6 bolt requires a standard allen key

Nope.

She won’t be bothered about the numberboard, and trying to stop her attacking the cheese, ham and chocolate will be virtually impossible, official entry or not!

Honestly wouldn’t be worried by the make or model, within reason – buy on condition. I’d also be relaxed about fuel consumption, unless you’re planning to do loads of miles. A 5mpg saving doesn’t translate to a lot, and bigger cars tend to offer much better value at this end for the market.

Definitely go diesel, and look for a privately owned car that’s spent a good amount of time with its current owner, and has a complete or mostly complete service history, crucially with belt changes.

Don’t be scared of high mileages if the servicing’s been well carried out. If there’s no evidence of servicing (ideally with bills rather than stamps), walk run away. A cheap car that’s unreliable and turns out to be a money pit is never a bargain, no matter how cheap it is.

Something like the VW Golf or Volvo V70 below would be my choices – fire up Autotrader, select the £500-1000 category, narrow it down to up to (say) 40 miles from your house, and you’d be amazed at what’s available

http://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/201224475171932/sort/pricedesc/usedcars/price-to/1000/fuel-type/diesel/price-from/500/model/golf/make/volkswagen/radius/1501/postcode/wd174nu/page/1?logcode=p

http://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/201223475001708/sort/pricedesc/usedcars/fuel-type/diesel/price-from/500/price-to/1000/make/volvo/page/1/radius/1501/postcode/wd174nu?logcode=p

I’ve got an account, but rarely use it. It has some use to me for various MTB-related activities, but that’s as far as it goes. I still can’t see the massive attraction, and the valuation placed on it in the recent listing was laughable.

No animosity to people using it, just not particularly for me.

I’m a bit reluctant to post this as it will kill what was quite an enjoyable thread.

These are the worst lyrics ever.
No discussion. No competition. Simple.

Heart’s “All I want to do”.

So we found this hotel,
it was a place I knew well
We made magic that night.
Oh, he did everything right
He brought the woman out of me,
so many times, easily
And in the morning when he woke all
I left him was a note
I told him
“I am the flower you are the seed”
We walked in the garden
we planted a tree

So bad they actually cause physical pain.

I have to admit that this may be a winner! Wince-inducingly terrible throughout, but the “I am the flower, you are the seed” is the real low point.

Of course, in the 1970s Clapton and parties used to go together like gin and tonic. It’s said that he was at another party, got pissed (again), confessed to the then Mrs Harrison/future Mrs Clapton (as well to George) that he was rather rather keen on her, and played them the outlines of a song he’d written about Pattie.

Considering that fact that this one song – Layla – essentially made Clapton his fortune, you’d have thought he’d have been reasonably generous financially when they split up. Sadly not the case.

The story goes that he and the future Mrs Clapton were about to head out for a party, she took ages getting ready, looked fab when all dolled up, and was nice to him all evening.

That’s the story, anyway….

Eric’s Diary 7th September 1976
Off to a party with Macca, but flipping Patti took ages to get ready. Honestly, women! 20 dresses but nothing she could possibly wear, not a thing! She looked ace once done, it has to be said, but I’d got bored and started hoovering my way through the drinks cabinet. Anyhow, got there 2 hours late, a bit pissed, got completely plastered with George, and I rather lost track of things after that. d Patti got really shirty with me, grabbed the car keys, and shouted at me when I was sick in the car. Made me sleep in the spare room, too. I promised to write a song about her, to make up for it.

She liked it, thank heavens. Not a great tune, to be honest. I’ll probably stick it out as a B side or something.

And even if he didn’t actually write it (anyone know?), performing it alone should have been punishable by death. “I give her the car keys”???…FFS…

No, he definitely wrote it.

Death it is, then…..

Nick, that’s genuinely bad news. Sounds as if you knew it was coming, so perhaps it wasn’t a total shock.

Doesn’t really make it any better though.

Macca’s “In this everchanging world in which we’re living” has to come close to the bottom of the barrel, though for me there’s always the comforting though that whenever you’re confronted by the question as to the worst lyrics of all time, you can simply reach for anything penned by Ian Astbury

Laydeezungennelmun, I give yoouuuuu……….Love Removal Machine by The Cult.

