That thing being sitting in a field in the sun, having a couple of pints, whilst some people play cricket nearby.

Roll on summer!

Do you believe God intervenes in the universe, or does he sit back and let it all play out?

Enough to give me and Mrs SWSD investment income of about 24k. (we’re not particularly extravagant).

I have no idea how much I would need. Half a million maybe?

I haven’t used QB for a while, but the online and desktop versions used to be quite different. The online version was a bit more dumbed down.

This, of course, might be a good thing.

I think all the online accounts packages will give you a free trial for a bit, so it might be worth having a play with a few different ones.

I’m not sure I would trust the guidance on that Gov.UK website linked above.

Lock knives

Lock knives are not classed as folding knives and are illegal to carry in public without good reason. Lock knives:
•have blades that can be locked and refolded only by pressing a button
•can include multi-tool knives – tools that also contain other devices such as a screwdriver or can opener

That definition wouldn’t cover a standard Opinel, which I think most people would agree is a lock knife.

Didn’t armed toddlers cause more accidental death in America than Islamic terrorism in 2017?

And apparently Kinder eggs are banned in the US because they are a choking hazard.

priorities

indeed

Just ask: “is it ok if we bring our dog?”.

No reminder that the original drunken offer had been made, so face saved all round if the sober answer is no.

These carriers will have drones as their primary weapon before their end of life.

Hence my question about the effect of a nuclear explosion. You can’t operate a drone if you radio and radar don’t work properly.

The F35 is bang on the right aircraft for the job, it’s been specifically designed and optimised for the modern electronic battlefield

What would happen if, at the outset of hostilities, someone with the capability detonated a nuclear bomb in the upper atmosphere? Would it have any effect on all our electronic gizmos and our ability to communicate with our electronic gizmos?

Just had too look up what “homologated” was.

I imagine a tyre manufacturer would pay a fair bit of cash to the car manufacturer for the right to supply their tyres as “approved original equipment”.

That first stage looked like it was coming back down way too fast. Amazing how it slowed down in the last few feet.

I’m not sure a modern suit would look particularly 1920s.

You could try a DJ with high winged shirt collar?

Don’t forget to grow a really impressive moustache.

Anyway, the sort of people who are daft enough to be injured by, for example, jumping in a river or climbing up some rocks, would probably be daft enough to do it without watching the programmes.

I thought the one where Bear made a mold of his head using only a microwave oven and some Polyfill was a bit OTT though.

I went off him a bit after reading his autobiography.

He did his Everest climbing bit, got back to Base Camp and just jumped onto a passing helicopter. He seemed to think it was a great joke just to bugger off leaving the rest of the expedition to do the boring packing up and walking out of there. Not the sort of person you’d necessarily want on your team.

EDIT: I quite like his TV programmes (or the few I’ve seen), they’re fun to watch.

I don’t know about disinfected chickens, but I was watching the head of DEFRA (or the head of the bit that deals with plant and animal health) in front of the Select Committee stating they had no plans to change the way they handled any imports of plants or animals.

He had no control over how other countries chose to treat our exports of plants and animals though.

One piece of serious but (very) blue sky thinking that was put forward to get around the customs union mess is if the UK contracted with the EU to run the EU border on its behalf. So goods continue to enter the EU at Harwich, Southampton, Heathrow etc. and the new “international” borders at Dover, Fishguard, NI etc. are treated as if they were intra EU.

If the UK adopted the same customs tariff as the EU – and there is no reason why it wouldn’t, it would mean business as usual, as far as Customs borders are concerned.

It would all hang on the will of UK and EU politicians to try and make sense of this mess though.

There’s a myth that Britain is overcrowded and it feeds in nicely to the Brexit propoganda and xenophobia

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096

That article is about the proportion of Britain that is built on. Its not about whether Britain is overcrowded.

Embarrassing that the police/HSE of the town of Lincoln of all places spoiled the party- surely there would have been a way around that? The friking thing does LESS than walking speed at full chat.

I dunno. When they were mucking around with the rope in the High Street it looked like there would be only inches to spare in a couple of places.

Then when they started trying to drive it – three blokes, all communicating by hand signals. What could possibly go wrong?

It was a shame they couldn’t incorporate it into something more official at Cambrai though.

Incredible amount of work needed to build the thing. Presumably JCB and that other engineering firm did it gratis?

It apparently was part of King Charles I of England’s collection in the 1600s and got lost, but was “rediscovered” in 2005.

A lot of royal stuff went “missing” at that time. Either sold to fund the war, confiscated or just nicked. It would have just hung on somebody else’s wall for a while.

I think it depends on how personalised the plate is. I know someone whose plate correctly spells out his full surname without any leftover letters. It looks quite cool, especially as he is about 100 and drives an nice old Jaguar. It must have cost a fortune though.

Wonder if it’ll cause an increase in cheap imported/smuggled alcohol?

Probably not. I think that why they’re talking of a minimum price at retail rather than slapping on more excise duty.

The booze may be smuggled but the corner shop still has to charge the minimum price. It’ll be obvious if they’re not, unless they are selling it under the counter in plain brown paper.

Upping excise duty will just mean more smuggling with no control over final price to the consumer, which is supposed to be the whole object of the exercise.

Apparently this is why it is “impossible” to fly over Antarctica (despite the fact that people have done it and commercial airlines schedule regular flights that would be impossible with giant ice walls blocking the way)

That’s a point – airlines like to fly on a great circle as its the shortest point between any two places on a globe. If the earth was flat, their routes would actually be larges curves. So they’d be wasting a lot of fuel.

