Italian police passed through the carriage and did an ID check of passengers on the train we were travelling on in April. Passport was scanned and presumably checked for things like how long we had been in the EU.  Wouldn’t have liked to be over the 90 day limit in that situation.

I work with disabled riders, and having somewhere with appropriate toilets, change / washing facilities, ability to get food and drink, park and have approp

@riklegge is Delamere on your list as they have all of the above and recently put in 6 short sections of blue. Bike hire available from the shop. Happy to show you around if you’re not familiar with it.

Agreed. The above clarifies it.

you’re going to be taxed at 40% when you take it out

How so?

Thisd be why I posted above – increasing my salary sacrifice is reducing the amount I’ll pay 40% on through my wages, then I’ll pay 25% in retirement so a net saving of 15% tax.

^^^^^^ 20% is the basic tax rate so even better.

Assuming you take the 25% tax free lump sum in stages you can crystallise and draw down £67k per year and only pay a small amount of tax:

Gross £67,000

minus £16,750 25% tax free leaving £50,250

minus personal allowance of £12,570 leaving £37,680

20% of £37,680 = £7,536 which will be your tax bill for the year, in other words just over 11% tax and of course no NI.

£700,000 even with taking 25% tax free seems to be £40,000 a year

If your pot was £800k and you drew down £40k a year AND your pot continued to grow at 5% you would still have a pot of £800k when you cark it.  The good news is when that pot goes to your dependents there is no tax if you die before 75 or if you are over 75  tax is treated as income for the beneficiary.

Carnage at the women’s triathlon.  Swim looked brutal against the current and multiple bike crashes on the wet cobbles.  Men off at 09:45.

No right or wrong answer and it depends on a number of factors.  The great thing is you have the flexibility to make it work in whichever way suits your needs best.

One is some AVCs that I took out on the advice of a FA rather than pay extra into my job pension

Of course he did. All that lovely commission he trousered.

I’m looking forward to trying to spot the 4 Wrexham AFC Easter Eggs. Up the town!

I’m with you @surfer, I’m not paying an IFA to borrow my watch and tell me what time it is, but I get why some people aren’t that confident and need the comfort blanket of an IFA.

Going back to the original question has anyone started training for another trade/job as they’re heading towards retirement.  Something that you can do self-employed on your own terms with a choice of the number of hours a week you work?

Fortunately, I have a decent pension but you can also earn up to £1,000 each year tax free, so I do photography gigs at cycling events which helps me fund my photography hobby.

Experiment and Strava will tell you what works best.  When I went for distance in both eyes it made a significant improvement to my segment times at Llandegla.  You just need to keep a set of those tiny nose clip glasses in your pack or pocket for any close up stuff.

Does anyone publish a comparison of charges & performance of pension companies?

I’ve got pensions with Reasure, Phoenix life & Peoples pension but feel I should transfer for a better deal.

Phoenix are notorious for high charges and in my case  make it difficult to transfer out based on the transfer value.  I’ve got a pension with them that is currently worth £45k but a transfer value of £24k.  This is one of the old With Profits pensions so things may have moved on.  If you can get a good transfer value moving to a SIPP should be a better option but some of the older policies have minimum guarantees so you may need to take that into consideration.

The only advice I would give on pensions is spend time understanding them, it really isn’t that difficult although the pension companies, IFAs and other parties taking a slice of your pot try and make it so.  Start off with the Boring Money videos on YouTube. Other good YouTube channels on this topic are Chris Bourne, PensionCraft and Damien Talks Money.

edit – and The Martin Lewis links above

Think a camera or two got me as they’re positioned right on the 20 / 30 sign change-over point,. so after grinding along in 2nd for 5 mins, you’re 30 yards from a 30, change up to 3rd and then notice the camera too late

Most of the static speed cameras I’ve seen in the UK aren’t positioned right on the boundary of a speed limit change.  Are things different in Wales?

Cracking comment on The Register :

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.”

– Douglas Adams

How true this is for the Cloud. The man was totally ahead if his time.