Fell to the red room because she was there, uh-huh-huh-huh
A scarlet woman, she got me in fear, yeah, yeah, yeah
She said, do all those things that you do to me
You know what I mean, boy
Do all those things that you do to me, yeah

(Talkin’ bout love)
Love removal
(Talkin’ bout love)
Love removal machine
(Talkin’ bout love)
Gimme love, soul shaker
(Talkin’ bout love)
Love removal machine

Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, I fell from the sky
Yesterday, you blew my mind, oh yeah
Having trouble with my direction
Upside-down, psychotic reaction, oh

(Talkin’ bout love)
Love removal
(Talkin’ bout love)
Love removal machine
(Talkin’ bout love)
Gimme love, soul stealer
(Talkin’ bout love)
Love removal machine

(Talkin’ bout love)
Gimme love
(Talkin’ bout love)
Love remover machine
(Talkin’ bout love)
Gimme love, fun remover
(Talkin’ bout love)
Love removal machine

Yeah
(Talkin’ bout love)
Love remover
(Talkin’ bout love)
Love remover machine
(Talkin’ bout love)
Gimme love, fun remover
(Talkin’ bout love)
Love remover machine

(Talkin’ bout love)
Gimme love
(Talkin’ bout love)
Love remover machine
(Talkin’ bout love)
Gimme love, soul shaker
(Talkin’ bout love)
Love removal machine

Ooh yeah

Look out, here she comes
Look out, here she comes
I said, look out, here she comes
Look out, here she comes, yeah

Shake it, don’t break it, baby
Shake it, don’t break it, baby
Shake it, don’t break it, baby
Shake it, don’t break it
Baby
Ow, ow, ow
Ow, ow, ow
Ah, yeah

Oh **** hell.

Don’t open laptop when pissed

So true. Then again, we’ve all done worse. And if it makes you feel any better (not sure that it can, a bottle of Baileys would leave me ill for days), at midnight I was doing exciting stuff like putting bins out, washing up, and being generally suburban, so that I could get up at 0500 and do the whole thing again.

Frankly, I’d rather have been drinking, and damn the hangover.

Following a bit of a blitz this weekend, all nine of the bikes in the garage are rideable, if you allow for one half-built bike (needs brakes and a fork) which isn’t actually broken, and a geared 456 which doesn’t have a saddle or a seatpost (but I just swap the saddle/seatpost from my singlespeed 456).

I even managed to put a new front end on my daughter’s DH bike and get it running perfectly.

My 5’0″ son rides a 14″ 456, and has no problems, and that’s with 150mm Fox forks.

Stem is 50mm, and he’s got the saddle as far forward as possible. Also cut the bars down a bit so there’s less overall stretch.

Endorfin VP-4 R SL – Rohloff full-suspension bike.

Fewer than 5 in the UK, I understand.

That bike is better looking than Tulisa

She’s your yardstick? Each to their own, of course, but you’ve not set your standards all that high, now have you?

Blimey. That’s terrible news.

RIP

Sorry but if you knew the land was private and the guy had a reputation are you sure there was not another way you could have gone ?

You clearly knew riding the bike was a no no so to me it would make sense to avoid the path altogether

A fair question.

Thing is, the guy has a reputation for being difficult with everyone. I genuinely didn’t think he’d go off on one about someone pushing a bike. I now realise that he will, and will probably avoid the area in future. Just annoying that the law is so vague on this.

Looks like I was in the wrong!

From the hertsdirect website

“The route of a footpath is shown by waymarks with yellow arrows

You have the right to walk together with any ‘normal accompaniment’ (e.g. a dog, pram, wheelchair).

You do not have the right to use a bicycle, or even to wheel a bicycle along them. This is not a criminal offence, but a trespass against the landowner.

It is a criminal offence to drive a motor vehicle along a public footpath (unless you have a private right).

You do not have the right to ride or lead a horse or take a horse-drawn vehicle along a footpath, although it is not a criminal offence.”

Weird. Why would he call the Police? An attempt at intimidating you or had he been assaulted previously and was nervous?

He/it doesn’t make sense- seemed OTT?

I don’t know all the history, but it appears he’s been abused and assaulted before (no idea by whom); given his attitude, I can understand why. He was foaming at the mouth – literally – though what drives this hatred is not clear.

Anyway, he blocked my access to the path. I made to push past him, and he stated that do get past I’d need to assault him, at which time he’d call the police, and I’d get a criminal record. I then pushed past him, and requested him to call the police. He was reluctant – I found out subsequently that he’s had much contact with a weary-sounding PCSO, and I presume that he’s cried wolf rather too often – but when he got on the phone he alleged that there was “about to be a breach of the peace”, that he was scared, and that I’d threatened him.

