Chav TV!

How about looney left Andy Burnham? That’d make Labour unelectable – great!

She’s not a wee lass you know….

What, not even in pregnancy?

Looks to me like the crane driver was incompetent/reckless, but why did the developer build a house so close to a 150 yr old tree (or however old it was at the time)?

It looks to me like they needed the crane to stop the heavy bows of the tree falling on the house, but the chainsaw man chopped off more than the crane could handle.

The clean slice through the building just shows you how flimsy and insubstantial those houses are.

Hotel life sucks! Spent months in hotels in the past. Just hate ’em!

I hate capitalism, but if you have to give away the factor returns of your alienated labour then I would rather my reward for socially necessary labour time producing surplus value for my employer and reproducing my labour power went towards fetishized commodities from these people rather than certain alternatives. I’m sure Marx would have liked a fixie too.

So you don’t hate capitalism then!

Saw off and replace.

Tricky to remove the handrails and you’ll need joinery skills, but doable.

1st class compact car! All aluminuim body and great fuel economy. Superb looking, not dated and nice to drive as well.

Huge swathes of the country have suffered economic hardship over a long period. Typically the old manufacturing bases, legacy industries, the old “engine” of the British economy. Over several decades, those places have gradulally become too dependant on the public sector as the principal employer. Too many people are dependant on benefits in these areas too. The local economy is broken!

It’s like a life support system keeping a brain dead body’s heart beating, but it IS dead.

What these places need is commercial stimulation – something the coalition government are addressing to a small degree. Much more needs to be done however.

The solution is enterprise, not increased dependency on an already overburdened tax system. These areas are Labour strongholds – people there have been brainwashed into thinking they are victims who need to be supported. If there was a sea change in attitute in these communities – the majority embracing an enterprise culture, there would be a huge turn around within 20 years.

Don’t hold you breath though, when you are one step away from state dependency and there are no decent jobs, the temptation of Labour’s cash splurges takes away any incentive an individual might have to build a better life. You could also be sure your peers and friends would become resentful if they thought you were bettering yourself. Proper socialisn! A vicious downward spiral of underachievment and state dependency!

When will people realise how destructive a Labour administration is? How their politics ruin the country’s prosperity, their ideals kill enterprise. How it breeds inequality. We’ll end up like a third world country with them in the driving seat. Good job they aren’t in power now!

£700k pension? Didn’t Gordon Brown lift the cap on pensions which enabled this to happen? If you look into it, I think you’ll be surprized about how unfair he and his party have been towards the normal working class people of this country!

The high earners at the top of the private sector ARE frequently rewarded for failure. It’s like an exclusive club – insulting to hard working people! In this case, as a customer, you do get a degree of choice as to whether you want to continue to fund their businesses.

However, the vast majority in the private sector are perpertually under a lot of pressure to deliver. Failure to perform is a great concern and job insecurity is much more of an issue than for those in the public sector (perhaps until now).

People in the private sector (whatever they earn), aren’t the issue here because their organisations are not entirely funded by taxes.

This thread is all about individuals drawing huge salaries from the public purse (your pocket) – non-profit public services.

The situation should have never arisen, but we can thank Gordon Brown and the Labour party for this mess. NOBODY ELSE!

And the Liverpool City Council are £120,000,000 in debt!? WTF!!!

Playa Blanca, Lanzarote – near the marina. A lovely spot.

Sounds like a total ****! Not fit to manage people!

Find another job and then make sure you leave him in the lurch good and proper.

Never tolerate intimidation! The people who do are not much better as they are in effect condoning the abuse and massaging the ego’s of the abuser by being subservient.

Good managers earn respect, they don’t demand it!

Was the Vulcan bomber ever actually deployed in anger?

“Effin Scaley”, you are numpty of the highest order!

CAB will set you on the right track.

A small claim would be the right move after the insurance company refuses to respond to you, however you should forget phoning and start writing. Outline what you are claiming for (with supporting documentation/photos) and give them a reasonable time limit in which to respond. Keep copies of all correspondence and send everything recorded delivery. Keep any reciepts and note how much time you are spending. Tell the insurance company you expect full compensation for damage, your time and any inconvenience. Only you can work out what the compensation should be. They should count themselves lucky you weren’t injured!

CTC would probably be a good point of call for advice.

Hope you get just and proportionate recompense.

That sound odd. You shouldn’t have mains water supplying the bath if the hot is gravity fed.

