I think the solution is to build council homes.

Councils should not flog off anymore land on the cheap, but use it to build on.

Councils can get cheap 100 year mortgages and could negotiate very low rates with their lenders.

They can build their own teams to construct property, buying in certain skill in the short term. That would them the chance to give young British people training and experience and a decent start in life. Private developers should have to contribute a certain amount towards these projects so no longer having to build affordable homes into their proposals.

The cost of development to the public purse would be slashed, therefore reducing the amount of borrowing required for these projects.

Councils could then stop giving private landlords the incentive to let property to them, so the council would save the tax payer from funding lucrative private buy to let projects.

Private developers would then be able to just build developments for people who can pay their way.

I think we are much loved, which is why people from so many countries are so enthusiastic about coming to live here!

Maplins have one on offer right now, for £60

I very much doubt it’s you as males continue to “function” as long as they live, whereas women do not after a certain age (depending on the individual).

Have you looked into what advice is available on the subject online?

I wish you good luck.

I bet that smarts!

I have one of these. Badged as Diamant, but the box it came in said Towsure. I expect other companies badge these as their own product too.

No assembly, required other than to fit the number plate, folds flat in seconds, nice quality finish, full wiring and lighting, storage bag, everything locks with keys (included). An ingenious little design for much less than the well known brand – I paid around £150 last year, but seems like they are more now. This is a 2 bike only rack.

Diamant tow bar rack.

Probably because local employers don’t have well paid jobs for intelligent and driven individuals. It’s always been like this so long as I can remember.

Not one government over the last 30 years has done anything effective to decentralise the draw of London. Seems daft that we all have to spend hours travelling into and expensive and chested city when the quality of our work and our lives could be so easily improved.

Well there are plenty of narrow minded simpletons out there, so give them a cause like religion……

I think we should butt out of the civil war down there. Let some other country waste lives and money on the futile mission of trying to change a culture that is so vastly different from our own!

Sabre rattling politicians should face a tour of duty on the front line. That’d shut the bxxtards up!

Changing a battery on my 4S was a doddle!

Spent a few years painting full time and many more in DIY mode.

1st off, why does anyone still use gloss paint indoors? It went out of fashion in the 80’s. only ever use the stuff on exterior woodwork (an exterior variant).

As for Dulux, had many bad experiences with this – satinwood and gloss oil based. Very thick consistency and rubbish opacity. How do they make such inferior paint that is so difficult to apply with good results!?! 3 coats on a white primed base before it looked acceptable – complete waste of my time waiting at least 24hrs between coats!

I’ve tried satinwood waterbased and it never flows, so you always end up with brush marks that spoil the end result.

My recommendation is for an oil based satinwood/eggshell by Johnstones – fantastic stuff, used many dozens of 2.5l tins of the stuff. It’s good to recoat within 4 hours in warmmish ambient temperatures. This makes this competitively priced paint far more commercially viable when on a price! Can’t be doing with wasting endless days waiting for inferior paint to dry, especially when you need an extra coat of the stuff to achieve results easily attainable with trade paint!

I once reluctantly tried a water based woodwork paint designed to refinish kitchen doors. A small tin of this Crown kitchen paint passed the light scrape fingernail test when freshly dried with flying colours. So my opinion of water based paints then changed, but this small time was 5 times the price of what I used most of the time..

Washable matt paint was good to apply as well. First coat gets absorbed, thinking you haven’t enough for the second coat. The second coat goes miles as the first coat absorbs next to no moisture.

I think for heavy traffic, oil based paints win hands down. Yellowing is unavoidable, but I find the eggshell and satinwood finishes less susceptible.

I had that. I used one of these[/url]

I think it helped, but the injury will take time to heal and you never know whether the expensive gadget you bought did the trick, or whether it got better on its own.

As a last resort, Hydrocortisone injections offer relief, but the problem isn’t often resolved. These injections can cause unsightly localised disfiguration from the uneven breakdown of fat, or so I was told by my GP. Oh and these injections are very painful.

