To get back to the OP the way forward is to try and understand each other better and be able to discuss this without it becoming polarised. The polarization into leave/remain, right/left right/wrong has meant that everything has become an argument and not a discussion. Our political leaders, with very few exceptions, constantly argue, use falsehoods and half truths. To accede an opposing view has merit and that they could work together never happens in public. That role model does not work in real life where we all can hold contrary opinions and can be right and wrong at the same time! We need to relearn how to talk to each other and work out a way of coming together.

The only real advice is to take a deep breath and find out you can talk to each other without it ending up in an argument. Then you can tell the rest of us the secret 😉

Missed Joe G’s message (too long typing) and yes that is something that needs to be ruled out as CF/ME is a common long term symptom set of Lymes. If you know that you are in an at risk area it will be well worth pushing to get a test and the tests are getting better all the time.

My wife is a sufferer and I have done a lot of research on the science of CFS/ME. From what I can gather, after reading a lot of research papers (peer reviewed, etc, not just single source web sites) the conclusion is that there can be many reasons behind the symptoms that are grouped under CF/ME. This why a lot of people give what seems to be conflicting advice and many “cures” are often a result of trial and error (possibly a bit of luck if you hit on the right reason and control).

One of the things that underly the whole thing and can cause relapses/failing to see results is stress/anxiety/depression (as others have said). We have had to spend a lot of time changing all of our behaviours to just realise that you can’t do it all. One of the best tools was to use the spoons analogy: on any one day you only have, for the sake of argument, 5 spoons of energy. You can choose to use them at any point in the day, but when they are gone you cannot get them back until the next day. That way you know that you have to rest and give yourself time to do things. It also gives you permission to go easier on yourself and reduce the amount of stress that you are putting yourself under. You also have to learn what rest actually means. To get some recovery it is either sleep or low/no sensory input; having a sit down and watching TV is not rest as you are still processing a lot of information and therefore using energy.

The flip side of the slowing down is that you can get used to it when in reality you have actually recovered and could get back your energy levels. In that case some people have to almost kickstart themselves (look up the “Lightning programme” or similar).

Lots of other information/links if you want, but drop me a line if you want to know more.

Just from our experience there can be a residual risk of soot and coal tar seeping back out of the bricks, even if it was swept in the first place. What happened to us was that the coal tar bubbled back out of the bricks and it is then an accident waiting to happen. If the tar gets hot enough it can ignite and can burn without much oxygen. In the end we had a small fire outside of the liner (which was still fine when we got it out). Reinstalled the fire and liner after the fire and the chimney was swept again and there was very little in there after the fire swept it clean.

We used to get the smoke and smelly tar before, but since the fire there have been no issues at all.

Easel, you can reset your stones with something like a relatively cheap diamond flat and then start using it again.  I make small hand carving tools and knives as a part time job/hobby and a have to reset some of the wetstones occasionally using this method.

2 adults and two double beds including mattresses from Ikea in a Vauxhall nova. They had shut (not able to pop it back in to collect the next day) before we realised that even with one of the mattresses on the roof we ere going to be making a very odd spectacle along the M6.  In the end we admitted defeat and called in reinforcements, but not without a fun few miles flapping around the backstreets of West Bromwich.

Carol King: will you still love me tomorrow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLA7sanwnN8

Ok, without pictures I can only relate a similar incident that I encountered on a 1900s property.  It ended up being the old lead flashing having worn through to be porous, but not have obvious holes in.  The water then migrated to the chimney breast and then down to the lowest point.  There was also an issue with porous bricks, but Thompsons Waterseal sorted that along with the new pointing and flashing.

The water that you see will almost certainly be coming down and not coming up by capillary action as it is happening too quickly.

As others have said a few pictures will help.

If you can still do this then you attempt to stop the large cracks opening up by using a ratchet strap, or two, and really tighten it up.  Keep tightening it as the wood shrinks and you may have something still in one piece.

Good luck.  I have some off the top of this sculpture that I am still trying to finish in a local village and they are doing ok, but they are 5 feet across and the same width as yours.

Damson and apple crumble (leftovers from last night)

Strong cuppa tea

Birds in the garden, a plane overhead and nobody else up yet so relative silence.