All nonsense, but designed to get the police to come out, which they didn’t do. He had to admit that I’d not actually threatened him, just that he thought I might.

To my mind, it’s simple; either I’m in the wrong, was trespassing, and should have left, or he was in the wrong, and in blocking my path was committing an offence himself. It has to be one or the other, surely?

He rang the police while I was there – at my urging, I might add – and I subsequently had a longer conversation with them. The police officer I spoke to seemed very clear that I’d committed no infraction of the law in wheeling a bike along the path, but looking that these older threads makes me think that perhaps the landowner was correct, galling though that might be.

I’ll have a chat to the the Herts right of way officer when I get some time.

Original Ti456

Unbroken, despite my best efforts

Didn’t see that coming. Genuinely thought he’d be given another year.

My prediction: she’ll be found guilty, and be sentenced to 18 months in prison. This looks to have been a pretty concerted attempt to conceal the truth, and accordingly the sentencing, assuming she’s found guilty, will not be trivial.

It’ll utterly finish her career.

I like downhills, whether yee-haa brain-out stuff, technical pick-your-way down stuff, or meandering trails. Climbs are OK, and it’s occasionally really fun in a look-what-I-did way to grind up to the top of a horrible ascent.

But mostly I prefer the downhills. And warp speed DH descending gets my adrenaline levels up more than almost anything else I can think of.

Would a semi-acoustic flying V even work, acoustically speaking?

‘Course not, but it would be a laugh.

You’ll be needing a fretless bass too.

Always thought a fretless semi-acoustic 5-string Flying V bass might be the single most niche guitar. Sadly, so-one’s ever bothered to make one.

Remember seeing Sting playing an 8-string bass at Newcastle City Hall. Made not a blind bit of difference to the woeful sound, but I’m sure it made him feel a million times better.

I was a prefect. The gown was a real embarrassment, but hey, it went with the territory.

Back to the original case. As I sadly expected, the crime of these perverted bastards is being overshadowed by the racial element.

These men got together and decided to commit crimes. They picked on the weakest and most available girls they could, who they (correctly) believed wouldn’t be believed or supported if they went to the authorities. The connection between these men might be ethnicity, it might be that they all live close by each other, it might be because they’re mostly involved in the taxi trade. None of us know the true linkages, but blaming the police for being too soft on Asians – which is what’s being implied by several of the posters here – is the easy answer.

The real shame is that women are not listened to, and that paedophile gangs do exist. Mostly, they’re white, because that’s the overwhelmingly prevalent racial type in the UK. But rather then get furious about the evil that such men do, and the inept job the authorities do in bringing rapists to justice, it’s just so much easier to say ‘yeah, it’s those Asians, they don’t respect our white women’. This then fuels the BNP and their ilk to rail on about immigration, the evils of Islam, and whether or not we’re free to fly the flag of St George (a Syrian, by the way).

The reality is that we – as a society – don’t sufficiently respect women. The girls in this case were mostly in care, and were not properly looked after by the care authorities. These were girls who had gone off the rails and should have been treated as the damaged individuals they were, and those charged with their care clearly didn’t take that seriously enough. We should be turning our anger onto these people, venting our fury at the police for not listening, and demanding why the CPS didn’t prosecute earlier.

The cop-out response to this case is to blame the men who look different or come from some other place for their colour or religion rather than for their crimes, to wave the flag, and to say that we’d expect all those horrible darkies to do terrible things to our lovely chaste white girls. So much harder to accept that we have a real problem with sexual crime, and that mostly, we choose to ignore it.

Shame on us all if we fail to properly learn lessons from this.

[edited – there’s really no point arguing with those who refuse to see]

So Catholic priests aren’t Catholic then?

The Catholic element is absolutely relevant – these are supposedly holy men who have acted in the most hypocritical (and unChristian) manner possible, and the Catholic hierarchy has institutionally covered up their wrongdoings.

Not quite the same as labelling these criminals as “Muslim Asians”, is it? Unless you’re certain that the linkage is their purported faith or their ethnic origin, of course.

it serves someone agenda to think that PC dogooders stiflled the investigation of sexual crimes but i dont think it is true

Not so much PC dogooders, more that it’s astonishingly difficult to get a rape conviction in the UK, the more so when the victim can be shown to be somewhat less than a chaste convent schoolgirl, and is unable to give absolute concrete facts due to alcohol/drug intake.