A non-return valve in the hot supply to the valve would sort it, assuming the valve is working as it should, but you will never get even pressure between hot and cold supplies.

The solution is bloody simple!

Undo years of Labour profligacy.

Cut their pay!

As a general rule, a mortgage of 2.75 times your main income and 1 times your second is a prudent sustainable level, leaving you enough money to live your life.

Many people borrow far far more than this these days, but when interest rates rise, they are stuffed.

The temptation to borrow too much has fuelled house price inflation and left millions heavily in debt to the banks. Many have no choice but to be overleveraged now. They can blame the people who had no self restraint and who caused the huge bubble that has built over the past 25 years!

It’s not been these people alone however, they had plenty of encouragement:

1) Successive governments for relaxing financial regulation in their clamour for increased tax revenues. They allowed lenders to become reckless. They also taxed the backside out of the already damaged private pension system, thus fuelling the buy-to-let market.

2) Banks for throwing far too much money at people and creating cheap introductory rates at the expense of standard variable rate customers! They created the mortgage tart – people who continually swithched from one cheap loan to another.

3) The financial institutions that provide personal pensions/endowments, for lying to savers. This brought about a loss in confidence in this sector. It was the poor value of these traditional pensions, their inflexibility and the fact that annuities don’t form part of a policyholder’s estate when they die. This exasurbated the closure of company final salary schemes. Thesed combined started the buy-to-let boom – people just wanting an alternative to protect themselves in retirement (and their offspring).

4) Estate agents and developers who inflate prices, especially new build.

The young have no chance of buying property at sensible prices. Our system is well and trully broken. The only people who can have things like this will be top earners and rich foreign investors. The rest will have to pay through the nose and rent.

None in the armed forces?

They didn’t say, probably a few wouldn’t you think?

The bullies should be sent home – period.

Too many teachers whimp out and allow bullies to dominate proceedings! These people need to grow some balls!

Someone said the £40k cost of excluding a bully was a Daily Mail Factoid. Stupid comment! Who reads the Daily **** Mail? It’s a comic!

There’s no way it costs £40k to exclude a child. This a nonsense bandied about by people who have absolutely no commercial savvy whatsoever!

The solution is for the parents of the bullied girl to threaten legal action against the school. Now this IS something that would make the school sit up and take note.

It’s also possible that the cost of excluding the bullied child could cost as much as £40k. If this happened, the schools would find it much easier to get rid of the troublemakers, or simply resolve the matter.

Now that would send out the right message!

– servicing, waxing – and cost to fly them (£30 each way) can close the gap, so it’s not necessarily the cost saving it seems compared to renting.

£30 each way? Not to Europe! £15 each way is more like it, but until recently BA carried skis for free. Virgin still did free carriage in March when we flew to San Francisco.

I service my own skis. I bought Toco wax and scraper, P-Tex, Scotchbrite pads and an edging tool. I use a 20 yr old travel iron that never got used until I got my skis. Takes 20 mins to do both skis and is very easy. The total for these ski materials/tools cost less than £30 and i’ve done a good 10 wax and edges so far. Still got tons of wax left and this will last me forever. A shop in the Alps will charge 30 Euros for this and they won’t take as much care.

The only thing i’d pay for is a proper base grind, but this hasn’t been neccesary with my current skis so far and i’m not competing, so this is no issue.

Rental skis usually have no edges left on them except when they are new. Shops often don’t even wax then between hires.

Try some out at a snowdome if you can find a slope which has a decent shop and demo skis. I wouldn’t get your hopes up though. You might be lucky, but seeing as everyone is different heights etc, the shop would need to have a lot of pairs of different lengths for each type of ski.

The idea of trying lots of different skis out whilst on holiday sounds like a good idea, but in practice, all you want to do is ski, not trudge through to shops in your boots in the middle of the day, piss your mates off causing them to wait, or end up on your own for the restoof the day. If you have a shop right by your apartment, that’s fine, but this rarely seems to be the case in my experience.

Arriving in a resort, you’ll always end up in a queue for hire skis and not get much advice as they want to get you out the door ASAP. This takes time (a lot on arrival days) and you have the same problem dropping your skis off at the end of the holiday. There’s the potential hassle of the shop claiming you damaged the skis and then there’s the rental cost, over a £100 for 6 days for a decent pair of skis – RIPOFF!

I bought my Rossignol B2 Bandits five years ago for £385 from a British run shop in Andorra. The price was including shipping to the UK.