Looks like Bambi “bought it”!

Our housing market is unbelievably messed up!

Youngsters have no chance.

What will happen when those who own all the property begin to pop off?

By some rough calculations, property in real terms is around double what it should be according to what normal people earn. That’d be a really serious bit of negative equity if the market readjusts..

Nevermind, keep the immigration rates up and all those people renting will perpetuate the status quo.

And so buy to let will soak up the fall out from people dying off, plus the hairbrained government scheme to enable people to borrow too much, all indemnified by you and me. It could become like a whole new subprime crisis all over again! 😉

We are nowhere as free as we once were. I blame reckless lending and governments clamouring for all the tax revenue to fund their ideals (electoral bribes).

Rabid lefties are so in cabals of rational,though, they blame all woes on Maggie.

Gordon Brown favourite lines : “I am a prudent chancellor” later followed by “it’s the end of boom and bust”

He sold off the country’s gold reserves when the market price was at it’s lowest!

He deregulated the finance industry and sat back as the housing market and city boomed. He allowed this because he wanted the tax money to fund his wasteful schemes, to fuel his ego.

He splurged on PFI’s and bloated the public sector when the economy should have been naturally slowing down after 2000, but he kept it going by creating tens of thousands of non-jobs. End of boom and bust???

Then when there was a run on Northern Rock, he panicked and used public money to shore up this overspent bank.

We had Labour in power for well over 10 years, but STILL those with no clue (and are probably too young to remember) blame Margaret Thatcher for everything that ever went wrong in the UK. Rational eh! Par for the course! Lefties are so frustrated and angry in their jealous hatred that they can’t even think straight. And to think such barmy people can cast their votes!

RIP Maggie, you weren’t perfect, but you had balls. You stamped on aggressive militant unions and so rightly so! I remember the power going off in the 70’s, the rubbish not being collected, bodies not being buried, car plants at a standstill. The tail was wagging the dog!

In the late 80’s when I was just starting work, the factory I worked in was shut down for half an hour because someon dropped a small piece of ham on a thoroughfare. The unions shut production down to have the piece of ham removed! Bastards! Anyway, the factory closed years ago and houses occupy the site. We became uncompetitive and companies shifted production where unions didn’t exist.

I yearn for the sort of politicians we had back when Maggie was in power. We don’t have any personalities in mainstream politics now. They three main parties are roughly the same these days – fronted by a bunch of privileged toffs who went to posh schools, but have no comprehension of what its like to be a normal British citizen.

We need another PM with the same courage of conviction and charisma as that of Margaret Thatcher.

.

I find it sickening that large house builders get to eat up swathes of land, creating the eyesores of the future. As I search for a new home, I find an abundance of estate houses, because people don’t like living in them. They only moved there in the first place because they seemed cheap. These properties have inadequate parking, inadequate room sizes, no scope for improvement, are knocked up using the cheapest quickest methods and with run of the mill fittings.

These large bland developments are architectural vandalism. They destroy the character of the neighbourhoods in which they are built with no consideration for the impact on local amenity. You could be in Carlisle, Cardiff, Reading, or Chichester, these ugly sprawling box parks all look the same with their main access road and lots of mini roundabouts leading of down numerous pokey little rabbit warren cul de sacs.

Councils never used to intervene in local planning. Before then, our hamlets, villages, towns and cities evolved as they had done since man learned how to construct basic shelter. Since they intervened, councils have presided over hundreds of thousands of architectural carbuncles (many non-estate ones too). They even built a load of rubbish houses themselves and made a complete pigs ear of that exercise, wiping thousands off the value of adjacent homes.

Your local planning officer and the people who make the decisions on planning consent are not capable of making a decision on a development based on its architectural merit, they just tick boxes. They would not know a well designed house, sensitive to the vernacular, but designed to be practical for the way people live these days, if it landed on them from a great height!