That’s the real scandal – the fact that women are treated as second-class citizens by the police and courts when it comes to sexual crimes. Sure, things have got better in the last few decades, but even now, the attrition rate for rape is just 12%. That means the number convicted from alleged offences is about one in eight. The actual conviction rate is just over 50% – so even when the CPS believes is has a solid case, a victim prepared to put herself through the ordeal of court, and unimpeachable evidence, only one in two prosecutions is successful.

This case is particularly shocking (a gang, multiple victims, prostitution), but step back a little and consider that something around 85,000 rapes are reported each year (2006 stats)….meaning that a vast number – maybe 70,000 – of these crimes go unpunished.

Don’t just get angry about this case, get angry about the treatment of women as a whole.

And why does religion always get confused with race?

So why mention Muslim Asians? These men are Asians, certainly, but there’s nothing they’ve done which remotely corresponds to any definition of Muslim that I’ve ever seen.

Presumably you are not a white taxi driver?

No, I’m not. And I’m not trying to imply that all taxi drivers are all rapists, far from it. Just that the majority of the convicted people in this case appear to be taxi drivers or know each other through taxi driving. They are also of Asian ethnicity.

It makes just as much sense (more perhaps) to link them through their occupation as it does to refer to their ethnicity or their faith. As taxi drivers, they have all sorts of excuses for being anywhere, at any time of night. They get access to young, drunk girls. They have transport (obviously).

Yet rather than looking at this (to me, fairly obvious) link, the press are looking at race. Again.

Surely the “racial” issue is not with the victims but the perpetrators. There is no doubt that in northern cities the grooming on the street of vulnerable girls is overwhelming conducted by pakistani asian men.

Substitute “taxi drivers” for “pakistani asian men” and you have as accurate a statement, but one which is far less emotive.

Hell, a certain Mr Griffin was even prosecuted for making these allegations…

Really? I thought it was for inciting racial hatred……if you can give specifics, I’d be interested to read.

I’m sure all agree

Absolutely. And while the ethnicity of the perpetrators may or may not play a part (I don’t know all the facts and therefore am in no position to judge), I’d hate the fact that this is an ongoing child abuse issue to be overshadowed by yet another let’s-have-a-go-about-race in the small papers.

All along the police and politicians have said there is no racial element to this case. This is patent nonsense to anyone who’s got anything between their ears. And its incredibly patronising to try and close down discussion in this way. This is obviously a complex issue and needs open discussion. Which ‘the authorities’ seem to be doing everything to avoid

So, you know all the facts, do you? I mean, clearly this is just a big conspiracy by the Leftist police to deny any racial issues, and no-one can see it but you.

Except that the Chief Constable of the area said last night (I saw the interview) that there were several other investigations of a very similar nature going on right now, in the same area….and the men concerned in that case were not of Asian origin.

You’re right to say that there needs to be an open discussion. But I don’t think your opening point shows a particularly open mind.

That’s really niche, you also need serious facial hair and a floppy leather hat.

The Practical Shotgun guys at my club are pretty niche; Ramboesque moves and a willingness to wear cartridge bandoliers are de rigeur.

Forgot the indoor pool. There’s also going to be a new water park opening in July in Avoriaz, which should be excellent.

As your kids are a bit older, they’d love the Go Ape-type setups (but better than Go Ape – far more fun), the white water rafting, canyoning….it’s flipping ace. The goat village is (quite literally) the s***iest place I’ve ever been to, but has to be experienced. There are huge numbers of excellent walks.

One of the best family days we’ve ever had was the ride up from Chamonix to L’Aiguille Du Midi (not far from the summit of Mont Blanc), then the crossing to Italy on the aerial tramway. Stunning scenery, just awesome. When you cross back, you then have a meandering 2/3 hour walk to the Me De Glace, where you walk inside glaciers, (and you can sneak off and climb down the via ferrata to the main glacier surface). Funicular railway back down to Chamonix, then back to Morzine. An expensive day – probably €350 all in for the four of us (the tickets are unsurprisingly not cheap, but you look at the engineering and you can justify it), including fuel, food etc.

Eating out is expensive, but self-catering obviously doesn’t have to be.

Glen, as I mentioned before, I’ve driven one. Nice, responsive, revvy, but a bit more thirsty than I’d either like or expect. Doesn’t feel under-powered, certainly doesn’t feel like a 1.0.