Genuine question, is it not more financially advantageous for an MP to be ejected by the electorate rather than stand down? I seem to remember there is a decent severance package in that event.

Not that your average Tory is motivated by that sort of thing of course, in it to make a difference and all that.

Family of four here.

I am clearly doing something wrong. as I still end up with a full draining board of pots to do, even after filling the dishwasher. My wife is an excellent cook and like most excellent cooks, she is incapable of preparing a meal without using every pot pan and utensil at her disposal.

For some reason it is also imperative to cover every surface with ingredients, but that’s a whole other hill to die on.

Also use it to clean my hands when in the garage.

Doing that is a brilliant way to find out if you have any little cuts on your hands.😫

My rural journey to work crosses a couple of rivers that get a bit floody at various points of the year. I always detour, even if I’m in our Discovery, as you’re never quite sure what’s been washed onto the road you can’t see. I don’t fancy dragging the bumper off for the sake of an additional five minutes.

One of crossing points rarely floods more than a couple of inches. The issue is, when it does you can’t see the road’s edge, as one lady in a Merc discovered last winter. She panicked half-way across, attempted a three point turn and ended up driving into a submerged four foot ditch. The water on the road was ankle deep.

Muslin cloths from when the kids were little, in various states of oilyness. We must have bought so many, I doubt I will run out before they have kids of their own.

Meaux should be in Normandy, not in a windy bit of the East Riding. Really not sure where the Land of Green Ginger should be, but probably not where it is.

I’ve just spotted PX have pre-built Big Dogs with Rock Shox 35’s, Sram GX and a dropper for £849. That is absolutely crackers value, if you are looking for a winter hardtail.

Linky

Isn’t the Big Dog a bit of a lump?

I think the build is key. If you look at the basic spec on the website for the £1K ish price point, basic wheels, heavy tyres and fork are all going to contribute to a pretty sluggish bike. At that budget steel makes no sense at all when the Scandal is the same price.

Lighter components, tubeless wheels etc. for a bit more spend, and the Big Dog starts to make its case, if the look and feel of Steel floats your boat.

Have also just noticed On One Big Dog which can be bought with a Pike fork and dropper stem on GX kit for 1650. That seems like a good deal – anyone got thoughts on the frame (I’ve seen mixed reports of On One since I bought my last one).

I’ve just bought one (with the Pike upgrade) to replace my QR Solaris that was stolen. Quality is fine, I wouldn’t expect it to be comparable to a Pace or Cotic, but they are half the price, spec for spec. I’ve only ridden it a couple of times and I would say I am still adjusting to the more modern geo. I think I like it, rather than love it, but then it always takes me a while for a new bike to feel like it’s mine, if that makes any sense.

Hard to look past it for value though.

How far do I have to go down the thread to find out what the police said?

+1

The moronic comments are spoiling my day a little bit.

I don’t know… aren’t the kits £90 ish on average? So the shop are charging £100 for labour. That can’t be more than 2 hours workshop time, surely?

They quoted me based on 2 hours of workshop time, I suspect it would take me rather longer. I haven’t had anything done by an LBS for years so I’m not sure how that rate compares. I take the view they have to make a living and their overheads must be on the increase like everything else. I expect to pay the going rate for their time and skills.

I think I will probably get this one done professionally. I will maybe have a go with a simpler generic kit on Mrs LJ’s, in order to satisfy my inner tightwad.

Cheers all. :)

When you say ‘bespoke to your frame’, do you mean it’s a generic kit, as opposed to one of the frame specific ones?

It’s one cut specifically for my frame. If it was a hardtail, with lots of nice straight lines, I wouldn’t give it a second thought, however it’s an FS frame with loads of weird shapes to manipulate the wrap around. The Youtube vids talk about it being easy and then show half an hour of water spraying and re-positioning in a temperature controlled, dust-free environment.

**Magnum Force** A Man’s got to know his limitations **Magnum Force**

Droppers have made a big difference confidence-wise for my eldest (10yo). It might be worth trying your child on an adult model though. I was ready to splash out on a PNW kid’s model but found the regular Brand X 27.2 was fine in terms of activation weight and he’s pretty small for his age.

a little worried about the square taper. Should I be?

If they’re fitted properly, not at all. Pro downhillers raced World Champs on them 25 years ago, they’ll be fine on a kid’s bike. Just check the spindle bolts every now and again for tightness and go and get muddy.

I’ve just paid £1600 for a reinforced (Secure by Design) up and over with a new frame. The existing 30 year old one was cut with hand tools in order to steal all our bikes, so spending a bit more than the £900 quoted for the basic one seemed sensible. We went with the insurance supplier, as we were quoted locally over £2K!

When anyone say’s they’ve been quoted a figure for anything at the moment, the immediate response is “yeah, but when was that?” Inflation is just smashing, isn’t it?

They seem to have increased the Queens queue to a two-lane job now.
Sensible.

Dear lord! If they’re expecting the lanes to merge, we may end up with a civil war.

Any neighbours with ring door bells for a reg number?

Hope the kids aren’t to shook up with it all.

We think they parked in the lane outside our cul-de-sac, they seemed very camera shy.

Thankfully the kids are at their grandparents this week, we will tell them when we see them at the weekend. We have decided on the white lie that they were stolen during the day, while we were out. They don’t need to be worried about things like this happening while they sleep.

My ten year old is a worrier, the five year old will want to hunt the baddies down with a bow and arrow. I’m not sure who I’m more concerned about to be honest.

@kayak23 Thanks for the offer, and to everyone else for their kind words

A small confession. One of the reasons I posted this on here was that I think I needed to offload a little to folk who ‘get it.’ Most of the responses from people I know have been along the lines of ‘at least it was just bikes’ and that’s true, of course, but I suspect I could have said lawnmower and they would have seen it the same way.

