If it’s any help – and it may not be – I had a similar with my ancient E-Class Mercedes which at the time had about 175k miles on it. Turned out that the injectors themselves were OK but that the sealing around them was a bit knackered, which I think let in miniscule amounts of air …… in any event, it produced a skip-load of smoke and failed an MOT. Cost about £150 for the garage to sort the 2 leaking injector seals, and that was almost all driven by time as they’re tricky to get out.

As others have said, refurbishing injectors is way cheaper than buying new ones.

Good luck with it – I’m firmly of the view that if the car still does what you want and you can be confident that you’re not dropping hundreds of pounds every few months then fix it and keep it.

Because people disagree with you, not everybody loves your dog as much as you do, and you don’t appreciate being told that your dog isn’t under control if it’s sniffing at somebody else’s picnic or jumping up and stealing food from somebody else’s kid?

No, because of the usual pick-holes-in-what-people-say bitchiness and general whining on STW.

For the record,(and this really is my last post on this or any subject) I have my dogs under control. I don’t take them to the park in the summer precisely because there are picnickers there and it means I’d have to keep the dogs on the lead in case a hysterical muppet might think my dogs (friendly, well-controlled) are about to attack a child. I have no time for those irresponsible dog-owners who don’t clean up after their animals.

Tolerance is what you need, not a narrow-minded viewpoint that you are right and everyone else is wrong. I keep my dogs away from mollycoddled children and hysterical parents because it’s just too much like hard work to deal with the hassle. I shouldn’t have to, but I do so because, after all, life’s just too short.

I now remember why I left this place for over a year.

Don’t worry, I’ll not be back.

Hint: there is a solution to the issue of dogs interfering with people’s picnics which doesn’t involve people not having picnics. Well actually I can think of a couple, one if which is to ban dogs from parks, is that your preferred solution?

Did you read what I said? If you did, you’ll note that I said that

(a) people shouldn’t be surprised if a dog comes along in a full-of-dogs park. I didn’t mention banning anyone, or stopping people having picnics. But the dog owners are entitled to be there, just as much as the picnickers, and the dog owners are there 52 weeks a year, not just for two weekends in the summer.

(b) tolerance on both sides is a good thing.

Now, tell me again what I said that was so wrong.

My two bitches have always got on fine. Adding a dog has changed the dynamic, but only a little.

One of my hounds once jumped up and ate a kid’s apple. I bought him an ice-cream to compensate (the child, not the dog). Everyone was happy.

As a dog-owner you have to expect that your hound might very well sniff out food, and apologise when they do it. At the same time, it’s a bit galling when people lay out a picnic in a park where they know there are a load of dogs and then act surprised when a hungry trailhound tries to investigate the sausage rolls.

Tolerance all round would be a very good thing.

It’s definitely harder having two dogs rather than one – one lags behind on a walk, the other’s bouncing around up ahead. You need more space in the car/on the sofa etc. Puppies destry everyhting they can get their teeth into. The bills are doubled.

If you can cope with that, then go ahead. We had zero dogs, then got a rescue ex-race trailhound. Then a second; same breed, same background. And finally we got a lurcher pup (again, a rescue dog) about 12 months ago.

It can be a pain occasionally to have all three of them bellowing for food at the same time, or when one of them runs off on a walk and one of the others does the same thing 20 minutes later, but the upsides absolutely outweigh the downsides.

Just watch out for the chickens – we have some as well and the puppy thought they were tremendous fun to chase after. A few hard pecks on his nose sorted that out, but it’s something to watch out for.

Take spare parts for the bike – the availability out in the Alps can be quite limited. Brake pads, tubes, spare rotors, gear hanger – all useful.

Highlights of the weekend: Guy Pratt’s bass-ing for Bryan Ferry. A real master at work. Chvrches were predictably excellent. Oh, and Ellie Goulding’s sheer energy; Burn was a brilliant closer and a real crowd-pleaser. Never enjoyed Metallica, didn’t like them at Glastonbury

Off to TITP in a week or so, and many of the same bands are on – will be avoiding Drenge, Haim, Manics (pity, but the set they played at Glastonbury was rubbish). Just hoping that Human League aren’t a letdown.

SPD for everything, even DH. Prefer the properly connected feel, even when it’s steep, rocky, and there’s a good chance of crashing.

Regularly have 4 bikes in the back of mine – easiest with the front wheel off, but you don’t need to. I actually find the seatpost to be more of a problem with larger bikes, so whip that off and you’re laughing.

Take the wheels off and you can have up to 5 bikes and 5 seats. No chance of any bikes in the back if you’re using all 7 seats though!

