Add me to the ‘been there done that’ list. We had two goes available on the NHS, and were fortunate enough that the first was enough for our first daughter (now 5). We then used one of the frozen embryos privately for our second daughter (coming up to 2), and put a pin in it there.

I’m sure my memory has faded for a lot of the challenges now, but one of the comments above about the mental approach resonated with me. This is something which is both highly stressful and not 100% certain to succeed, so I think it’s really important to ensure that if all doesn’t go as you hoped then you have no regrets or anything you can’t beat yourself up about after the fact. If that means staying off the bike and the coffee so that you don’t regret things maybe being different if you hadn’t gone on that one bike ride, then such is life. It also shows solidarity with your partner.

For us, I also think it’s really important to set boundaries or limits. You can obviously spend a lot of time, money, and emotional capital here if this doesn’t come to pass as you hope it will. With our second, we had two embryos left and said that we would pay privately to try them both and if that didn’t work, we would leave it there. Again as has been noted above, people live highly fulfilling childfree lives even if that wasn’t the original plan.

I guess in short, while I’m hoping for the best for you and yours, do everything you can to set yourself up emotionally for what might come afterwards.

Possibly somewhere around the £8k – £10k.

My entirely unscientific survey of the one private school I know of in the vicinity suggested around £8k per term for someone in years 7-11.

You get lunch for that though.

I also know that if this happens I probably wont be able to afford to send my kid to private school, and having had conversations with others they may not be able to either. However there is a % of people that 20% extra cost will make naff all difference to. Therefore it becomes even more elitist than it was before.

To me this suggests that we should take an alternative approach. Perhaps make them cheaper, maybe even free. Of course, some central funding will then be involved but I think that’s ok as now everyone will be able to attend regardless of economic background. Elitism solved!

Remove private cars because of their pollution and mandate everyone either walks, cycles or uses public transport?

I’d settle for properly funded public transport and active travel infrastructure so at least it’s more of a real choice.

I therefore began singing the alphabet song in my head, when suddenly it hit me: in English and French, at least, we sing the alphabet song to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star

I realised this a few years ago when attempting to add some sort of nursery rhyme variation to proceedings to try and get small baby to stop crying. Less the Mozart of course.

I’ve noticed (minor) day to day performance improvements across my bunch of Sonos One SLs since I hardwired my Sonos Beam. There was also always one room that worked fine 9 times out of 10 but would then totally fail to connect leading to extreme frustration, I found that rebooting the mesh (as suggested above) tended to solve that but this also hasn’t happened since wiring the Beam.

In short, in my experience anyway it’s worth adjusting things so that you can hardwire at least one of them if possible. If not, try rebooting the mesh (I think you can even set it to do this automatically overnight daily, weekly etc. in the app).

So how is the nomination for the Booker Prize going?

The Bulwer-Lytton surely?

I have had words but just get laughed at.

Get her to unload the cutlery until your point is made?

I’m sure I came across this here, but

“Made a sound like a sack of builders rubble being emptied into a swimming pool”

So evocative.

Does that work then? I change the TP the same Name and Password as my router, then change my router name, and all devices will then just auto connect to the TP mesh? I would expect devices to recognise that it is actually a different network.

It worked for me, moving from a Virgin router to the mesh.

Not all Mesh networsk let you have a hard-wired backbone.

This is definitely worth considering if you have the cabling and/or patience to set it up. Ours was fine without it, but I think hard wiring the backhaul (the link between the two nodes) will have freed up a bunch of wifi bandwidth.

TP-Link Deco here as well, totally idiot proof with management via the app and works really well in our Victorian semi with just two nodes. Combined with fibre, it’s wifi you can ignore (and I mean that in the best possible way).

I know nothing about these things, but will you get any benefit whatsoever for your £1k+? If not, perhaps you could put that question to him (phrased all nice like) and see what he says?

Singletrack on subscription, and the odd book on occasion though 95% of my reading is on Kindle these days. I did also have a Cyclist subscription but I’ve let that lapse because, although I do like the magazine, I didn’t feel it was adding sufficiently to justify the ongoing cost.

I see far more dog crap around town!

That’s because the cats are crapping in everyone’s gardens, not the pavements.

Genuinely interested in some clear rationale

Bants?

This also reminds me of these highly evocative photos.

The **** gov.co.uk website.

I’m glad I’m not the only one. Someone much smarter than me will I’m sure be along soon to explain what’s going on, but it seems like they’ve made a deliberate decision to employ a design language and structure that literally no other website uses. I guess it’s supposed to follow usability guidelines or something, but the end result (for me anyway) is that it is absolutely impossible to navigate.

