so it'll probably only get used 10-15 times a year

I can rent brand new transits for £22+vat a day, inclusive of insurance, less for longer hires. Why on earth spend £4k something that you'll hardly ever use. Your budget (exclusive of insurance – you'll not have a NCB on the van if you already have a car insured- tax, servicing, MOTs and repairs) would keep you in hire vans for the best part of a decade.

at 15 uses a year your insurance alone will work out at around £22 a trip.

Talk you out of it you say?

Ok I'll try

Noel Edmunds owns one (probably)
The Daily Mail says they cause Ball Cancer
The remote control transmits your credit cards details to nigerian fraudsters
Noel Edmunds owns one (probably)

Cheaptents.com is also an actual real world shop, rather than a warehouse and a phone, so if you are in the north west you can pop in and see the tents (they have a fair few of them on display) useful for buying smaller tents where you might want to try them for size.

My wife and I felt physically sick, as did many others

I imagine they could hardly hold their dinner in as the uploaded it to youtube, we salute their bravery and their dry boaks.

Brazil
Lost in Translation
The Fall

Do you need help or can you fly them solo?

you've probably already let them fly by now but… one to hold, one to light. Otherwise they are a bit of a handful

I think copying CDs in the UK, even for personal use/backup whether to MP3 or tape or whatever is indeed illegal although there are moves afoot to change that.

Is it something that has ever been policed or prosecuted? I very much doubt that.

I'm not sure if its the same with music, but with film if you buy a DVD strictly speaking you are buying a license to view that film in your home (but not screen publically/rent/broadcast/distribute – those are different licenses and you can't buy them for £3.99 in Fopp), and not the piece of media – the disk itself. Notionally if you scratch/loose/break the DVD you can ask for another copy of the disk, as you still own that licence to view the film.

Where that seems to fall apart is if you sell/pass the disk on, does the license pass on with the disk?

I think in the situation you suggest – buying second hand CDs, ripping them and giving them away- there isn't a point where the CD publisher could benefit at any point in that process, as if you buy second hand then they are not involved anyway so what happens next – eat them, stick them up your arse, launch them into space is irrelevent. What you could perhaps do though if you felt benevolent, whether you buy new or second hand is simply retain the original CD after you've ripped it rather than put it back into circulation, even through a charity shop.

That would still technically be illegal, but within the spirit of the way in which the law is expected to change (ie it would be fair). Ripping for yourself, but passing the original media on, would still be 'sharing' in the sense that the law is currently being tightened (ie it would be unfair), but still unpolicable I would imagine and unlikely to ever be policed.

i used to rinse the bike with the water hose at the air and water bay at my local garage. doesn't get the bike totally clean but removes anything that would drop off later. Older buildings tend to have more nooks and crannys to shove a bike into.

The (absolutely not) 'hilarious' staged bits were unnecessary.

The trouble is without them the show would only have been about 10 minutes long.

allthepies – you be amazed at how tracable people are[/url] when they use the internet

I had one about 5 weeks ago. There are hernia ops and hernia ops, both in the sense of where your hernia is (para-umbilical for me) and what they do to fix it.

Advise as to when you can do what tends to err on the generous side (quite sensibly). I'd say for a week you're next to useless, partly for the discomfort – surgery itself might not be that sore but you feel pretty bruised and bloated, and partly because the anethestic buggers you up quite a bit (and knocks your immune system back a bit so you are a bit lurgy prone too). For the first week I'd say being driven somewhere for coffee and cake, then driven home again was the limit of my abilities each day.

For my procedure I was advised not to drive for 2 weeks which proved about right, up til then just being a passenger was harder work than you'd think, You do more work with your abdomen that you'd appreciate when you are travelling in a car and you'll never have such venom for traffic calming measures. "F@%king Humps!". I was also advised to avoid lifting,shifting, pushing, pulling for eight weeks, although I've been steadily getting back into lifting a shifting (and pushing cars through the snow).

Keep in mind that if you've been advised not to drive you might find you're not insured to do so as a result, you certainly aren't insured for the first day or two after a general anesthetic.

