proper business and hold any sort of team-building day, the staff who go to it club together and fund it. I hope that makes you feel better.

I know of a chap who needs a £5,000 operation but the NHS can’t afford to pay for it.
They can afford though to pay over £20,000 (and rising) to relieve his pain on a regular basis, which the operation would alleviate.

Internal and increasingly expernal marketisation of hospitals and healthcare, innit. Resource and targets-led ‘decisions’ made Stafford what it is, and are quite possibly at the root of this poor chap’s ridiculous situation too.

1) yes your chainset will be fine.
2) 8 and 9 speed (but not necessarily 10) rear derailleurs are pretty much the same as regards jockey wheels and cable pull ratios, as long as the brand matches your left hand shifter (ie shimano shifter and derailleur, or both sram). So if you want you can buy just the 9-speed derailleur now and use it till your chain and cassette are worn out then change the rest of it later.

uwe-r – Member

I thought the former GP, MP, came across really well on R4 recently re the minimum booze price U Turn. Her arguments were unbeatable because she could back it up with her experience of dealing with families affected by Alcohol abuse.

+1

Plenty of GP’s turned politicians in parliament today, but I guess that your professional background is not what gets you places in govermnent: though plenty of them have gone on to be trustees of health related charities or indeed board members of BUPA et al, I find it curious that of all the health secretaries since Bevan (I got bored looking back any further) not a single one of them had a professional medical background.

The best pre-politics health work experience I could find was that:
Andy Burnham worked for the NHS confederatiom for four months.
Patricia Hewitt was once a Press/PR officer for Age Concern.

Is the same true of defence, education, environment/rural affairs etc?

I have just remembered the “where’s the first presbyterian church on Gordon Street” bit in Wayne’s World 2. 😀

It used to be traditional for upper class people whose families didn’t trust them to not run the family businesses into rack and ruin to be pushed into politics by way of ‘damage limitation’. IIRC this is sent up un Jeeves and Wooster at one point.

Local examples: one of our local mp’s was a solicitor for 15 years before politics came into his life, one a GP, another was a headteacher. On the other hand, one comes from an officer-class military family but stated politics at 21, and recently he was called out by a veteran for wearing one of his relatives’ RM tie to a function. 😆

I seem to remember a lot of very secular-sounding pop music credits thanking God too. I often wondered the same thing.

Do you really think he’s poor enough to lose them it given how unpopular the Tories are making themselves?

Yes.
-media/personality: remember how popular Clegg was made by the a couple of good telly appearances and lots of positive press. The same can be done with Cameron I am sure.
-you can fool lots of people with a manifesto that only bears a passing resemblance with what you really want to do.
-relatively low numbers of “swingable” voters.
-relatively low numbers of swing seats.

*affects poorly-informed pub bore voice*
The wild card is UKIP either splitting the conservative vote enough to lose them lots of marginals, or fighting the election on the Euro referendum and somehow that backfiring. Otherwise Cameron will have to actually bite the head off a child on Newsnight no to win next time.

[EDIT] actually what Binners said make sense too. But is anyone (well, anyone not ‘protest voting’ against the labour or conservative incumbent in a safe seat as I suppose I might consider doing. Again.) actually going to vote lib dem now?

Labour were in the same boat before the last election with Brown. But the labour party doesn’t possess the electorally ruthless streak of the Tories.

Was Brown as much of an electoral liability as Thatcher was, (well, actually her utterly blind insistence on pursuing the Poll Tax) at the time she was ousted?

Labour lost the 2010 election by how many seats? I heard on R4 the other day that alongside the cabinet that did the ousting, there were in the region of 150 Tory Mp’s in marginal seats saying the poll tax (and therefore Thatcher) was going to lose them their seats and the Conservative party the General Election.

What I want to know us why is there no meat option at a vegetarian restaurant!

I was similarly outraged at the menu of my local italian restaurant: can a man not order a curry anywhere he likes any more?!

What other reason is there? Do some people eat meat because they have some unnatural compulsion to kill and devour cows?

