I let the dog out :lol:

:oops: Maybe they fell down?

I have had treatment twice for abnormal cells (CIN2) on my cervix and I have HPV.

Once you have it, it can stay dormant and never actually clear up. the body may get rid of it on its own, but it doesn’t always.

I had very unpleasant treatment to remove the changed cervical cells, including a biopsy with no anaesthetic and then a LLETZ treatment which basically burns them off. My first abnormal smear was at 23, which is only 10 years older than the OPs daughter, and I was treated a year later. My second treatment at age 27 – I got infected afterwards and my cervix is scarred, and is now hypersensitive.

I now have to have smear tests every year, I bleed every time and it’s very painful after the two treatments, not to mention that having a very sensitive cervix affects, ahem, other things. I dread having another abnormal one and having to go through it all again, but of course if it happens then that’s what will have to be done in order to stop it turning cancerous.

Sorry for any squeamishness on the part of the men, but that’s what women have to deal with when they have abnormal cells due to HPV infection and I would like that the OP is informed about this before he makes any final decision regarding whether his daughter is vaccinated or not. I sure as hell wish there had been one when I was that age.

I sometimes wonder if men don’t want their daughters to have this vaccine because they can’t handle the idea of them having sex, ever, so they WANT an excuse to say no to it and not have to deal with it. And of course, there is an association of HPV with promiscuity, even though you need only have one partner who has been infected to get it yourself, so some people think that the women who have to go through this probably deserve it because they are sluts anyway, if they’ve ended up with a sexually transmitted infection.

I’m a woman, and don’t want kids. Various reasons, some that probably some might consider selfish (i.e. don’t want to lose my freedom, financial independence, put my career on hold, and don’t really like babies and small children, but meh – horses for courses) and some that are related to health issues that I don’t want to pass on, and also that might make pregnancy complicated/risky.

I’m happy to see that a lot of the guys who really weren’t sure about kids before they appeared, have warmed to fatherhood. I know a fair few guys who either remained ambivalent or actively try and avoid doing much or spending much time with their children (stay at work late, gym, hobbies, out with mates, banging younger, childless work colleagues, volunteer for long business trips) and leave the women with the grunt work. I think a few of the guys may have had their minds made up for them, mind you (as in wife/gf stopped contraception without their knowledge). Good on the guys here for being active involved dads (even if they weren’t sure to start with!!) and being a big part of your kids’ lives.

Never been slated on the trail. Chatted up (badly) yes!

Agree with most of the comments regarding ASSos. Use cyclists, not models, to advertise kit. So we can see what it might look like on, y’know, a real body.

Getting out of London after working here for 2 weeks and going home to see Mr Panda.

Not having to worry where the nearest toilet is. 18 months of chronic ulcerative colitis makes you somewhat nervous about shitting ones pants…

sympathies, I’ve got Crohns, I know what that’s like! :oops:

lovely dog! Hope it all goes well and you enjoy your new pet.

It was income inequality, particularly in the US, which is at the very root of the present crises. Poor people make very bad consumers, capitalism needs consumers ….. lots of consumers with plenty of spare cash.

So as wages have been driven down and income inequality has widen in the last 30 years, it comes as no surprise that also in the last 30 years credit has become more and more easily available, specially to poor people.

This did stave off under consumption which is the consequence of low wages, for a while, but the end result of giving easy credit to poor people was always going to be fairly obvious.

Pretty much.

so like wage inequality is inherent in the capitalist system…who knew.

Also this.

So we have a system that promotes low wages (“good for business”) but offers credit to poor people to boost consumption and requires the government to effectively subsidise businesses to be able to pay said low wages, in order to sell stuff to people who can’t afford the stuff they sell because they’re on wages that don’t cover the cost of living (including raising kids)….so the poor people need to be offered credit in order to be able to consume to the required level to keep the system going.

Madness?

Totally in agreement with ernie_lynch about the living wage, I am a big supporter of it. It would allow more people to be able to afford to live and raise families without having to rely on tax credits, top up benefits etc because a lot of businesses will pay only the legal minimum they can get away with, “flexible” part time working and zero hours contracts are on the increase so it’s easier for employers to hire and fire at will.