However…… Although keyhole is the preference it won't be clear until you are on the table whether its viable, in fact it won't be clear until they go inside, so what can start as keyhole can turn into good old fashioned butchery, especially if your gut accidentally gets poked, and you need to sign consents for both types of procedure. The recovery for that is a lot, lot longer, you'll be kept in the hospital for a few days for starters (rather than walking out at lunchtime) and the care you need to take throughout it is greater too, perhaps even being advised not to raise your voice!

"F@%king Humps!"

Make preparations to lay off activities for as long as you are advised, don't find yourself breaking the rules because you've given yourself no choice, or because you're bored. The first repair is the best repair so don't let impatience bugger it up, as it just leads to nastier ops and less successful repairs.

without saddles, without chains and almost always without tyres

Is this the new uber-niche?

Its capable of being a good show but they just made far, far too much of it. Given that the point of Top Gear was to focus on the top gear – the best of the best cars – there just aren't as many cars to feature as there are programs made. Rattling on about yet another reincarnation of the same car that is £200,000 more expensive, but 20 grams lighter is just dull, no matter how many sharks you try to jump. The last series looked like the end, I was quite expectant not to see another one, or at least the current one billed as the finale.

They clearly know whats wrong but if they knew how to pull it back they would have done it with this series, but if anything its been worse.

5th Gear (which is the old Top Gear format and presenters, minus the name and Clarkson, sold on to Channel 5) while pretty crappy has the advantage or being able to cast its net a lot wider, so at least it can be crap in lots of different ways

just another toy for the soda stream generation?

I was standing in John Lewis's the other day and thinking the exact same thing. But i think its people who didn't have a Soda Stream or a Mr Frosty that buy them.

I predict the big thing next christmas will be a tiny little counter-top malt house and whisky still. Or a tiny little water wheel that you can run under the tap to make your own stone ground oatmeal.

Also, in future make sure you are connected to the external drive when you add new music, otherwise it'll create a new folder on your drive and store the music there instead

careful now…… I've just had to put some apple goods into repair and they identified it as mine from the packaging rather than the item itself. Fine for me as the box had been kept as it was handy for carrying the machine around, it also wasn't a warrentee issue.

But returning what appears not to be the item you bought would look less good, as slippery slick apple products don't flaunt their serial numbers, but the packaging does

Can you put the silver tint on the windscreen?

yes, but only on the inside 🙂

the tinting prevents shattering of the glass and is also quite difficult to penetrate

quite the opposite actually the tinted film holds all the shattered parts together so you can take the broken glass out pretty much whole, a particular bonus if you want to steel the car rather than something out of the car, you don't get broken glass stuck in your arse, and you don't need to try and clean out all the broken shards before you fence it

and the best bit – with the film fitted the window breaks almost silently, and what you do hear sounds nothing like glass being broken.

So tinting the windows in the hope of avoiding theft is just going to result in getting the window broken just to have a casual look around, as you can break it without worrying about attracting attention.

If you own a van something you have to get used to is your empty van getting broken into regularly just for a nosy.

Mask the squeaks and creaks with very loud dirty talk, screams and the smashing of crockery, or by playing Jeff Waynes' War of the Worlds at full belt

I used the same techniques to adjust and maintain the suspension on my bike

the hand-cranked ones can be a pain in the arse- ornamental but not always very successful ergonomically . But if you unscrew the handle and operate them with a drill driver they are a hoot.

A lot of these guys will be one man bands so you'll not get a quick response unless they have a number you can call.

As a fall back – a days hire of a transit is £30-£40, (nearer £50 if the sofa is more than 8ft long) return fuel will be about £40

have a search on ebay itself you'll find a few people who specialise in bulky uplifts. I used a guy in cheshire who specialises in moving big bits of woodwork machinery – ideal for idiots who buy 1 ton machines then realise that the machine in in dorset and I live in glasgow.

Their deal was they would wait until there was enough business from a certain region to make a trip cost effective – the longer you were happy to wait the cheaper the price. I was in no hurry so got if delivered for less than the fuel would have been to drive one way!.

Those guys used flat beds so not really weatherproof enough for a sofa but there is bound to be others that operate in a similar way

Knock Knock

"who's there?"