I suppose it depends on the culture you are brought up in. If you are told that a meal is inciomplete without meat you may feel you ought to, and if you are told meat is baaaaad you may avoid it rather than try it with an open mind.
I tried to minimise any social expectations about diet and religion with my children and ended up with one veggie, one pig and chicken fan, one atheist and one eight year old white english Hindu. (although she is ‘backsliding’ of late…)

Haven’t found the fruitarian mum/baby yet but I did find this interview featuring fruitarianism with one of my wife’s old friends. Great beard. I think she said he rode a singlespeed town bike too. 😀

I suppose after 15 years of treehugging, I ought to also read upn on and consider the effect of milk, particularly cow’s milk. ie methane and the how if everyone stopped eating cows overnight there would still be a demand for them as milk producers, and then you would have a lot of steers left over. So in the case of cows, the original post has some point as you’d need to stop the demand for making shoes, cheese and so on of out of them too. [edit: typed this while toys was tying the above post, he articulates it much better: I suppose I should re-examine the real effect of my meat free-existence given my ongoing use of and demand for dairy and leather)

In the meantime, my kids were both born 8lbs plus to a vegetarian mum, and raised omnivores. Daughter has made her own choices now (occasional pig-in-blanket related lapses), and son LOVES PIIIIIIG. 😆 I also find that cooking meat for your friends and children’s friends also sidesteps much of the preachyness/jibes etc and yet somehow I still sleep at night.

FWIW Graham and xherbivore are still only the 29ers of the food world: for true eating nicheyness, my (then vegan) wife once knew a couple of fruitarian musclemountain bodybuilders, and fruitarian lady who somehow raised a baby in good health as a fruitarian. 😯 IIRC there was something published in medical/paediatric journals about her: ( if anyone is interested in looking it up this franklly bonkers but fortunately healthy parenting, it was in Leicestershire in the early to mid 90’s and would have been overseen by paeds at Leicester Royal Infirmiary)

Salsa Juan Solo.
Reissued shiny silver zaskar.
Yeti arc x, or indeed that sc cross bike (?crux?)
as above/page before, trek 69er singlespeed in rootbeer with duc32’s
Foes xct5

Let me google that for you. 😉

Do you reckon that in the same way the Beeb have had Thatcher programmes, obituaries and so on pre-recorded for when the time came, successive governments have had stealth legislation lined up? 😀

3m make good double sided sticky foam, or whatever its called. iirc my sanderson headtube is stuck on with this, as is the one on t’wife’s SC.

There is a crank pulling tool with a larger ‘plug’ in the middle that doesn’t get pushed down the hole in the middle. like this one. Years ago I got one from halfords which had a cap that comes on and off so you can do both square taper and isis/octalink/howitzer with the same tool but its not as nice or expensive as the park tools one.
If you have a crank puller for square taper only, I have heard of it being done using a 5p piece to go over the hole in the spindle before you insert the tool. You will knacker the 5p though!

My daughter has a pack of Micheal Jackson Top trumps, with each card being a single or album. Somehow they manage to make scores for it so you can play it as a rather crap game.

Surely the same could be done for Maggie with pieces of legislation passed as education secretary and PM, and with scores/dimensions for “rich got richer”, “poor got richer”, “north got better”, “south got better”, “controversy” and “memorable quotes/soundbites attached”. Falklands and Poll tax as some kind of wild cards/jokers.

Also metallic or pearlescent blue case of course. 😀

Been on nights so lots of catching up on this thread. Heard and read lots more about her in last few days of course.

The bit that stood out for me was the soundbite from sometime after she left no 10 where she talks about how every politician can understand that one might be stabbed in the back, but she couldn’t get over or forgive how it happened to her.

For me that brought it all home that irrespective of her policies (which as part of the stupid and impertinent lefty club I of course mostly didn’t agree with), she was driven beyond all common sense. No doubt that the 150 or so Conservative MP’s in less than safe seats and her own cabinet were right to get her out before she lost them the next election and still she couldn’t see how she had brought this ousting upon herself. We don’t need political changelings like Blair, Clegg and Cameron, but we really don’t need rigid and uncompromising ones either.

Cheap and quickly posted in my experience. I like them.

^^ Ooooh, that is a good price for a really lovely frame.

My ss is the same size as I would buy a normal hartail for.

Although for some reason mine (sanderson soloist) is half an inch shorter in the top tube than the equivalent size geared/xc sanderson frames. It is fine, in fact one of my favourite ever bikes I’ve had, (perhaps that is the fork and the bars more than the frame but hey ho…) but if I could change one thing it would be maybe 3/4″ longer and same everywhere else.

Blimey. We were only talking about *that* website at work yesterday. 😕

Nothing to add to the cowbell video except that I have met Aldo Vanucci a few times (friend of a friend) and despite only being Plymouth’s 14th best dj, he is a proper decent bloke. 😀

seamless bib shorts…. I would be well interested in that. A quick google turns up no reviews so far: has ST or any other mag got any in for testing?

Take the advice of a midwife (even the duty one who doesn’t know your missus from adam/eve).