Reclassify parts of the green belt.  For example, there are plenty of towns/villages where a relief road has been built through green belt so allow some infill development  between the relief road and the town/village.

Once had a blackbird fly out of a hedgerow and impale its beak into my kneecap. Vividly remember looking down and seeing it there and a split second later it was gone.

Downloading offline Google maps is a good way to cut down on data. That plus local wifi and you really shouldn’t be getting through much data at all

Mate of mine does similar to BB above but I’ve heard that you’re more likely to get a lesser room going through booking.com etc compared to booking direct with the hotel.   The room above the bottle bin that gets emptied at 6am every morning 😀

Seems as if 372 was spooked by some idiot flying a drone near the nest.

“He gets back before the females arrive so he can tidy the nest up and its believed a well presented nest (good diy skills) make females more likely to stop.”

Sadly last year’s female LM6 didn’t return and the male LJ2 looked a bit of a lost soul, constantly looking up at the skies. The good news is he paired up with Blue 372, originally from Scotland but relocated to Poole. Fast forward to today and the first chick hatched much to the surprise of 372, but at 14:16:40 today something spooked 372 and she nearly flipped the chick out of the nest – click on the OP and use the clock top left to rewind.

I picked up a em-1 mk 3 last week for £629 from London Camera Exchange.  Pretty much the same as the mark 2 apart from improvements in image stabilisation and also a funky night sky feature that I haven’t tried yet.

I was covering the Glorious Gravel event in N. Wales yesterday and couldn’t resist snapping this fella who seemed pleased with himself

_X180520 by Ian Pemberton[/url], on Flickr

However, I didn’t spend anywhere near £10k extra on an EV, nor do most people. Thanks to zero BIK, the government is actually funding the extra in what I guess is the majority of cases.

Which is where I have an issue.  Instead of funding the purchase of an EV that money should be used for further decarbonising the grid.

But yes, there was always going to be a financial black home in the future based on lower income from both VED and from fuel duty.

Agreed, but when you look at the forecast VED from the OBR for the next few years the amount of increase in revenue is significantly more than the last 30 years.  In other words we are all getting our pants pulled down. https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/vehicle-excise-duty/

I had a very stressful transfer at Dubai on a tight connection.  Arrived late from Mumbai on an Emirates A380 which parked up away from the terminal and they stuck us on buses (how many buses to unload a full A380?). I was last off the plane and then had a 15 minute bus journey to the terminal.  Transit security was chaos and when I got through looked at the board and my flight to MAN had closed.  Wandered up to the gate just in case and the Emirates lady who was just about to pack up and go whizzed me down the air bridge onto the plane and they closed the door behind me.  Then we sat at the gate for 90 minutes until the fog cleared!

But I’ve had plenty of great connections through Dubai so I’m sure you will be fine.

Do they get to wash their hands? I’m told that delivering 230v +10%/- 6% is a legal requirement.

This is what they fobbed me off with back in January after being reasonably helpful on previous occasions, so thanks for the link which I will point them at when they reply to my latest complaint:

I have investigated the interruption on 30 January 2024 and would like to advise that these interruptions that last a few seconds are the result of an automatic device, called an auto re-closer opening and closing during a brief clashing or short circuiting of conductors, caused by variety of reasons including adverse weather conditions, trees, wind borne items, birds and squirrels coming into contact with the overhead equipment, or the beginning of a permanent fault on the high voltage network.

This style of fault restoration is greatly appreciated by the vast majority of our customers because it reduces the actual time off supply to a few seconds. Prior to their introduction it was necessary for us to send an engineer out to physically close a fuse in a sub-station in order to restore electricity supplies. Whilst the introduction of such equipment does not prevent supply interruptions entirely it does limit the disruption and minimise the time taken for restoration to occur.

The fault could not have been predetermined by the company, Nevertheless, regardless of how much we protect, and maintain our equipment, faults may still occur. There will always be circumstances beyond our control, which can affect the electrical network.  However, I would like to assure you that there are no issues with the running of the network.