If they properly went after the serious tax dodgers as well, that would reduce the need to pick on the poor. Fewer people claiming in-work benefits (thanks to better, living wages, and a Scandinavian-style subsidised childcare system allowing parents to return to work without crippling costs) would allow more money to be invested helping the long term unemployed, and in job creation, so that the unemployed and the yoof have a future to look forward to, and having babies in order to secure a council flat and a benefit income is less of an attractive choice for young women who come out of education thinking they have few other prospects.

Not a criticism of anyone in work and claiming in work benefits by the way – it’s the way the system works, and I would if I was on low wages. I am saying the system isn’t right. People should be better off working, and people being in work should lessen the burden on the state welfare bill.

But the CEOs and the shareholders will bleat and lobby the government if they dare suggest that their multi million pound profits should be reduced, so it’ll never happen.

130…. must try harder!

merino liners and waterproof socks for me

I’m actually not a slow cooker fan. perhaps I didn’t use it right but mine never cooked the veg enough even when left all day.

I got a pressure cooker and I love it – cheaper cuts of meat, stews, cooking dried pulses, chilli, bolognese etc….seems to cook stuff better and nicer flavour.

@ernie I don’t think there has been a sharp increase in those who cannot be bothered to work since the crises, I think the problem has existed for a long time it’s just more clearly in focus now as we cannot afford the welfare payments.

Very very many people benefitted from the (too) cheap credit that was available. For every bad loan made by a bank there was a willing borrower, be that individual company or government. You cannot say it was purely corporate or banker greed, there were jusy as many if not more greedy indiviudals or over extended themselves. We are now returning to a more normal situation which is painful. As a nation we were living on credit and far too reliant on financial services.

Pretty much how Robert Peston described it recently in that series he did about shopping. I think the greed culture extended to all levels of society. But the question we should be asking is, who created that culture? Those who stood to make short term gains from it, and were not looking to the long term or gave a toss about benefits to society.

I was with a guy who had spent £20k in legal fees trying to get regular and consistent access to his daughter through the courts. Court appeared to be toothless.

Kid’s mother withheld access on a whim, out of spite, or to get money, she would ask for £50, £100 etc and if he didn’t pay she would withhold access. He paid child support as well.

On the other hand, if it suited her, she’d drop the kid on us at a moment’s notice (if she wanted to go out on the sauce usually)

She tried every trick in the book – accused him of sexual abuse which meant he had no contact while they investigated and then three months supervised access whilst they “re-established contact”. She accused him of physical abuse – same again.

Eventually when kiddo was 13 (this was after we split up), she’d had enough and went to live with her dad, but her mum and mum’s family put her under so much pressure she went back. Mum now does not allow her any contact with her dad, they have moved to a different area. All he gets is updates from the school. Kid has been completely alienated against her father – mother has told her he was violent in the marriage and abused her sexually and physically. In fact, my ex suffered violence from her, emotional abuse, she was cautioned for harassing us, and she was dealing drugs – because she was a mother, she escaped with a caution for possession for it.

I got out of the relationship because the existence was so miserable thanks to the mother of my ex’s child. I wondered how on earth one woman could manage to cause that much damage and misery, actually. My ex was never really happy, because he was always worried about would he be able to see his kid that weekend or not, would he have to shell out money he didn’t have, what accusation would she come out with next. So we were never able to relax and be happy together, we didn’t have any money, and I had become a target of her venom, which caused me to start having panic attacks and severe anxiety and depression.

In my experience, the only ‘reason’ I’ve ever seen is: ‘because I feel like being an arsey cow, and as far as the law is concerned a father has pretty much no rights at all! So I’m going to **** you about. Just because I can’

pretty much.

Again, point missed.

I didn’t say wait until you can afford them. I said its desirable to have children when you are not wholly dependent on welfare/benefits. I don’t think that it’s a responsible choice to have kids if you cannot support yourself, basically.

If you are working/self supporting, then it’s your own decision what you feel is affordable, as many here have discussed the concept of wealth is relative depending on your circumstances.

