Bontrager 24/12 at Newnham.

The weekend of 27/28th July this year you can camp from thursday to monday and usually the showers are on from friday to sunday evenings. Loads more great woodsy/downhill/moorland witin a very short ride of Newnham park itself, and you are right near the sea, dartmoor and the south hams for non-bike holiday shenanigans. All your family camp for a £40 solo entry. Frankly I am suprised more people don’t just enter for the cheap camping and have a holiday in devon…

Also if you you want to turn the tables and have Mrs ride the bike and Mr do the washing and children-minding, The Filthy Foxes Dirty Weekend is also at Newnham and in may. 40 sheets too I believe, with trail running and xc races (laydeez only) and various other skillz/workshop/wine related groups.

Can’t believe it was a whole page before anyone mentioned Jim Davidson. Yes I suppose he is y least favourite. And Joe Pasquale.

I quite like that Henning Wehn off the radio, Rich Hall and Ross Noble.
However the great thing about Russel Howard’s Good news is that watching it I discovered the truly extraordinary Reggie Watts.[/url] 😀

hipshot tremelo innit! 😀

oh and a pearloid scratchplate and matching machinehead buttons.

gweilo, newsflash!! There is a hitherto hidden “2nd axis[/url]” of politics. 😯 and indeed 😉

…which means you can be both lefty and heavily interventionist at the same time.

I would love to know if the STW masseev feels that there is a difference bvetween the scientific misinformation and “advice” propagated by various religions and the scientific misinformation and “advice” propagated by the Mail. Hopefully being concerned about this does not make me overly authoritarian.

Politics and poorly-disguised racism aside, it’s really the “science” and “health” stories that get me. The amount of utter nonsense this newspaper publishes with regards to what will or will not give you cancer and so on is ludicrous.

My mother-in-law laps them all up and is forever cutting this or that out of her diet/life because she read about it in the Mail. And in her umpteen years of doing what the Mail said, she has had (and so far survived) three different cancers. Look where that got her then. 👿

(fwiw the first two cancers were totally unrelated, third possibly related to second. If you believe what you read in the mail that is.)

oldnpastit – Member

I thought this was going to be about all the muck, grime, grit and flooded roads that afflicts my drivetrain and clothes at this time of year, perhaps with an interesting argument about the pros and cons of going fixed until the rain stops.

+2, it’s horrible out there at the moment. This week a simple road bike takes twice as long to clean as a dripping in mud multi-llinkaged mountain bike. 🙁

Why don’t we raze Leeds to the ground?

No-one would notice.

Leeds isn’t just a place, it’s a state of mind.

binners +1, well the bit about ‘salary’ being of limited relevance when compared to “disposable income”.

I would add that the harder-to-price-up opportunities and doors that open to MP’s present and ‘retired. I am thinking second jobs, non-exec directorships/board positions and the marvellous jobs you have vastly better access to when you leave politics.

As a local example, David Jamieson (lab, Plymouth Devonport, oh and I was in a band with his son once) was a headteacher before his political career, and left politics to a very senior (and far better paid than MP or headteacher) position in GNER. What a fantastic career development oportunity his junior transport ‘ministership’ turned out to be: how else do you get from teaching to trains?

Paying MP’s anything at all was a significant step towards democracy in the late 1800’s as it allowed ‘normal’ people as well as those of independent means to afford to stand as MP’s, but I think the situation has developed over the last 150 years and there is now a valid argument that “suffering” the salary of an MP is a thoroughly excellent career move.

Oh and the ‘public sector pensions’ that MP’s enjoy have such fabulous terms and of course were completely unchanged in the pensions reforms applied to teachers, civil servants and health workers last year. When they have dealt with the armed forces and police officers, MP’s may well have the only surviving example of these fabled “gold plated pensions” left.

I thought it was like a better version of Colemanballs. (shows age 😳 )

maccruiskeen – Member

It tells me what Torys think STW was the first place I ever heard anyone express a tory political viewpoint as their own. Up until then I knew roughly half the people I meet day to day must vote conservative but I never heard anyone say they did, or promote or defend a tory policy.

I lurk on BM a bit and the prevailing opinion over there would seem to be that STW is full of frothing-at-the-mouth loony lefties, not the opinions of the right. I work in the NHS but the British side of my family is well up in the middle class (some of them even had “staff” 😯 ) so I didn’t come in search of dogged Wolfie Smith trade unionism, shiny neo-liberal bullshine or condescending ‘old money’ Toryism. Found plenty of all three though! 😀

I did come here for the trails and bike-fixing threads, most of which I still read, but actually it seems more interesting to chat about whatever comes up with people I know or may well meet out riding soon enough that I find myself posting more in the chat side these days. I also haven’t bought a fork or frame anywhere except the classifieds for nearly 5 years now.