@DrJ I’m also having problems with our charger regularly tripping out but SP Energy have washed their hands of it after a few attempts to dial down the voltage at the sub-station. The problem we have is the voltage is measured by a separate matt:e box which goes off with a big clunk when the voltage starts to go up beyond 252, and as we sleep above the garage it wakes you up then usually trips agin every few minutes until I get out of bed and switch the bloody thing off.

So we’re now looking to swap out the matt:e for something similar that doesn’t make a noise, any suggestions folks? I’ve looked at earthing rods but will struggle to get a location away from the utilities coming into the house.

“Absolutely in for this! There are so many Easter eggs buried in the trailer it’s going to take repeated views of the film to pick them out.”

Wrexham striker Ollie Palmer appears in the background of the bar scene. Up the town!

Mrs S had the 4.2L Diesel for horse trailer towing duties and it still rates as the most comfortable car either of us has ever owned. And you can usually fix it with spanners instead of a laptop.

Seen it many times on tv over the years but watched it live yesterday supporting our daughter. Managed to see her 3 times and her friends also saw her and it was great to all meet up in the pub afterwards. Incredibly humbling to see all of the charities being supported and the often sad stories that would be behind each runners chosen charity. The most emotional thing I saw yesterday was a woman running topless who had had a double mastectomy. Talk about a jaw dropping moment.

Not sure I agree with Chew. My compromise agreement from a US company was 2 weeks salary for every year of service plus £30k plus 3 months notice. And as above the company paid for a solicitor to rubber stamp the agreement. Hope you get a good offer.

CEX are pretty good for 2nd hand. WF-C500 for £35 and WF-C700N for £52. I’ve just bought some AKG on ear NC class B which are in really good nick. And they come with 2 year warranty.

Just realised I had another comparative picture between 2011 Olympus compact and iPhone 15. I took this sat outside a gallery while Mrs S was looking at some pictures so composition is not what I was interested in. The iPhone picture feels very ‘flat’ in the background, almost like a painted backdrop on a stage production, but the Olympus has lots of depth as well as warmth. Not sure how much flickr takes out of the original jpegs?

60832E9A-DD43-416F-B582-BADC64A8487D_1_105_c by Ian Pemberton[/url], on Flickr

P4079690 by Ian Pemberton[/url], on Flickr

@bikesandboots yes the default setting for iPhone is HDR so it always takes a few shots in rapid succession with different exposures and blends them together.

I took my new iPhone 15 and 2011 Olympus XZ-1 compact to Italy last week but only managed to do one comparison shot.
7AB23E76-071F-4100-B0BB-D6D8336D5BCE_1_105_c by Ian Pemberton[/url], on Flickr

P4079698 by Ian Pemberton[/url], on Flickr

Compact set on P mode with -0.3 exposure compensation which is normally pretty good for street photography but you can see how the tower in the background is blown out compared to the iPhone. That said, the foreground IMHO looks more natural on the compact especially the water surface and the poles.

The iPhone wins hands down with hand held nightshots which I wouldn’t even bother attempting with the compact.

702D76A2-79FC-43FE-B1FC-0F2E2A283022_1_105_c by Ian Pemberton[/url], on Flickr

Congrats to Stockport and my own team Wrexham for clinching promotion yesterday. We play each other at Wrexham on the last day of the season but Stockport are in poll position to wrap up the title by then. It also looks likely that Mansfield will be the third team promoted automatically but the playoff positions are hard to guess. Donny were 15 points off the last playoff place on March 3rd but now only 1 point.

Time to retirement is only really a big factor if you are buying an annuity. If you are going into drawdown you should be able to ride out most of the ups and downs and have a reasonable % in equities.

I decided to ditch Spotify and trialled Tidal and Apple Music before settling on the latter. Massive quality difference on both and Tidal just had the edge but the reason I went with Apple is the integration with Apple CarPlay. Also, SongShift is a great free app which transfers playlists between music streaming platforms.