Junkyard, you say “atypical”. I guess you’re right, in my previous line of work though it had begun to seem very typical to come across addicts/drug abusers, young adults with fairly extensive criminal records and young adults who had never had a job and hadnt a clue how to get one. It probably feels more typical to me because of that. Because I have worked with some young people who were possibly never going to be productive members of society, I know it’s a reality, but it’s perhaps not as widespread as it feels when you’ve done inner city yoof work/probation work and had the hapless task of trying to find some of these kids gainful employment!

Ahh ernie. I can see we’re just going to have to agree to disagree.

I’m not whinging. Actually, quite the opposite. As I said I am very happy with a society that allows people to make their own reproductive choices. I’m quite happy for others to do the same. I don’t wish for an ageing population, I don’t hate kids, or parents. I’ve been a nanny and a youth worker, and enjoyed both.

Yes, my parents had me, but if they hadn’t then I wouldn’t be here to lament the fact that I’m not here, so that’s kind of a moot point.

I admire people who are good parents; I’m sure there are plenty of good ones here on STW. I think it’s hard work, bringing up kids. But it’s more than just sperm meets egg, so no, I do not feel grateful by default to anyone that has given birth to a child – sorry. And it’s kind of a lottery what kind of person your child turns out to be. A lot of parents think they know exactly what their child will turn out like, but you don’t know. My parents are academics. They wanted a future PhD. I turned out not that way inclined, and it took them some time to adjust to me not being what they had assumed (because of the genetics and environment I grew up in) I would be. That’s a fairly innocuous example, but I’m pretty sure that most parents whose kids end up in jail, addicted to something, or pregnant at 13 don’t think that their kids will turn out like that either. And there are people who had perfectly good upbringings who go off the rails too, so even being an awesome parent is no guarantee that your child will be a future productive member of the economy, and won’t actually end up being a drain on resources.

In the first comment I posted on this thread I said that while my partner and I don’t have a lot of spare cash we don’t want for anything essential and are quite grateful we don’t have hard choices to make about whether to pay the bills or buy food, for example. So nope, I don’t buy that I’m a whinger.

Yes BEB, I did suggest that it would be more sensible/responsible to start a family when you are not wholly reliant on welfare benefits to support your family, so in a roundabout way….I would prefer to see less kids growing up in poverty and surrounded by a benefits culture, because I have seen the results of that in my professional life, and it’s not particularly good for “raising the next generation of taxpayers”. Not saying benefit claimants are automatically bad parents, but in terms of a socially responsible action, nope, I don’t think having kids when you can’t afford them unless the state pays for you entirely is socially responsible.

I can’t see there being a state pension by the time I reach retirement age, or at least only a very limited one.

I’m not disputing that raising children is important. I love how some parents get all uppity when you don’t kiss their butts for reproducing. I am, simply, stating that whether or not to be a parent is a lifestyle choice. You either want that lifestyle or you don’t. And I doubt that for most people, they take the decision whether to have kids or not based around their duty to raise future taxpayers to pay for everyone else’s elderly care. The decision is made, usually, because its something that a person, or couple, want for themselves – a personal choice based on whether having children and parenting is a lifestyle you want, can afford, and will derive some benefit from. The choice not to have kids is equally a lifestyle choice. We are lucky, in fact, in the first world, because we have access to reproductive choices that make it possible for it to be a lifestyle choice. It’s not a negative thing. I’m pretty darned happy I was born here and not somewhere that I am not allowed to control my own fertility or family size.

Anyway….digression from the original point of the thread.

In order to pay for your care in old age, you will need younger people in work and paying tax. Those people come with the costs of getting them to that point.

Exactly, so we’re even then.

You’re not partners then. You’re just friends with benefits.

I’m glad you know me and my relationship so well.

I can’t see any benefit that can be derived simply from people being married.

Nope, me neither. Back in the day it was a business transaction – this idea simply harks back to that, women were chattels to be bartered and sold via a dowry, family alliances made for the purposes of making more money etc.

Has anyone ever told you about how the human race survives?

I’ve not got kids, but even I can tell how only someone without kids could make a comment like that

I know plenty of parents in my family and friendship circle who would agree that having kids is a choice, nobody forced them to do it. How about if I put it better “Making the choice to contribute to the survival of the human race is a lifestyle choice”.