If you are in Crawley then get over to West Wood/Farley Mount and explore the woods.  There is only a bit on road our of Crawley and then you have to bridle path in to the bottom of West Wood. There are quite a lot of tracks in and around there that I still don’t really know and just pop on and off the fire roads and see what I can find. It is kind of like being a kid again and just exploring somewhere close to home.

Beautiful creatures, but people do get scared by them, as much by the noise as anything else.

I know a guy who lived in the New Forest and can in to find the spare room has a hornets nest in it as they had left the window open for a week and they moved in.  He just shut the door for the rest of the summer and let them get on with it.  They all left the nest in the autumn and he got an amazing paper nest and his room back.

I can see Mark’s point, but the balance of the magazine has shifted almost entirely to lifestyle/travel and the bike and all the geeky stuff that a lot of us are in to has all but disappeared in the magazine.

This, I guess, is the conundrum of actually having the print edition still going, but as there is a subscriber edition that gives Mark the option of putting something geeky/techy/gear review in the extra bit.  This could even take the form of a review of what reviews that have taken place on the website and maybe some pictures to go with this.  That would mean that it signposts us to what you have done and should not take the form of a smaller review which is not as complete as you would like.  It also then serves as a reference for those who subscribe but do not use the website much to go and seek out the reviews that we want to read.

This would also give a bit of balance back to the print edition.  If you look at the magazine  the website the one is not a refelection of the other.  Mark may be able to tell us if the magazine has to have these aspirational lifestyle/ travel angle to sell in the shops, or are there more technical reasons, such as the 500 word restriction for a review, for the loss of the technical content.

The bottom line is that I love the quality of the journalism in the magazine as well as the stunning photography, but the bike nerd in me is starting to feel a bit neglected (which may not actually be a bad thing).

Sloes lovely and sweet need no sugar, just a eat a nice gob full. Mmmmm!

Only if you like your mouth actually turning to fur and shrivelling up in a nanosecond.  However if you stick them in your pocket for a few hours and allow them to bruise then you “may” find them almost palatable and sweeter (for a given value of sweet mind you).  I always wait until after the first frost before picking any and then pickling them in gin just to be safe 🙂

escrs – I live on the South Downs as well and we all know that there is not tyre in existence that will cope with wet chalky tracks as well as the dry dusty ones.  I have just come to the conclusion that I have to use the 80:20 rule; the tyre is good for 80% on the time and the rest will be a sketchy as fury no matter what I do.  Living with that means I just use 1 tyre all year (tubeless high roller if you must know) and pick the tracks that are likely to be the least worst, especially as there are so many routes on the downs.

If not then you may be about to do a good impression of Sisyphus, pushing the rock up hill forever, constantly changing tyres/tubes/wheels.  You pays your money and takes your choice, but you could investigate changing the way you think and have a much simpler life?

With regard to the copper slip; you have tried everything else and have nothing to lose.  It has worked for me on a couple of bikes and not on others trial and error is all that is left after all of the other obvious suggestions.

We have just done a tent audit and I am still not sure how many we have got.  The whole family has their own tent and some of us have more than one ( not including bivi  bags in this).  Our most expensive was the brand new VE25 that we got as a combined wedding present (£600 16 years ago if I remember rightly).  I have brought a second hand one from mountain hardware (the guy used it once!) New it was £700 and we used it in hurricane force winds.

On the other hand we have used a pop up tent as it was just handy when you need to chuck one in the car and the weather forecast is not bad.  In fairness on a camp apart from the top end tents the pop ups faired really well, if you did not mind the tent folding on you and then popping back up.  Other rigid poled tents just gave up.

Vango have a really good rep with lots of our campers (anyting from a two week standing camp to wild camping in the highlands with kids from 8-18) and we get a 20% discount from them as well if you decide to go with them (I think, will check if you are  interested).

Also just outside Winchester (Twyford).  Straight out on to the downs and off in to the woods around here. I ride at least once a week in the vending and at the weekends so happy to show you round.  Loads of stuff around and you can go as long or short as you want.

Drop a line here and I am sure we can all hatch up a plan.

The Young Ones.  Vivian’s head to the rest of his body walking down the railway :

You took your time, you b*****d

It is properly fast out there and where there is gravel it is properly drifty (word?).  The only downside is the amount of vegetation, but most of that is not a problem unless you go off piste and then some tracks are impassable.