We paid a solicitor for ours even though we also have a very ‘straightforward’ family setup with no complexity of funny business. It was still reasonably eye opening in that there were scenarios we hadn’t considered and seemed worth it to me to make sure it was done correctly to best reflect our wishes.

The problem of course is that you never get to find out whether what you did worked as intended, so might as well give yourself the best chance of getting it right up front.

They queried it with her and she blurted out “daddy hit me.”

So I have a kid in reception, and one of the first things they said as part of the parents welcome stuff was that we no longer have secrets from the teachers. Our kids will (and do) tell them anything and everything with no regard for phrasing or context.

I’d plug in the virgin router, disable the wifi, plug your base mesh station into it and then carry on as you were before.

This is the right starting point for sure, and is what I did. I then wired up my TV/Xbox/Sonos/Hue stuff along with wired backhaul to the other mesh node afterwards. This had essentially zero practical benefit except that I now know everything is as good as it can possibly be, the 1 time in 50 that it took my TV more than a few seconds to join the wifi no longer happens any more, and the Xbox downloads stuff faster.

The Guardian readers have got Newsnight, Question Time and the BBC Climate Collection to keep them miserable

It actually got a very good review.

That’s not an argument. Argument’s an intellectual process. Contradiction’s just the
automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.

No it’s not.

It’s easier to maintain arguments elsewhere as the standard of argument is usually lower than this forum.

No it isn’t.

It’s actually because we are doing IVF and I’ve been told that I shouldn’t sit on a bike saddle much until it works or doesn’t

Been there. I remember not taking it well when I was told I shouldn’t ride my bike for a while. Best of luck to you and yours.

They’re not particularly cheap but would a suitably sized Asgard in place of your shed help? They can be insurance friendly with the right padlocks and things.

1 – ignore

2 – mess about with them. Given tehm an email address (burner email?) and see what they send. Then keep pretending you’ve posted the item. Or get their address, print out the email content, put that in an envelope, and just pop that in a postbox without a stamp. see if they pay the charge..

If you go for option 2 post it on here though yeah?

We have FTTP from an ‘alt-net’ (i.e. relatively small non-Openreach) provider whose main selling point apart from the actual service provided was that they are not Virgin. They brought the fibre over from the telephone pole to the same place on the house where the copper cable connected, but then it was basically up to us where we wanted the hole drilled and the termination box placed.

Then it’s ethernet to the main wifi mesh box, from there to a small switch that splits everything off to TV, xbox, Sonos, Hue and ethernet (put in by the previous house owner to my lasting thanks) round to the back of the house where the other mesh box is. End result is great wifi at the back of the house where the study is and even in my (tiny) garden!

So in short, would certainly recommend small providers (they have more to lose if they get it wrong), get them put the termination point somewhere that works for you in terms of connectivity and out-of-the-way-ness, and then do whatever you need to do to get wifi where you need it which is pretty simple these days with relatively cheap wireless mesh systems.

Yeah sorry everyone my 5 year old daughter’s current favourite thing to do is find every single dandelion she can and blow the seeds around as much as possible because it makes the world ‘beautiful’.

People who refuse to see that sometimes, issues aren’t just black and white.

I’ve found it easiest in the past to just download the GPX off Strava, edit it in gpx.studio which has a bit of a learning curve but does let you just delete the front and back parts of a ride for example, then re-upload.

Cheers for the update, all sounding positive.

I only tend to keep consumables as spares, or hard to get parts

This is my approach as well, I’m curious what you’re ordering that you absolutely have to have next day.

These days I tend to either buy from Sigma Sports who I find under promise and over deliver with timescales, or more often just ring my LBS and ask them to get it in.

That TIE Interceptor is a thing of beauty.  It was always my favourite of the Imperial fleet.

Totally agreed. I’d love to get it, but as ever space is an issue, plus I got the Interceptor from the smaller Tie Interceptor vs Fang Fighter set last year which is much more in scale with my non-UCS Tie Fighter, Tie Bomber, and X-Wing.

I’ve had a great deal of fun with this Atreides Royal Ornithopter build.

This is great news, it’s next on my list after I finally get round to finishing the Galaxy Explorer which has been about 1/3 constructed for about a month now. I’m just hanging on for a good GWP or double insiders points or something before ordering it.

Umami?

Salmon spring rolls.

Vice Restoration The Musical.

I found sunshine and dry trails. Definitely out of the ordinary.

The website looks alright to me tbh, if it’s a scam it’s quite a high effort one.

What they’re selling on the other hand…

Yeah SPDs on gravel all the way for me.

Just to add to all the bluebells…

Through the mouth if I’m not concentrating. Through the nose if I’m paying attention to it, but it definitely limits how much effort I’m wanting to put in (related to @thisisnotaspoon and wanting to stay in Z2).