My Disco 3’s on 145k miles and other than wear-related things (suspension bushings, brakes, the usual sort of thing) it’s been fine. Did have to have a new propshaft about 10k miles ago, and the torque convertor’s just been reconditioned, but at this sort of age you can’t really blame that on reliability.

V2 for my DH bike and my Patriot. X2 for my others.

Mavic XM819

UST tyres

A small amount of solution to deal with the inevitable small cuts/thorn punctures

No problems in the YEARS I’ve been using them.

“We’re going to see fireworks in this swimming pool tonight!”

After all that, it turned out that the race was a bit of a damp squib………

Nell and Susie (and Lucas!) on a walk[/url]

Nell and Susie after a hard day’s snoozing[/url]

Susie trying to look cute
[/url]

I forgot a colleague called Michael Hunt. Who preferred to be called Mike…..I suspect he just did it to embarrass us all.

My manual wind Speedmaster (not the same, I completely get it) is 35 years old and hasn’t ever been serviced, so far as I’m aware. Still wonderfully accurate.

A mate of mine’s son is at medical school, when he qualifies he will be
Dr. De’ath.

I worked with Gladys De’Ath. She was known as Glad, and worked in Payroll, with whom we shared an open-plan office.

Once or twice a week we’d get someone traipsing in asking “I’m looking for Glad Death”. Oh, how we chuckled.

I’d never heard of Paco de Lucia until I happened across Friday Night In San Francisco some years back. Since then I’ve bought most of his catalogue; just try his take on Concierto de Aranjuez.

The man’s an absolute genius.

You know lots of bikes come with ABS now too ?

This is STW, why let the facts get in the way?

You’re quite young, aren’t you?

Ooh, that man’s trying to chat me up. Calling me young and everything.

And what if it a Honda Goldwing?

Then it is a lorry. Just a very large one.

Sorry, uncalled-for pisstaking on my part. Apologies.

Then your next paragraph mentions “contemptuous ease”; then there’s “badly driven econoboxes”,

As to the first, I mean that it’s so easy to get past you’d scarcely believe it, not that any contempt is meant.

For the second, OK, bang to rights. It’s hard not to look at some of the astonishing inept drivers and wonder how they ever passed a test. The sort of people who drive at a steady 40 in a 50 zone, then carry on at exactly the same pace in a 30 zone. The ones who think that you shouldn’t overtake because if that speed’s good enough for them, it should be good enough for you. These are the people who like to flash you if, gosh, you have the temerity to wake them from their snooze as you go past.

there are countless dozens of idiots on crotch rockets who are not.

If you want to be taken seriously in a debate with motorcyclists, using the term ‘crotch rocket’ will win you no points. It just makes you sound like a Daily Mail reader.

Unless you’ve ridden bikes, you simply don’t understand the contemptuous ease with which you can get past anything with four wheels, unless you happen across a Veyron on a regular basis. So the question is, why on earth would any sane person sit there in a queue of badly-driven econoboxes all doing 48mph in a 60 zone, when you can do one or two overtakes and get past all ten of the trundling diesel Golfs.

OK, they’re not all diesel Golfs (quite often it’s a Hyundai, driver comatose at the wheel). But just because they don’t want to go any faster, why should everyone else wait? If you’re in a car you may well not have the acceleration or visibility to get past, but just ‘cos someone with a faster vehicle does have that power, why get all grumpy over it? I leave additional space if I look in my mirrors and see bikers, precisely because I drive a 3 tonne truck and can overtake very few people – so I assume that others will want to get past me and the mobile chicane blocking my way.

The idiots who flash past at 120mph leaving no margin for error are fools, obviously, but all of us, regardless of the number of wheels used, can agree with that.

Morpeth’s a nice place, though perhaps not quite as quiet as you might think. If you’re renting, however, it’d be a good place to start.

Personally I’d go with Alnwick. It’s on the coast, the housing isn’t expensive, the architecture is lovely…but it’s not hugely wealthy. Depends on what you like.

I’m from Rothbury – only 15 miles from Morpeth – which also has a lot to recommend it. Alnwick’s coastal location would swing it for me if I ever moved back (been daaaahn Saaaaarf for many years), but beware the biting North Sea wind!

At 16st and riding a singlespeed, it’s not unknown for me to snap. I’ve tried different chains, more lubing, and reasonably frequent replacement but it doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference. Probably break a couple of chains a year, so it’s not that bad.

It’s still absolute murder on my train – all the ‘3 month cycle commuters’ have decided that they too would like to clutter up the carriages. They’ll all sod off when they realise, sometime around September, that it gets flipping cold and dark out there in that London. I’ll then be able to go back to being the only bike on the train, but for now, it’s hard to get any space.