As much as I do not like the old pop up tents there is actually another advantage that we found in hurricane force winds.  They do not break, just fold flat and pop up again!  The fact that they do not have an inner can mean condensation issues and not having a porch can be a pain as well, but overall a great solution for camping in a fixed location.

In the said very windy camp the top end tents all stood up well (Muntain Hardware, North Face VE25, Hilleberg) but a lot of the tents in between got trashed with broken poles and ripped flys.  The tents with fibreglass poles broke very easily, but we even had a few alloy poles break.  Actually a few of the old school ridge tents (Force 10s and a Saunders) were good as well and they are readily available second hand.

Nothing to add to this really, but I tried to look up the derivation of the word Wazzock today only to find that the internet has decided to put the orange one’s picture as one of the definitions.  Made me laugh anyway, but then had to explain to the kids why I was laughing so much.

I used some bamboo (both tongue and groove and click lock) and have been really happy.  It is incredibly hard wearing and is in the kitchen.  You have to try pretty hard to dent it and the finish on it is really robust.  I know others on here have more knowledge on this than me, but you will need a vapour resistant membrane and then some sort of cushioning beneath it.  The flooring still comes in at about £24 sq/m (inc VAT) which I still think is quite reasonable and it looks amazing as well.

I have not heard much comment about what he was doing through the winter that may affect his performance now.  He must have been doing a lot of work to replicate the stresses and dehydration that could potentially have led to the adverse finding.  If they are doing it is a systematic way then he would have to have replicate the stress that could lead to the high values found in his sample from the legal dose of Salbutamol.  I think I read that this was seen in some of the training he was posting and it may have impacted his performance coming in to this season.  As it was not a normal training regime and something different it may not have been as good preparation as he wanted.  Add to that crash before the prologue and he has admitted he has been having a lot of treatment for it then his performance is where we may have expected it to be.

Having said all of that then I still think that Yates looks far better than many of the others and the team looks stronger as well so it may all have been academic.  It will be a tortoise and hare moment with Demoulin trying to gain all the losses back on the TT and it is still a fascinating race.

Try Beautiful Anonymous.  It is an anonymous call in show where you get a fixed to tell your story to the host, Chris Gethard, and can go anywhere.  Some dark stories as well as some really interesting people, but all chosen at random.

Richard Herring’s podcast is usually good.

Dumb White Guy – with Brendon Burns.Brendon is a comedian who, in the podcast, looks at different issues (initially it was discussing race with comedians of different ethnicity, but got a lot broader than that).  There are some really interesting insights into how we look at race and lately sexuality though the eyes of a dumb white guy who keeps checking his own thoughts with people who have a different viewpoint.  Really sweary, but as funny as ****.

Just a thought that I have had to try and put in place recently was based on what tjagain said: try and do the use/we and not you/me.  Anything that looks to you like a suggestion can be flipped and looks like an order.  Very much along the lines of: “Why are you so stupid you can just do this….”.  What I now  do is be interested in the situation and ask to have a conversation where you listen and they make suggestions.  You also have to be able to change and challenge your own behaviours for something to change.  Obviously if you keep doing something the same way it will not change.

The best example I have got is that I mentor somebody who has a significantly different way of looking at things than me.  Whenever I say something I always go back and check what I have said from their point of view and see if I could have done it differently/better.  They also have that challenge for me and I have found that it has massively improved our relationship, but it also means I look at all communication like this.  Self knowledge does not come from within you need to get and respect people’s view of you.  Sounds like you are having a pretty rough time but still some good stuff there.

Have you tried totting up how much time you have on your own to do stuff (anything) against how much time she has?  I actually get it in the neck for not taking as much time to myself as my wife does, but that is my problem and it does not get on my nerves.  We do actually clock the amount of time that we have and talk if it gets out of balance.  I found a book by Michael Rosen, called Goodies and Daddies, made some really interesting points.  One was that work is not just what we get paid for, but all the other stuff that makes a household tick.  Once we had clocked that then we could see if either of us was out of order, especially when the kids were young.  This all went to pot when my wife had chronic fatigue and we are five years in but the balance is just about being restored.  It helps as the kids are older, but we do have to check in with each other that it is all ok.