I counted 18 cars/vans in Gawton car park too, busiest I have seen it outside race days. 😀

Gawton. Nicely busy and nicely muddy. 10 runs and 10 pushups (equals pushing bike up 11 miles of steepish fireroad making 4000 vertical feet 😯 ) . I hurt today.

OMG, just found this:

£48 from parker-international. Mmmmmmmm, tooooooollllllssss. 😀

I had the park tools one and it was ok but hard to get really tight or undo stubborn ones.

This one is waaaaay better (but doesn’t work on campag bolts as the park one does both)

http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=55957

If she was really in her stride, surely Thatcher wouldn’t have made it illegal, but instead would have removed the obligation of Local Authorities to provide it to all school ages not just secondary as Labour did (and some kind of corresponding drop in funding if possible at the time) and then minimised loss in support from dairy farmers and whichever parents* were bothered (*despite being well lefty and quite French, I am not sure my folks were really that bothered) by blaming it all on the local authorities or schools.

ps44, you want a “mr Whippy” for this film not popcorn. 😀

…and with a little more basic googling:

Labour did not ban or make it illegal for local education authorities to continue supplying free school to secondary schools if they wanted to.

And as far as primary school children were concerned, Labour, in the Public Expenditure and Receipts Act 1968 made it a mandatory requirement for free school milk to continue to be supplied.

Thatcher changed that with legislation that made it illegal even for local authorities to supply free milk and any authority doing so would be gulity of breaking the law.

I presume this last paragraph means free milk to over 7’s (Thatcher’s 1971 legislation made it illegal as opposed to “not mandatory” for LA’s to supply it to over 7’s) as I still had it age six in the early eighties in 2 different and distant LA’s.

Still, thanks for providing the first half of an interesting point again Zulu 😉

you know, Public Expenditure and Receipts Act, 1968, Chapter Three ?

Wow, it took fifteen years to fully implement the milk bit? 😯

Well, every day’s a school day.

FWIW despite my bleeding heart leftism I will definitely watch it.

Not being so bothered about weight myself, (my big bike has 2.8kg of 66 on it!) and having rode both forks, I would say Lyrik.

You used to be able to get codeine linctus over the counter from a proper pharmacist, though like most/all other codeine/opiate preparations it is now prescription only as it was rather abusable. (Anyone read “Scale” by Will Self? 😆 ) However, it might help in the OP’s case because the right dose (ie quite small compared to pain-relief-size doses of codeine) is supposed to supress your cough overnight whilst you sleep. Only for you to wake up with looooads of stuff to cough up but at least you got some proper kip. But you’ll be needing to go to the GP’s for that.

*puts old/former NHS manager’s cap on* Make sure your manager is recording your sickness as “work-related/caused” (there should be a code for this in their weekly/monthly sickness returns, iirc it differs from trust to trust)

Sickness is recorded and paid differently in the NHS if it an injury you sustained in the line of duty. (Many years ago as a HCA, filling a large kettle from a hot water geyser was very much in my line of duty and the old ladies would have revolted if this was not accomplished at least the regulation six times a day!)

You need to be clear that your sickness is being recorded as this otherwise (as a new starter with reduced sick pay allowances) your next wage packet may be rather a lot smaller than you are expecting!

Also/however if you work on a ward it will not be unreasonable that they ask you to come into work “in civvies” and help out with filing, admin, stock control/ordering etc until your hand is well enough to cope with gloves and being washed 20-30 times a shift. Plenty of my colleagues have come in with injuries that prevented them from normal nursing duties but allowed them to help out in other ways.

I’ve used them for a few years with tubes. FWIW they seem much harder to get on t’wife’s DT rims than they are to get on 717’s.

I want “fire” by Jimi Hendrix Experience. Or if there is a good crowd, the Tia Carrere cover from Wayne’s World. 😀

Mrs J wants “Hot Hot Hot” by the Cure.

As a sometime bona fide gigging musician whose music was welcome rather than tolerated (not any more mind!), I once skilfully murdered/pastiched Metalica’s “nothing else matters” at a house party, only to find that it had very recently been played at a funeral of one guest’s friends who had taken his own life. There is no emoticon that says how bad a thing that was.

Top two on this page. 9mm for front and 10mm for back.

Assuming your ‘toe in’ is good, then wwaswas +1 :there is an explanantion of this somewhere online (sheldon?) about this but it is something to do with the length of cable between the brakes and the cable hanger. The shorter this length is the less the shudder and hence less squeal, so if there is a drilling in the fork to mount a cable stop there instead of the one she has on the top of the headtube then so much the better. [edit] waves at Rich ^^

I had a BMW mini hairdressermobile for a couple of years, and I was puzzled to twice find unlocked and the windows part or fully open, but nothing stolen or tampered with.