As for this bloke Charlie, he’s a talented, but reckless fool. You cannot rail against the local authority and hope to get away with this sort of breach of the planning rules. If he ever did get permission for it to remain, I don’t think it would be saleable. Every prospective lender would run a mile at the non-standard, non-complaint construction.

What is needed is a complete overhaul of the planning system, so houses can be built, but large house builders are seriously disadvantaged. If land is available to individuals, they can build a single dwelling of high quality and still turn a decent margin as a reward for the risk and their hard work. The only blocker is the availability of development land. I say that small units of land should be put in the hands of local communities, for local individuals to benefit. This is local tradespeople, suppliers as well as owner occupiers.

One of the times I got held up on the M4, it was an accident involving two cars. As I passed the scene there was a Renault on its roof, perched perfectly on top af a Ford. Now that must have taken some seriously skilful bad manoeuvring!

I’ve an Atlas Copco/AEG 12v drill. It’s heavy, but built like a proverbial outhouse.

It runs on NiCd, recharged by a smart charger.

The unit and it’s batteries are 20yrs and 3 months old and amazingly, still working fine!

NiCd is looked down upon as old technology because its heavy and has a memory which, if you don’t discharge on each cycle, will quickly ruin the battery’s ability to hold a charge for very long.

I have always run mine totally flat before recharging and am stunned at the lifespan of these battery units.

There is no way LiIon or even NIMh would have lasted so long.

Ryobi are a value brand that are up to professional use, so easily good enough for a keen DIYer.

SDS is essential for drilling masonry. Get a drill with Rotostop so you can use chisel attachments. For occasional DIY use, any make will do.

As a comparison, the beardy man should get someone to push his car along the same route as a cyclist rides, to see how much CO2 they each emit.

I have an iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.

The iPad cold do with being a little bit bigger for home use.

A 6″ tablet wold be ideal on the move – something that slips into a jacket pocket.

I tried out he iPad mini and thought it was too big and relatively expensive.

I hate the way Apple are so tight about pricing the larger storage models and those with 3G/4G and GPS

IMHO, all Mini’s should have 3G/4G GPS, otherwise, what is the point of it?

Self employment is tough! If you are the right person for it; get on well with people/ a popular/charismatic type, have a bit of luck, are capable and work like a dog, you might do much better than as an employee.

Most people have jobs they don’t enjoy. In my experience, people in this predicament expend more energy not doing a job well by servicing a different agenda they have created, perhaps out of boredom, resentment, or just sadistic entertainment. This makes their colleagues’ day to day experience a nightmare.

So if you are in the wrong job, do something about it, but don’t expect that to solve your job satisfaction issues – other people will always make what could be a rewarding situation an uphill struggle. I have had jobs with a high degree of autonomy and where one can get on the road to change the scenery. This was good, but the job spilled into my private time far too much.

I don’t think many get what they want with their careers, but if you want a chance, you must have a plan. Gaining qualifications should be an integral part of a long term plan and once you have started, you should finish. The qualifications must be relevant to not just the role you are seeking in the immediate future, but to a wider spectrum of opportunities and the roles to which you aspire later in your career.

Taking a job in a cheapo retailer is soul destroying. It riles me that they only allow staff to do a 4 hour shift. They like this because they don’t have to give you a break, which would cost them money. Tight wads! There are too many companies getting away with paying peanuts, but then we all have to start somewhere. Just make it a stepping stone and use your time on the train to better yourself.

Look for another job closer to home, even if its a dull and poorly paid as the last job.

DONT QUIT YOUR JOB! An unemployed person is viewed as much less employable, so you automatically become in a much worse place! Having no job is a killer; you lose your daily routine, laying in bed and posting crap on websites like this. You eventually start to doubt whether you will be able to maintain a job (if you can get one). Agents are working for their client and not you. You are a commodity and don’t expect to be treated as anything else. It is soul destroying applying for jobs and not getting any response. You have no money to do anything and life is miserable as your self esteem takes repeated knocks. You receive a repeatedly reinforced message that nobody really gives a toss about you. Even friends and family won’t get it, giving ill thought out generic advice, not really understanding the route causes of your unhappiness.