Parents frequently comment on my “lifestyle choice” not to have kids; why is theirs any different?

Other people’s lifestyle choices will be paying for your pension.

My lifestyle choice not to have kids pays for their kids via tax breaks, child benefit, childcare subsidies, the NHS etc….so I guess we’re even.

Tax breaks for married couples is really a misnomer, think of it more as harmonising their tax status. If you are going to treat a married couple as a unit for the purposes of benefit entitlement etc. you should consider them as a unit for taxation.

Even if you are not married and cohabiting, you are treated as a unit for the purposes of benefit entitlement, but you are not considered good enough by the Tories to be entitled to any theoretical tax breaks under the policy they want to bring in…methink they should make up their minds.

Trouble is many people who are married or in long term relationships don’t see pooling of finances as desirable but that’s a whole other thread.

I don’t see this as a problem, again whether to pool finances or not is the personal choice of the individuals/partners involved. A personal decision, that should not be interfered with by the state.

Perhaps mention the noise from the gaming initially (as its less of an emotive subject than criticising their parenting) and judge from their reaction to that whether or not you subsequently mention the baby noise.

This.

as russianbob said, they may not be aware that the noise travels.

If after a quiet word, nothing happens, maybe time to have a word with the landlord.

Ugh ugh ugh married couples tax allowance. Ugh.

I do not want the state interfering in my affairs by implicitly telling me how I should conduct my personal relationships. By financially incentivising marriage, the state is effectively privileging one type of relationship (ie a marriage) over any other type (cohabiting, or choosing to remain single). That is a private and personal choice, and there should be no judgement, implied or otherwise, over that. But we do have a Tory government, and the Family Values hypocritical bull is alive and well.

My relationship is not about “delegation of responsibilities” thankyou very much. It’s about, you know, love, respect, commitment, and all that jazz. It’s not a business transaction. I do not want to see marriage incentivised and more people getting married “for the tax breaks” when the divorce rate is already 50% or thereabouts.

Any married couples tax allowance or other such bullshizz wouldn’t offset the stupid expensive wedding shebang anyway, which a lot of couples are still stuck paying off after the ink is dry on the divorce papers. Yup, I’m a cynic. Sue me.

As a couple with no kids, me and Mr Panda pay more tax than people with kids do. I don’t begrudge it, but I’d rather see taxes spent on better and cheaper childcare, for example, that enables parents to go back to work than make it a more lucrative choice to stay on welfare. I might well get flamed for this, but I think having kids is a lifestyle choice, and if you need to rely on welfare to support them, you shouldn’t have them. But I’d like to see a better support system that allows people to have kids and be able to work flexibly to support them, like aforementioned childcare, transferable parental allowances, allowances for grandparents or relatives who care for their relatives’ kids etc.

I was one of the youngest people on my course (I was 29 when I took it).

The crying could be because of all of the upheaval – since July he’s had 2 weeks in Ireland, 2 weeks in Devon, 2 weeks in the School Boarding House and now 3 weeks in our new house. He got used to having his grandparents and Mammy around all the time and now had 1/2 a day at school and 1/2 a day with his nanny.

I think there is your answer.

Sounds like ballocks to me. I’m in the private sector, never heard of it.

1) This will make people come in when they’re sick and share their germs. I don’t want other people’s germs, I want them to stay home.

2) How productive are people when they’re sick? I’ve “soldiered on” a few times, only to be sent home because it was pointless me being there. I only did it because the employer had a “blame the sick for being sick” culture.

3) People will stay off for a week or more in order to get a doctors cert to get around it, therefore more lost productivity.

They could, at a push, introduce this on a voluntary basis – if they don’t pay company sick pay and it’s only SSP, then if people WANT to trade holiday/work extra in order to still be paid, then that could be an option open to them, but I think that to force it is probably not legal.

I worked for a charity that didn’t pay sick pay, only SSP, and I was on flexi, so they did allow me to work extra to make up small periods of sickness if I wanted to, but I had a flexi hours contract, so it was much easier for that to happen.