Why? With 12 confirmed dead, dozens injured and a bloke arrested with a selection of firearms, which can be bought legally like you’re getting a pizza, its hardly leaping off on flights of fancy to piece together a rough approximation of what might of happened, is it?

It’s not hard to get a shotgun licence in the UK, you know. I’ve got 3 in my cellar (2 of which are semi-auto, and can fire their 3-shot capacity in under 0.5s), any of which could cause absolute carnage. I could get a Firearms Certificate shotgun very easily (up to 8-shot capacity) which would, in the wrong hands, be capable of hideous destruction.

There are hundreds of thousands of shotguns in the UK, and yet the death rate from all guns (including illegally held ones) is around 0.46/100,000 people, equating to around 250 deaths per year. Of that, approximately 45 deaths per year are homicides.

The USA, on the other hand, has a death rate of 10.27/100,000 which equates to approximately 31,000 gun-related deaths per annum, of which 12,500 or so are homicides (the remainder are preponderantly suicides, sadly).

It’s all to do with the attitude of the population. Most people in the UK could get a shotgun if they wanted to, but they can’t be bothered. That shows with the statistic that for every 100 headcount there are just 6.2 guns in England/Wales, whereas in the USA there are 88.8. Yep, the US has 14 times the number of guns as the UK per head of population. Simply put, we really don’t want guns, at least not as a general rule, and those of us who have them tend to be very careful with them

Trout, in all seriousness, I’m interested. Have a think on price and battery type and drop me a line.

I walk my dogs at 5am, in the woods. In wintertime it’s really dark, and a tree-melter like that would be just the ticket. Be ideal if it ran off a cassette of 18650s.

Very interested – spec, likely price?

I think Crankboy has it right, and the uncertainty over point (2) will prove to be the critical one. Yes, Harwood’s a nasty piece of work, and yes, he’s a disgrace to the uniform, but unless you can prove that his actions directly led to Tomlinson’s death, it would be impossible to prove manslaughter.

The CPS should have gone for an assault charge, which would have led to a conviction and imprisonment on the basis of the evidence presented. As it was, I couldn’t ever see the manslaughter charge being one that stuck.

There are 5 On-Ones sitting in my a garage, so you could say I’m a fan.

There are certainly lighter frames, but I love mine and have no real desire to change. Given that I stopped riding a Nicolai, an Endorfin and a Turner in favour of the On-Ones (gradually – I didn’t suddenly wake up and have a ‘must ride steel hardtails’ moment), it wasn’t just ‘cos they’re cheap, it’s more that they ride really nicely.

The Ti456 is lovely….if I had to pick just one frame to do everything, it might well be that one.

As for quality – the paint chips reasonably easily, the frames rust if you let them. That said, the oldest of mine is now 6ish, and rusting hasn’t been a problem for me – just a few spots here and there. The welds seem OK, and the only thing that killed one of my original frames was a freak stick/wheel/grunting uphill moment which just wrecked the rear end. Could have had it fixed, but it was cheaper to buy a secondhand frame.

I think you find its Nazies, plural.

The plural is Nazis.

Not Nazi’s, and definitely not Nazies (which sounds like a town in Southern France, but isn’t).

Brake pads are variable. I went through a new set of pads in 4 laps of the Bonti 24/12 last weekend!

I’d suggest there’s something amiss with your brakes. I did more laps than that at the same event and my pads look completely untouched. Given that it was such slow going that they pretty much were untouched for the weekend, that wasn’t a surprise.

Cellulitis, if it’s anything like I had, will make your leg go bright red, swell to an unfeasible size, and be painful to the touch. You’ll have a raging temperature, and if you don’t sort it, will be admitted to hospital for intravenous antibiotics.

It just doesn’t look like cellulitis to me.

Genuinely repellent individual. And unless he’s deranged, what sort of person does he think will get in touch?

It’s cheaper than shooting, that’s for sure. But by the time you factor in upgrades, broken bits, worn out tyres, transport to/from your rides, it’s not what I’d call cheap at all.

Bear in mind that the tag system enables you to avoid the truly enormous queues you can get in the summertime, and means you don’t need your co-driver to be awake when approaching the tolls.

You do pay €40 for the tag, but that’s a deposit – send it back and they credit it to you. And it works out a little cheaper – you get charged in € converted to £ at commercial rates, rather than the tourist rates you’d have obtained your Euro notes in, or the frankly terrible rate you’ll get if you hand your credit card over.

But mostly it’s about feeling smug as you cruise past the hordes of frustrated drivers stuck in yet another one hour queue……..