It looks like you are pretty sorted as far as a balance in childcare, but if you are able to what you like when you like and she is more restricted then a bit of friction may come from there as well.  Only telling you what you already know, but it may take an honest conversation about how both of you react to the situation to find out what is really at the bottom of it.

I will add a couple of things to the no pile:

over 150mm of fain in the last 5 week’s and more to come

It hasn’t been warm either

I live at the start of the SDW and am finding it difficult to find a route I want to bike on (even had to go running instead)

Apart from that the only plus is that Friday looks dry and warmer than recently so you could be breaking trails for the rest of us.

The biggest issue I have with this is not actually the case itself.  Both sides did something wrong and I am not sure we know all the facts, but one thing that the parents failed to consider was a much wider issue with volunteer run activities.  This case will no doubt turn people off from either joining or volunteering for scouts, or groups like that.  It will also  make groups more risk averse and all sorts of things, including kids with any kind of requirement for extra help or supervision, will stop being offered because they do not have the volunteers to cover the perceived requirement.  In short it was a selfish move, to cap a lot of poor behaviours on both sides that led to the settlement.

The fact that they took the settlement and still kept some money in trust, meant that there is a financial element in their motivation.  If they had then paid for relevant training, or resources, to be developed to help stopping this happening again then that would be a fair outcome.  As it is it looks like they have profited from the move then it does not look good on them.

No good has come from this, but I do hope the kid gets to find somewhere he can have fun away from his parents and be safe, but the chances of that just went down.

So, with 10% chance they could be wrong, but if it did happen then there would have been severe disruption.  If, like the business I work in, you need a more accurate forecast for your exact location then you invariably have to pay for it.  Even then we get just as many heavy cloud warnings as entirely accurate forecasts.

Your decision to cancel the work was based on the best available advice and you took a precautionary approach.  All good so far.  I think that was probably the best result as the consequences of you ignoring that may have been the loss of one of three appliances in the country that can do the job for you.  From what I can see it was still the right decision and you get the day off in the dry to go and ride.

Win, win there 🙂

The main difference between things like the Roughnect maul and the others mentioned above is the profile of the blade. The cheap mauls have a straight profile whilst the Splitting axes have a curved profile. The curved profile allowed greater initial penetration and then ramp up the splitting pressure as the axe penetrates further.

From teaching both kids and adults to chop logs the Fiskars are an excellent splitting axe. It is by no means my favourite, but it takes a lot of abuse, is very robust and is every efficient. I know a lot of people do not like the plastic handles, but when they get left out for a couple of weeks you soon learn to like them not splitting, swelling or giving you splinters.

Now for the pewrsonal preference then it will always be a Granfors Bruks splitting maul, but the price is eye watering now. So I would get the Fiskars x25 if the logs are going to be big or the Bahco splitting axe with an ash handle if you prefer the wooden handle.

No problem, but the offer is there. We regularly make them in the field with hand tools if they fall off and get lost, but never had one break.

How many do you need? I reckon I have some nice ash that I can knock you up a few for postage and a pint as long as you don’t need them by the weekend. We use them on 180lb military tents and they have withstood 90mph winds better than most other tents on the camp.

Some might call it an improvement, but when I am not logged in I only see a line saying “Advertisment” with no ad. Do you still get revenue like this? 😉

Brett Whiteley : Almost once

It is huge (over 15m high)

That works then. It was just the code including the and delete the rest of the line.

Next issue, but it may be already known, is that the preview button does not preview.
I also get the coffee cup and page not found for quite a few thread posts.

Testing the Flikr BBCode again. I also noticed that my previous post are now deleted from the thread, even though they were included in a reply.

Ok, that worked, but the BBCode link from Flickr did not. Any ideas? Also the preview does not work for me either.

I cannot post any images do I am trying a single line of text as a start.

I quite like the cock ups when things go wrong and I find an idea I would never otherwise have thought of. If this came out as that raw and exactly what was meant then fair play. It is also refreshing to have this sort of discussion as it helps seeing something thorough somebody else’s prism. No side to it at all so you can challenge your own view on things.

Maybe we can expand the thoughts with other paintings that could challenge in the same way? Anybody for Bret Whitley’s take on heroin addiction?