One of the reasons I never did the move-to-London thing after uni was that even though salaries are higher, they do not compensate for the higher living costs in the capital.

However, I think there probably are better career opportunities in London/SE, if you’re willing to go down there as a new grad and put up with the hardship or have parents who can help while you’re on a grad scheme salary and paying at least half your wage in rent. Grad salaries in London can, in certain specialisms (IT, engineering, finance) start at £25-28k. But in London, that doesn’t actually go very far, especially when you’re also paying off student loans and possibly a student overdraft as well, unless you work somewhere like where I do, that offers grads interest free grad loans and the option to buy a yearly travel pass interest free. If you happen to be from London or the SE, and are willing/able to live at home for the first couple of years, then obviously, you’re much better off. I would rather have eaten my brains with a spoon than lived back with either of my parents – again, a choice I made meaning I was less well off than my friends who did that and saved money to buy their own place whilst living rent free and earning a London salary.

There’s also a lot of competition for those grad schemes – it’s fierce. Many of them will only take students with degrees of 2:1 or higher, and only from particular disciplines. I had a humanities/languages degree, and nobody wanted to hire me, because I wasn’t considered to be skilled/experienced for the modern workplace. Hence, like many graduates, I ended up doing fairly low skilled work for the first 2-3 years after graduating, and needed to gain vocational/professional qualifications in order to progress in the workplace.

Money wasn’t so much a motivation for me as getting away from the drudgery of a lot of that type of work. Being tied to a phone and at the whim of a stroppy customer or jumped up middle manager whose computer wasn’t working didn’t do much for my self esteem. Going to work and it feeling like groundhog day, same problems over and over again. In low paid/low skill jobs, you tend to have little autonomy, and there’s not much flexiblity. As I’ve gone towards the managerial roles, I find that I’m treated like an adult, trusted to manage my own time and workload, and that I’m allowed to give short shrift to anyone who behaves rudely or inappropriately towards me. And incidentally, I do not allow anyone in my team to be rude to helpdesk staff, IT support staff or admins – I remember all too well what it was like being dumped on myself.

It took me 6 years after graduation to earn £25k.

Why? Combination of factors. I went travelling after uni (my choice) for a year. When it came to getting a job, I found that my degree really didn’t count for anything, and that I was still expected to start at the bottom. After a while temping, my first “proper job” out of uni earned me just over £13k, and was customer service in a callcentre.

I trained to go on the technical helpdesk, since that seemed to pay a bit more, and made it to the dizzy heights of £17k once I got a full time job in IT support, which rose to £20k with an on-call allowance. I was, however, bored out of my mind, and I retrained as a youth worker (again, my choice). I earned about the same doing yoof work as I had in IT support, but there was no job security. I landed a contract managing a youth employment project, and as a manager, my salary went up a bit, but only by a couple of grand. After that contract ended, I went to be a project manager back in the IT world, due to lack of jobs because the Tories cut all the yoof services apart from forced-labour-in-pound-shop programmes. Only then did I break the £25k barrier, 2 years ago.

Some of it was my choice, admittedly, like travel and retraining, which meant I spent time out of the workforce, so my salary is probably 2 years behind those who graduated when I did and have worked ever since.

You seem to have to move jobs quite often in order to get higher pay – I have worked in a few places where I was promoted, i.e. given extra responsibility and higher expectations, but didn’t get a salary hike, or if I did, it was minimal, and I was paid less than what someone from outside the company would have got, i.e. less than what they advertised the job externally for. My last two job moves have been for that reason, because I don’t see why I should take on more responsibility and receive little or no reward. Salaries are not rising in line with inflation, I’m not going to say that Mr Panda and I are poor; we are not, with a combined income of around £54k, but we’re in a rent trap and have little spare to save. Still, we aren’t struggling to pay our bills though, so we are grateful for the fact that we don’t have to make any really hard choices, like between food and heating our home. We grumble at times when we can’t afford things we want, but it’s useful to remind ourselves we are much better off than many people who don’t have the skills and experience that we do, in order to earn the kind of wages that allow us to live in relative comfort, and not worry about the next electricity bill or whatever.

We are also in the fairly fortunate position of not wanting children, so we don’t have to worry about how we would finance a family.