I’ve been skiing twice most seasons and as we often drive or get independant flights, use 7,8 or 9 day lift passes. We have done two resorts on a trip, stopping off en-route to our main destination for a day and not returned there, so having your own skis solves the complication, time and expense of two separate hires on one trip. In Tahoe we did the last day in a resort away from where we stayed, en-route to San Francisco. You really need your own skis for this.

I’m massively quids in so far (£400+) and I broke even after about three years. I’ll get several more years out of these i’m sure, but the temptation is to upgrade to newer ones. I’m sure I could get £100 for mine, all day long!

I think skis have gone up a lot since I bought mine and this is probably due to the weakness of Sterling. I’d still buy new skis, but go to a Decathlon, or other out of town ski shop on the way to the Alps. You always see good deals on skis especially towards the end of the season. Early in the season you will find last year’s models. It can be difficult finding the right length though, so you might have to phone ahead. Not easy!

Do you homework and find out what were the top rated skis last season and then keep an eye out online and in shops.

Skiing is one of the best holidays going by a country mile and having your own kit is the only way to go if you are a frequent skier and like to create bespoke trips to get the maximum time on the slopes!

Do they still play that old music with it?

You can’t beat a bit of French taunting! 😆

So I got a little gs125. After literally a few weeks, I got fed up with traffic bunching behind me, and being blown all around the road in shitty weather

Exacary! 😆

I did CBT and day one of my DAS on a CB125 and boy, did my backside hurt! I'm 6ft2" and these bikes are great for small people and, like the 500cc Suzuki i did the remaining 4 days of my DAS on, are a bit basic. They are training school/commuter bikes. Zero bling, both were uncomfortable and cheap as chips!

The Varadero 125 is indeed a good choice if you want to go that route. Frankly, i'd do the CBT followed by the DAS as soon as you can and skip the 125cc. At higher speeds the basic Honda i rode 125cc felt unsafe and simply hadn't got enough grunt (although I managed to rag the one i was on and topped 75mph when the instructor told us to "open it up", but it was well past it's performance comfort zone).

The advantage of gaining a full license is you will be able to buy physically bigger bikes which will be right for your height. 500-600cc bikes would be about right as a first machine in my opinion. I'd generally avoid sports bikes as these are just going to encourage risk taking, but apart from this, they aren't renowned for comfort.

Power is irrelevant so long as you keep a lid on your behaviour.

I did the DAS 3 years ago after a 28 year break, with a view to commuting. Since then no commuting need has arisen and i'm tempted to pick up something old with a view to a rebuild. I'm sure it wouldn't be cheap, but fun. You can get some pretty excellent older bikes for £1000, so this might be a waste of time.

In terms of suitable bikes, being the same height as you, it isn't easy finding something big enough, but which doesn't have an enourmous engine. The BMW GS1200 is the right size, but the enging is too big and too heavy. I looked at TDM's and other "adventure" type bikes, but nothing has set me on fire yet (aprt from bikes with huge engines).

I went to the BMF Tail end last year expecting to see all the manufacturer's offering, but all I found was lots of stalls selling end of line stuff at knock down prices -which was nice seeing as I was also there to get kitted out.

Kids are a massive responsibility and i'm surte you don't need the safety lecture.

Good luck, whatever you choose to do!

50 is the new 30.

Lard arse younguns prefer to use a car and don't see the point in riding push bikes, or doing any other form of useful exercise.

Age is no issue. Itmight have been for our parent's generation, but ours (the forty to fifty somethings) is much more active.

I skied with a 78 year old a couple of years ago, a retired surgeon. His wife, a lawyer, wasn't much younger and they were both very fit and agile.

We were being guided on a ski tour operator's excursion and we were the in the advanced set. It was full on fast skiing all day and the old guy went like a bat out of hell. We could hardly keep up!

At lunch I learned that this couple also liked to sail, picturing them in some comfortable cruising yacht, but no, not them! They were into racing Lazers off the South coast. They said they hand launched and recovered too.

I hope i'm like that when i'm their age!

You can tell the one's on here who don't have a motor vehicle, by the rude chip on the shoulder attitude!

I think he's gone past the "wits end" stage and hence his strange unseemly behaviour.

I can understand why you walked away that night. It was supposed to be a catch up with an old mate, not three hours of embarrassment!

Still, now your judgement is no longer clouded by alcohol, your natural good nature has come to the fore.