I went to work three hours after my wife’s contractions started at 40 weeks, and felt better about it for asking one of my GP colleagues whether I should realy be at work. Yes, a real live GP. She said “yeah, probably nothing too serious right now, just keep your phone on.” Fortunately, I went with what the midwife advised instead, and was holding my daughter 3 hours later, this was three hours before I was otherwise due to finish work.

highclimber – Member

The proximity of some of those ‘observers’ to the cars makes me think that there’s something not right about the amount of bird crap on some people’s cars!

Seagulling.

Well that is what I heard from a therapist friend. (no really, he is a friend, who is also a therapist. But not my therapist.)

The legal aspects of child and adolescent psychiatry in England and Wales. My ‘other’ job is teaching a class at university on this once a year so I suppose that is my specialist subject.

oh, and Bowie. 😀

I can’t understand it myself.

Steve

Bit random with what it chooses not to record and upload ime. (Does the weather make a difference to gps signal btw?)

jam bo, Carl Phillips had the (android) strava record on Egypt, about a minute faster than anyone else. He was riding Proper job at the time. 😆 (for anyone else, these are two downhill trails at gawton which start in the same place but are otherwise about 100m apart the rest of the way down…)

How sad. 🙁
I heard him speak on that Radio four programme where readers ask authors questions and he was well funny and down to earth. Discovered him relatively late so at least I still have quite a few of his books left to get through. 😕

Perhaps another comparison, demand and waiting list-wise would be dentists. Almost everyone needs one at some point, and the most sought after ones are often nhs ones which are considerably cheaper but offer comparable services. I choose to remain in the care of my NHS dentist, in a region where the demand versus supply is almost the worst in the uk. I could give that place up to someone even less able to afford private treatment than me. But i don’t. Does that make me better or worse than Bob Crow? (Bearing in mind my dental treatment is both subsidised and below the “market rate”.)

I have read most of it. (NIV, if anyone is bothered)

Has anyone read The Message? It sounds rad. 😀

And spend the day herding yachties out of the way of battleships, submarines and the ferry in Plymouth Sound. 😀

The mash article though exaggerated (I hope three courses at the house of commons is a little bit more like what it costs elsewherein westminster, and I hope atos sometimes slum it in £100 a cover restaurants) still has a useful point to make about the viability of the ‘challenge’:

Sunday: Final day. Secretly borrow a fiver from old woman who lives downstairs. Use it to buy delicious three course lunch at House of Commons restaurant. That evening the lovely people from ATOS take me to Savoy Grill for dinner.

Should have just done this every day. Would have been a piece of piss.

Also how would you adjust for realistic housing payments, over-the-top keycard meter energy payments and so on. I am confident that given his family and support network, IDS’s life on the dole was absolutely nothing like it is for most people. I have a friend who is a PHd’s up university lecturer now, and yet claimed JSA for a few months between phd finishing and his first job: his standard of living was nothing like as poor as most claimants.

[edit]

and to be fair, IDS isn’t under 25, so he or I would be on £71 per week

Did he say he could live on benefits, or did he say he could live on £53 a week?

[double edit] ah, under Humprys duress, he answered the question of £53 a week with “If i had to I would.” Nicely ambiguous reply…

What the petition asks is pretty unworkable once you factor in expenses and whatever it is MP’s get subsidised these days. (what help does he/doesn’the get for commuting in from greater london as opposed to having a second home near westminster?) I expect that £53 a week will go unexpectedly far for anyone that well connnected. Plus like cabinet ministers of all flavours, I bet he hasn’t paid for a meal in a restaurant for a wee while. 😉

Nevertheless I added my name to it.

FWIW my old 2004 bmw mini came (new) allegedly with run flats (on steels), and denfintely came with a kit including spray sealant and a pump/pressure gauge that you plugged into the 12v lighter socket. Worth checking if all this is still in the car (and works!) before you shell out IMO

Given the subject matter/content and the time it is on, Songs of Praise seems an ideal displacement activity for teenagers across the nation procrastinating about doing their maths homework due in the next morning.

Also, it is just what I would expect from a public service broadcaster in a constitutional monarchy whose head of state is also the head of the armed forces and “defender of the faith” of the Church of England. When my tax contributions stop funding all that, I will write in and complain about my TV licence funding songs of praise. *runs for cover*

I’ve had an RS reba and a sid on mine, both bar mounted lockouts (although I don’t always bother locking it anyway) and they have both been fine.

Ah yes they do sell spacers individually: seem to be in stock at £5.99 per side at uk bike store.