Are the airlines in on this conspiracy?

As a boat sails off into the distance, it sinks below the horizon.

How do they explain that?

As well as the short term/long term thing, think about what you want the money for.

If you can’t afford to loose the money, keep it somewhere safe.

The only reasons a bloke needs access to a hair drier – melting dubbin into boots and wax into waxed cotton

Remember all the fuss when the Panama papers were leaked?

Does anybody know what, if anything, happened as a result of those?

Being Catholic was also seen as treason. The rest I’m sure you do know about, my history is crap but even I know that Catholics had a bit of rough time during the reform.

Both Catholics and Protestants had a rough time during the reformation, depending on which monarch was in charge. But even then, the government didn’t go around burning thousands of people just for being catholic or Protestant.

Buy the time of the Gunpowder plot the reformation was long over and England was firmly Protestant. Catholics were persecuted and occasionally executed (mainly the priests) but in the main the persecution was at the level of debarring them from certain offices etc. And this persecution was more due to the failure to observe the beliefs of the Church of England rather than being catholic per se.

It was the removal of this persecution that in part cause the Glorious revolution in 1688.

The thing about the 17th century was that for most of the time people were shit scared of the Pope and his Jesuits minions over throwing the British Monarchy and imposing the Catholic religion. (Think like the Dail Mail and the Muslim menace hiding behind the Burkha, only worse). The Gunpowder plot was just one of these supposed Popish attempts to overthrow the monarchy.

So when Catholics were executed, it was because of a perceived link with this effort to overthrow the monarchy and hence treason, rather than being Catholic. (but it really does get difficult to separate religion from politics).

Most Stuart Monarchs were rather partial to Catholic beliefs anyway. – Divine right of Kings and all that.

Anyway, academics have written vast tomes on this and nobody has yet come up with a definite answer, so I may be wrong.

I notice all this hanged drawn and quartered bit has been watered down a so as not to offend modern sensibilities.

They always miss out the bit where your gentleman’s package is sliced off and burnt before your eyes.

They wouldn’t show that on the BBC either.

yet another victim of religion and politics getting mixed up

To be fair, in the seventeenth century there wasn’t much difference between the two.

Apparently, in the 17th century, they used to stuff their Guys with live kittens so there would be realistic screams when burnt.

Imagine the uproar if the BBC tried to show that on TV.

He doesn’t trust a woman around any equipment or machinery

Not even an ironing board?

We used to like it when we were young and poor. We used to save up so we could have stuff that we couldn’t usually afford. Sitting at home with the heating on all day, stuffing your face with expensive food was something different.

When the kids came along it made it more fun.

Now we’re older and relatively comfortable and the kids have grown up. We could have Christmas Day most weekends if we wanted to so its nothing special really.

If the attack hadn’t happened, Britain may well have handed over the Falklands to Argentina a long time ago, despite what the islanders wanted.

There wasn’t much appetite for retaining expensive but apparently useless colonial possessions in the early eighties.

If Musk ever gets his act together and is in a position to actually send humans to Mars (and some how I doubt he ever will be), there will be no shortage of applicants.

From the tone of this thread, I doubt many of those applicants will be middle aged Audi driving IT professionals with a slightly odd obsession with wood burners and MTBs.

Might we also then have ‘punk’d’ ourselves for having accelerating mass-transit, mass-pollution, deforestation, mass-production, intensive agriculture/overpopulation and megacities?

Only if the steam engine delayed/prevented the fall of the Roman Empire. I doubt it would have stopped the empire rotting from within and being invaded by barbarian hordes (unless as a by product they invented gatling guns). So the Dark Ages would still have arrived about on time.

Weirldy enough, the bicycle. Pretty much any blacksmith roman times could have built one…

Why stop there? How about the steam engine? We’d have a steampunk Roman empire!

If you showed that factory farming picture to someone in, say, the 17th century, struggling to feed their family after a string of poor harvests, they’d think it was a brilliant idea.

And tarmac roads? Way better than being up to your arse in mud for six months of the year. You can still get from one end of the country to the other in less than a day despite the traffic.

The past is a different country. They do things differently there.

You’re right; you’re talking cobblers

So why is it cobblers? It wasn’t legal to burn wood in smokeless zones 20+ years ago. I don’t think much has changed since then?

You can burn wood if it’s an “exempt appliance

Ah, that make sense. My 50 year old Parkray probably wasn’t “exempt”. They may not have existed back then.

Dunno if its been covered above, but if you live in a smokeless zone you can only burn smokeless solid fuel. Wood isn’t a smokeless solid fuel so you shouldn’t be burning it.**

So all this talk about banning wood burners is cobblers. Its already covered by existing laws.*

However wood isn’t that smoky, at least compared to house coal, so folk tended not to worry too much. Now its been made trendy by bearded hipsters its starting to cause a nuisance.

*Or at lest it was in 1990, when I last checked with my local council.

** Except for 15 minutes “lighting up time” when you can be as smoky as you like.

Back OT, Lukaku needs to be careful what he wishes for! Football crowds being football crowds will never do what they don’t want to do….and, by raising the issue now, he creates the possibility of opposition crowds singing an even more demeaning (if that’s the right word) chant

Look at Lukaku,
can’t kick a ball,
and I’ve heard people say,
he’s got no dick at all?