You need to concentrate on what it is that makes you tick. I always think it’s good to focus in something you enjoy and are good at. Talent is a rare thing, so think about how yours may be nurtured.

I have done some volunteering to get me out of the house. It was largely menial work, but I enjoyed the interaction with others and because you are supplying your labour for free, you don’t suffer any ankle biting from employers thinking they own you because they are paying you a few quid. Doing this reflects well on your CV and could open doors you never imagined. It’s about being in the right place at the right time, working hard and staying positive.

Hope this helps.

You are a qualified architect!?

I thought he’d already gone off.

Ummagumma was pretty good

OP: why?

I find the Catholic sycophantic fervour surrounding the Pope rather ridiculous.

There was a clergyman gushing about the outgoing pontif, how he had been a good shepherd of his flock. Frankly, if I was a Roman Catholic living in a modem world, the inference that I am a dumb as a lost sheep would be rather offensive.

That’s the trouble with religious figureheads, they are delusional about their place in the world.

Religion should be irrelevant in a modern well informed world, but we are stuck with the attitudes of these religious flocks of sheep out there. Lots of fear, lots of guilt – a pointless preoccupation!

Barmy!

Great Snoring and Little Snoring in Norfolk
Ugley in Hertfordshire

EMENDO – Latin for edit

Beer scooter
Kebab
Habanero sauce

The disclaimer is a cop out, that ad. Is clearly inviting female applicants.

No, it’s a mixed sex school according to the ad.

I’ve got a great 25+6 with a neat mesh back that mitigates sweating. Has ice axe and walking pole loops, the +6 is in the form of two pockets that are neatly zipped away when not in use. The pack has an upper and lower zip for easier access and a rain hood that stows in a zipped pocket on the bottom. There are mesh side pockets for drinks and stuff and the top flap has a zipped pocket. I will look up what make and let you know if interested.

It wasn’t until my uncle died that I learned that 45 years earlier, I had an older brother. He was born with serious deformity and passed away within a day or two. I can’t imagine how my mother felt. Loosing a child is never easy, especially as she lost her daughter of 46 years. The way her generation dealt with issues was to not talk about it. Not sure that was a healthy thing, or otherwise. The hideous losses of WW2 probably gave people a different attitude to these days.

Life throws all sorts of crxp at you, but you just have to try and put it behind you and carry on. There is one strategy i use for dealing with such events: there is always someone worse off than you.

I won’t cite examples in detail, but my neighbours on either side each went through protracted terminal illnesses with one of their kids. One 18 months old, the other was 9. Harrowing! Neither ever mention those experiences now.

I hope all is well with the pregnancy, but if your worst fears are realised, think about the future and what might be in a year or two from now.

I wish you both the very best of luck!!

Don’t use satin finish, use matt. Keep the paint going on as even as possible. Don’t dunk the roller in the paint, dance over the top and roll off the excess on the try, but don’t press too hard. After spreading the paint as evenly as possible and, lightly roll over the area just done and move on.

You had better be careful who you accuse. You might end up at loggerheads with people and then they might ‘arbour a grudge.

There are a lot of cheap hotels near Bayswater.

If you ride on the road, expect your personal safety to be seriously compromised – think singletrack!

Windows mobile will eventually go.

Android and Apple overwhelmingly rule the roost.

I know a Kiwi who works for an agency that “imports” staff for the NHS.

They get a great deal on flights, accommodation and even a repatriation/ reintegration service at the end of their tour of duty – all at the British tax payers’ expense.

It a real morale booster for the British nurses (not). More of them leave which opens up more opportunity for immigrant workers.

We should take care of our own people (all colours of skin).

Socialism– — a word that must not be used

Communism would be more like it, so lets ban the word socialism and “make it real”