It would seem that if you put your mk1 bmw mini key in your back pocket and then sit on it, (activating the “hold button down to unlock and open windows cos its a hot sunny day” function) the transmittter works from inside your house. Or indeed the back room of a patient’s first floor flat in the roughest bit of town. 😳

they are supposed to be equal but also so that on neither end of the axle comes out beyonds the outside of the dropout (you wouldn’t be able to fasten the wheel up properly). 0.14mm is not worth bothering about IMHO.

over time the wife and I have had three specialized’s between us and on all three the hanger went on the inside. OP’s looks right in this respect. [edit]-just popped out to look at the commuter and it looks just like the op’s ie the drive side locknut sits against the hanger not the frame.
Locoboy, count how many threads (as in screw threads) of the axle you can see protruding from each side of your rear hub. If they are the same, just do the quick release up nice and tight and you’ll be reet.

There was that video a few years ago of some scottish hipsters having a bike race on a frozen canal. That looked pretty cool.

A “beige powder” evening here too: three or four summers ago in my not-quite-localest woods too!

As a lad I seem to remember dry astroturf being good fun for crazy cornering too, albeit with a rather abrasive failure penalty!

I expect they are hoping for a few orders that are at least a few quid over £40. (mine was closer to £50) And I notice that the sale is pretty poor in the lower priced stuff: (the things I bought were no more than 10% off) -perhaps they thought it would be a good way to get cashflow in, shift some stock and get a few new names on the database?

Only bikey present was this:

-Brasher gtx ‘light’ walking boots. Brown leather, not too chunky, fit nice, well chuffed!

-6 disc Truffaut film collection 8)
Portland Design Works “king of ding” brass bicycle bell. 8) 8) (available from your friendly singlespeed Bikemonger so the wife says)

-No Wiggo book, will I be missing out?

2 recipe emergencies sorted in two days. What a lovely forum. 😀

dt78 +1

Have you binned or checked and repaired the tube?
Reason I ask is that one of my recent punctures was from oil degrading the tube rather than anything pointy. I’d recently rebuilt the wheel with a new rim (and I use chain or fork oil on the nipples as per the wheelpro book) and in my hurry (commuter bike night before work!) I hadn’t cleaned the inside properly afterwards: particularly oily nipple made oil seep through cloth rim tape and pershed a hole in the tube.

The graph also ignores everything apart from income tax of course – guess who a rise in VAT impacts on the most?

…not to mention rises in fuel, alcohol and tobacco duty. (Which as we all know successive governments of both flavours have so dilligently reinvested in infrastructrure/road safety substance misuse treatment and healthcare/palliative care for those that could be seen as needing, but also potentially paying a lot of extra duty towards it. 👿 )

JY +1 -Guido Fawkes seems just like the Monbiot of the right, except he hides behind a pseudonym and a cartoony picture. I am sure zulu would be just as gracious in pointing out the potential bias in referencing Monbiot too. 😀

Does anyone enter politics to reduce poverty?

I reluctantly concede this: If the universe is infinite, and the extrapolation of this is that there exists an infinite number of planets similar to ours except for minute differences, then yes it is just conceivable that somewhere in a galaxy far far away there is a Conservative politician who in his heart of hearts really joined up to reduce poverty.

There is also a small chance that there may be one or two MP’s of any political persuasion in the current government (doh!) house of commons who really really are in it for the poor. Most likely not in Blue flavour though.

Tory policy is predicated on the assumption that people are best making decisions for themselves, and Labour policy is predicated on the assumption that people need decisions making for them. Your idea of ‘worrying about’ someone is another’s idea of unnecessary interference.

…and meanwhile over the last couple of hundred years in the UK we have seen that “people making decisions for themselves” fairly consistently results in the privileged, well connnected and morally ruthless winning out in time over those born into poverty or raised with more egalitarian (or indeed Christian!) values.

Top heavy/interventionist/’unneccessary influence’ and the bloaty but accountable public sector is still the lesser of two evils for many people.

bainbrge: how?

We used to try and play it in lunch break at school when I was about 12. I seem to remember you could only be in the middle bit of you kept saying “Kabaddi”, and it was a bit difficult!

Isn’t there a tiny chance that some Tories enter into politics to try and reduce poverty?

Post of the week! 😆

I love a good bible verse, me 😀

Compassion, charity, forgiveness, redistribution of riches, unselfishness, giving of oneself for those less fortunate, equal respect and unconditional love for the rich/poor/sick/healthy, I could go on… but if He was on the electoral roll today, what would Jesus vote?