I can’t really talk to Mrs LJ in too much depth, she’s really struggling with this due to finding an intruder in her house when she was 17.

You might not think it’s much but you’ve given me a bit of a boost today.

Thank You.

@LimboJimbo – I have a mint Syncros RR wide width road saddle which I would and can donate to you in order to aid a bike build to get you up and running.

That’s a lovely offer, thank you. Luckily my spares box was untouched so I have a bit of a head start. I am waiting for a insurance offer, as I think the above list may have blown their minds. I’m having to supply lots of photo’s and details, unsurprisingly.

Is your garage attached to the house? How did they gain entry? always curious to then try and combat it in future.

Integral garage. I don’t really want to go into too much detail on a public forum, but it involved cutting sections out of the door to access the internal release. There are a couple of ways they could have been slowed down, but I’m not really in a hindsight frame of mind just yet. The replacement will be substantially better and may include explosives.

GULP – so am I :o(

Have you posted this message on the village Facebook Group?

**Waves**

I don’t do Face Ache, but Mrs LJ is all over that. Neighbours on both sides have some pretty nice bikes they have now brought indoors. I wouldn’t have thought it was local, as I say it was very professional and there have been similar targeted attacks across the Mids. I’m idly guessing though.

Really sucks especially as you said “another” unwelcome visit.

To be fair, we were last done over ten years ago, but the feeling of seeing nothing, where there should be bikes, was horribly familiar.

I imagine it would be a rich Turkish doner?

The right wing press will skewer him for this.

I bet he’s been meeting ex-KFC officers in private as well.

Senior people in an organisation that are obviously far too busy and important to use salutation or punctuation in an email.

The same people who spend Teams meetings on mute, clearly doing something else, only to interrupt someone to ask a stupid question the rest of us covered five minutes ago.

I got to experience 3 or 4 days in the south of France in a caravan a couple of years ago, with temperatures hovering around 37 degrees. I had taken my bike but at no point did I feel like riding it. Let us know how you get on Molgrips :)

What tyres for melted bitumen?

I’m not sure folk in this country have an appreciation of just what 40 Degrees feels like. Low 30’s can be pretty uncomfortable, it’s going to be really quite hard for the fit and healthy. For the young and vulnerable, those temps are really quite serious.

We’ve been in deeper holes with shorter ladders.

Sorry if this is a little OT, but a question for anyone who knows about these things…

Does the energy price cap for the Autumn bring retail prices more in step with the wholesale price of energy, i.e. removing the loss margin for the suppliers?

I bought some of these in 26″ for my lad’s bike,

Brand X

Wide, tubeless rims, pretty light and really nicely finished for the price. QR kits available as well. Out of stock in 27.5 at the mo, but I find CRC are pretty good if you set up a stock alert and it’s not super urgent.

OP, Do you wrap up empty boxes to give your kids at Christmas?

**Edit** The above made more sense before the thread title was changed.

The Fast Show still gets quoted without folk realising it, it was massively influential.

I’ll get my coat
Does my bum look big in this?
Scorchio
Which was nice.

When all this is over, nobody will be able to call Thatcher’s resignation ‘dramatic,’ Cameron’s departure humiliating and May’s will be looked back on as dignified and gracious.

Johnson’s smashed it, he really has.

I could type 37 now with confidence that it would be accurate within a half hour!

I’d like to imagine the panicked staff of Tory Ministers frantically typing out resignation letters desperately before he resigns. I would have thought a lot will feel they need to be able to say they were part of the party that got rid of him, come the next election. So cynical it’s grotesque really.

A colleague’s told me this morning, he’s had 16 cars delivered this week he wasn’t expecting for months. He now has to get them prepped, funded and delivered this week as he only has a small town centre site and nobody can move.

It’s a bit of a horror show in the industry at the moment. The issue the dealers have, is that the ordering system will typically show a status that bears no relation to reality, so updating impatient customers accurately, is nigh on impossible.

A car can be ordered and allocated a build week, but component supply issues can knock that back and the system isn’t always updated by the factory. the factories will build what they can depending on what’s available, wiring looms are the big issue at the moment.

Conversely, cars that are supposed to be months away can suddenly turn up at port but then sit there for weeks as transport needs booking and there aren’t enough HGV drivers (Brexit, Yay!).

I know the popular narrative is that all car dealers are liars, but the reality is a bit more nuanced. Remember, they are paid on delivering cars not taking orders.

first experience with anything with curly bars

Don’t forget the tyre’s contact patch will be a lot smaller than a chunky MTB tyre. Add to that, it’s a heavier ebike on gravel wheels and they’ll never feel amazing by comparison.

I went to a new barbers the other day and asked the barber to give me a haircut just like George Clooney.

After he finished, disappointed, I said to him, “George Clooney doesn’t have his hair cut anything like this…”

“He would if he came here”

I’d say that’s closer to N+1.37

We’ll be in this hell hole in August, with a bit of luck.

Benodet, on the south Brittany coast and on the campsite to the bottom right of the picture. First time with the caravan abroad. Should have been in 2020, but, well, you know…..

I was only born in ’77 but as it was in East Hull, growing up in the early eighties was a very seventies experience. Nobody had anything new, Raleigh Choppers, hand-me-down parkas, NHS specs, even the books in school were at least 20 years old. Weirdly, amongst the regular Viva’s and Mk1 Escorts on our terraced street, there was an old Rolls Royce Silver Cloud.

I told the other kids at school my dad had a convertible. It was a 2CV.

If they say TR on the side then they are tubeless ready. I bought some Addix Nobby Nics for my lad, they went up tubeless fine.