Just had a look and see IBM say they pay £30k which is pretty impressive. Logica seem to pay up to £26k, would have thought they were average sort of payers. What are your skills?

I’m a project manager now. No complaints about my earnings these days, took me time to get where I am. A degree definitely wasn’t a help in getting there.

Had I been oriented towards programming, coding etc, then I’d be earning much more, but that’s not at all my skill set. My younger brother will be sorted, he can go programme for IBM and earn £30k – sure my dad will be more than happy to suggest it and ensure he moves out :-D

I had similar experiences with Leeds Met, unfortunately there is a lot of incompetence in some of these universities.

Glad she will hopefully still get her 1st though despite the idiocy – well done Mrs Cat!

Plan 2 (post 2012) student loan repayments are lower. But the interest is 6.3%.

If I had a debt of £27k – lets assume 3 years on a £9k course, and then earned £25k upon finishing uni, I would pay £30 a month on Plan 2. On Plan 1 (pre 2012) the repayments are £65 a month.

So, on Plan 2 I would pay £360 off a year. 6.3% interest on £27k is £1710. So while I would have more disposable income than my pre-2012 counterparts, my student loan debt would, in fact, be getting bigger, not smaller. So effectively, I wouldn’t be paying my loan debt off at all, and I would be stuck with it much longer if I couldn’t pay down any of the actual loan itself.

So, if I never earned more than £25k 30 years, the Government would only recoup £10,800 from me.

I fail to see the financial sense in the Government’s plan, surely if they want to charge for education, they should charge in such a way that it means the fees will actually get paid back?? I mean, given that they’re saying that we haven’t got any money and we can’t afford to pay for students to go to university and all that stuff, because Labour the bankers spent it all on welfare gambled it all away and had to be bailed out….

littlemisspanda – you question current average grad starting salaries, well finance and IT must bring the average up a bit. You’ve been working for a while? Average would have been less back then and it seems where you work pays less than average anyway. Your degree seems to have been less demanding than many so possibly all fair

I’ve been working 9 years now. One of those years I spent doing a postgrad because I couldn’t get anywhere with my first degree, because it was largely irrelevant to employers. And I do, incidentally, work in IT these days. I have worked for 3 IT companies and not one of them paid £25k to a new graduate outside of London.

You do get a lot of graduate jobs quoting “£40k OTE” which are usually for sales roles where the base salary is low, but there are commissions/bonuses to be had if you happen to be good at sales/recruitment etc. I suspect these inflate the market, as these are advertised quite a lot on job boards in the Graduate/Entry Level sections.

Are you not familiar with the basic concept of capitalism. You are sold a dream, marketed to you you as ‘aspiration’ which you must joyously display at all times, parroting it like a mantra. In return for this you will be delivered, post graduation into a consumer utopia of nice houses, expensive cars and frequent foreign holidays, as if they were your birthright.

They don’t shout the statistics proving that that this has absolutely no basis in reality whatsoever. But you can’t mention that. Because then the whole elaborate media driven sham falls apart. SSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I think I love binners.

As we weren’t paying fees, and thus a financial burden on the taxpayer to a certain degree, dossing about wasn’t really tolerated. We were timetabled (namby-pamby, poncey arty degree) for 30+ hours a week in the studio. And if you didn’t show up for those hours, you were booted off the course. It was as simple as that. You got one warning, then you were out!

I’m just wondering if that would still be the case if you’re now a revenue stream generating £27,000 over 3 years, while spending your time not requiring any actual teaching or resources, as you’re sat in the pub?

My degree was pretty darn slack. I did English Literature and we were timetabled for 15 hours a week. The rest of the time we were supposed to be doing self study. Most of the time we were taught by postgrads, particularly in first and second year. We got one tutorial a term, and the academics didn’t particularly appear to care about the students, or teaching, because research was what they wanted to do (and what has the prestige, in the academic world).

I am currently engaged in a battle with the university where I did my postgrad, to recover the MA top up fees, because I had a tutor who couldn’t be arsed to respond to emails/phone messages, arrange tutorials, I work full time and she refused to do tutorials out of hours (despite the university in question advertising itself as being great at catering for the needs of students needing flexible learning) and then when I made a complaint it took 6 months to get someone in the department to actually address it. If universities are going to charge these bonkers fees, then shouldn’t they be actually providing some kind of a service to the students who pay them?