"A control freak, now you have to say 'Control Freak Who?'"

Was it a jealous husband ?

He has a husband? More than one? Italy must be more liberal than I'd imagined.

your allowed to exclude people for no reason what so ever

there are plans to demolish social housing in glasgow to make way for a shopping mall, the aims and ambitions of that mall are stated by defining the people who won't be welcome there

Well….. shopping malls are private property, they don't have to have any reason to not allow people in. If it suits them to ban people with hoods, that their privilege. If they want to make distinctions with regards to age, thats their call too.

The security guard could have used some discretion in this instance but perhaps his instructions didn't give him room to use discretion. They might do now.

"No children allowed, all dogs welcome" as they say in Bristol

You'll probably want to factor the trailer weight as much as the load – 'some sheep' or 'some bales' doesn't amount to much, but carried in a big burly trailer it does. You might want something heavier than a belingo for towing if the trailer is weighty, a berlingo is a tall small car, rather than a big car if you see what I mean.

not made any easier by having glove puppets on each hand

Ah the transmitter I've currently got automatically scans, but never managers to settle on a frequency here. Like the idea of having the option to use a transmitter as I use a lot of hire vehicles as well as my own motor so being able to take the dab from vehicle to vehicle is attractive, but day to day I'd want to connect by minijack instead

Well yes, but the tree won't shit on your carpet and eat all your peanuts

Unless you keep it in a container the trick is going to be digging it up without killing it isn't it? And if its anything other than a few twigs then container is going to be a bit of a swine to move.

We tried this when I was young with a small tree in a pot. It was so small though that it hadn't really started to look xmas tree shaped. And years later it wasn't really bigger or anymore triangular.

Theres quite a bit of tweaking and pruning that goes on during the farming of trees that gives them that nice dense bushy, cone shaped look. If you forget, or do it at the wrong time of year you get dead, bald patches, gaps etc

MTBCol – what frequencies does the Highway use? I gave up using my ipod transmitter because you can never find a clear frequency for more than a few miles in central scotland. Is there the option to run it through a mini jack instead?

The head unit I've got is fairly new so not so keen to change it, although I have spotted the odd DAB add-on unit that might work through the head unit.

Aside from the kit I'm thinking as much about reception and coverage, is coverage/signal good enough when you're travelling about the country?

Some really naughty harpists dress up as firemen and try to encourage people in burning buildings to jump to safety onto what they believe is a trampoline. But its not a trampoline, its a great big harp.

"18 Hour Girdle"

I also reckon that would be a good name for a ladies only endurance event.

edit: of the mountain bike variety, not some sort of record breaking frottage.

I have to say, it has 'unreasuring' written all over it.

I'm starting to get in the habit of googling the site and "review" before i order. I learnt this after googling "waterstones.com" and review after I'd ordered. Nothing dodgy about Waterstones' online service just totally out of step with anything you'd expect from an online seller, and nowhere near up to snuff.

Try skimming down to the 6th or 7th review here

how about chucking lime into it, perhaps in the form of a grenade of some kind

Speech Therapist: " Well sir, what seems to be the problem"
Patient: " I can't pronounce words which contain sounds such as 'F' or 'Th' "
Speech Therapist: "Well you cant say fairer than that"

forrest , jc decaux, most of the billboards in your area will have the name of the company that owns them on the frame somewhere

It was amazing how much pain he could inflict with a couple of fingers

You're luck he wasn't training to be a vet 🙂

One of my first jobs was teaching in a prison. Wanted to look smart for the first day, but keeping in mind I'd be teaching woodwork I decided to wear a nice practical looking shirt I'd bought from a stall in Camden Market that mostly sold government surplus.

Imagine my surprise as my first pupils file in to see that its the same shirt thats issued to remand prisoners.

15 minutes later it all kicks off between two of the inmates (it turns out they have history on the outside and the first time they've been put in the same room is in my class), chisels start flying round the room, the big red button gets pushed and the education unit is stormed by prison officers. As a face that non of the officers recognise (and not even a lot of the education staff) it takes two of the prisoners to intervene and stop me in my cunning disguise from being dragged off the to cells.