I work in the private sector and if I ignored emails and messages from a customer, I’d be hauled over the coals.

can you set up mail forwarding? I did it with google mail….

My mum’s god daughter is at uni in Holland, with fees around £2-3k.

Younger sister (half), who has dual Danish/British nationality, went to uni in Copenhagen for free.

I don’t know where they get their £25k average graduate salary from. I wasn’t earning that until I’d been out of uni for about 8 years. My partner still doesn’t earn that. Graduate schemes, outside of London, tend to pay around £18-20k. Looked at a few with my sister, I don’t think we saw any outside London for any more than that, and other “entry level” jobs were paying much less. After graduating, I didn’t even earn the £15k a year required for the repayments to kick in. My first “proper job” that wasn’t temping or call centre work paid £17.5k and that was 4 years after leaving university. By which time, they’d put the interest up on student loans from back then to 3.5% so I’d been accruing interest but not paying the loan off. Around half the repayments I make every year go on interest.

I’m sure that salaries have gone up a little since then, but judging by the job boards, not that much, certainly not when you account for inflation. Because of having such high unemployment, a lot of today’s graduates will end up on the dole, because employers simply don’t seem to want them with no work experience. There seems to be a vast disparity between what universities provide and employers want. The courses with a year in industry seem to be trying to address that, and those graduates are more likely to get a job after graduation than those who don’t do a year in industry, but still, the outlook is pretty bleak for today’s graduates. Not sure I’d have gone to uni in today’s climate.

Back when I was at uni, it was treated as something of a middle class doss – most of us didn’t work that hard, and we didn’t even think about what we wanted to do afterwards, we spent most of the time in the pub. I don’t think the students of today can afford to do that, given how competitive it is out there now – to stand a chance in the job market they really have to stand out from the crowd and demonstrate that they not only have the paper, but the work ethic, attitude and ability to cope in the workplace, and sitting in the pub for 3 years isn’t going to cut it.

Sounds like they’re lovely kids If they’re effing an jeffing at the age of 7

Wonder what lovely people they heard that language from too :-/

Awesome work, Stephen Fry. Epic rant, and every word true as well!

I also have the said older relatives who read the Mail. However, they also vote BNP, so definitely not sensible, more on the incredibly bigoted side.

I am quite intolerant to dairy products, so I haven’t evolved very well, clearly!

I disagree mrmo – the pet owner should be responsible for their pets. Sorry to paraphrase but: pet owners want the benefits of having a pet but without the responsibilities that go with it.

+1

Cats are more difficult to control than dogs though it has to be said. I can keep my dog on a lead around roads. I have little sympathy with some of the owners I see who never put their dog on a lead, and insist that their dog is so well behaved they don’t need to be on one – all it takes is for a dog to see a cat, squirrel or something and they’re off.

I think it’s fairly rare for a car driver to intentionally kill a pet really, and most would feel pretty bad if they didn’t see an animal or an animal ran out in front of them and they couldn’t stop in time.

30mph means jack all even if cars are sticking to a limit, you hit a cat at 30mph you will probably kill it.

Are there really people who would accept a Wedding invitation without any intention of bringing a gift?

Yes, if you don’t have a lot of money and it’s going to cost you a lot of money to attend said wedding, I don’t think that’s unreasonable. I’d rather have my friends come and be part of my day and if they can’t afford a gift, so be it.

However, when we went to a wedding locally that didn’t cost us for the travel and overnight accommodation, we contributed to the honeymoon pot. But still the couple in question would never have dreamed of making attendance conditional upon a gift.

I didn’t used to like camping until OH and I got our big tent. It’s a 4 man tent, with a separate living/sleeping area, and 2 sleeping “pods”. It can get cold at night though, so definitely having the right sleeping bags….we usually take a sleeping bag each and a couple of blankets which can be thrown off in the morning when the sun comes in.

I wonder if it would be acceptable to ask for bike shop vouchers as a wedding present…..