I would definitely contact him and ideally meet up. You need to tell him how you have noticed a change in him since you last met and how concerned you are. You need to give him the opportunity to offload. Let him talk. If he doesn't want to, don't force it, but tell him you care what happens to him and will help if he'll let you.

People who are depressed do push their friends away. I believe they do this because they have no self-confidence and are uncertain about the strength of the relationships they have formed with these friends. Some so called friends can be really rather shallow – fair weather friends. I think your mate wants to test the friends he knows to find out who'll really standby him. The trouble is that this pattern of behaviour is chronic and bit by bit, those non-fairweather friends get sick of it. The rejection just reaffirms his fears and so the cycle it continues until there is nobody left. Very sad!

The other thing is that mental health issues are still very taboo here. If you broke you leg, you could expect plenty of wellwishers at your bedside. If you were admitted to hosptital for a mental breakdown, nobody but your nearest and dearest would show up. People are scared when someone is mentally unwell, but in most cases, there is nothing to fear and the patient will benefit from people treating them just like anyone else. I think attitudes are gradually changing for the better however. Many significant people including Sir Winston Churchill suffered from depression, so this illness is not debilitating, it's just one aspect of an individual's personaility. It just needs self-management and for others to accept it as no big deal.

Being on medication should be helping him with his moods, but not always. When a patient first starts a new drug, or has the dose changed, the effects can be worse than if he/she is on no drugs at all. Similarly, several missed doses can present a problem.

Or, it might be that he has drifted into taking illegal drugs, who knows.

Only you can judge what is going on as none of us here have met the guy.

What I do know is that if your mate suddenly died, you sound as if you are the sort of person who would have a lifelong regret that you hadn't done all you could for him.

He sounds very withdrawn and at high risk. Not only that, the public could be at risk too. In light of this, I think discretely contacting his mental health unit is also the right thing to do.

I wish you good luck and I hope your mate gets better!

Why not dry line the walls? There's foam backed plasterboard or you could just use plasterboard with a foil backing. You don't want to creat another proble, so I think you need to do some research to see what method/materials will best suit your property and budget.

There are a few choices, but as tron says, the moisture laden warm air is condensing in this room because it is cooler.

People often use the word damp, but in this context, we are talking condensation. As a building term, damp usually means water transmitted through the structure, which is not the case with your bedroom.

You could just fit a hefty radiator to mitigate the problem.

Keeping a constant airflow tith the rest of the floor of the house will help a little with the condensation too.

Good luck.

I love a lead balloon thread! 😆

I thought the same samuri!

Anyhow, it depends on which type of hernia.

For example, a femoral hernia can be difficult to detect, even if you know where you are looking.

I'd chill out for a few days to see if it gets better.

If it doesn't, go see your GP, but stop relying on unqualified STW forum contributors, for their two penneth worth. There are stack sof things that can go wrong with the human body and it takes and expert to assess the symptoms. There's an extremely high chance you'll get the wrong end of the stick listeing to advice on here.

For medical matters, just seek professional advice.

Clever people get mocked by stupid who people can feel insecure/threatened/undermined in their company.

Uber-intelligent people often lack common social skills as they just can't be arsed with small talk, or flattering people. They have much more interesting things on their minds, so people can find them cold and detached.

what more do you want?

Raunchy women that do nice things to your bits?

I discovered that I once had an elder brother, but he died soon after he was born.

I didn't discover this until my late father told me about him some 40 years later.

I don't think it was meant to be a secret, but you can imagine how my parents would have felt about it. I'm sure they wanted to forget about the whole sorry affair and so why prolong things by having the subject dug up again and again?

They pobably also didn't want to upset us either.

Knowing this made me realise how lucky I am.

It was on the wrong side of average for me. A fairly interesting plot, but I think it was a the prawns' ridiculous cat food fetish which blew it for me.

I don't get Ricki Gervais humour. The Americans like him though.

What's the point? It's just a small child.

The parent should be developing his social skills, not teaching him how to knock the cxxp out of people!

I wouldn't bother trying to call customer support, i'd take it back to the shop!

I had issues with a Blackberry I bought for my son. I could get GSM, but not GPRS, so no internet.

The shop took the SIM out and did some stuff, then reinstrted the SIM, but this didn't allow the SIM to register.

I don't know what it was they did, but the issue was that the card was not registering correctly and they told me the SIM was registered in France (despite it never being used there ever!).

THe matter was eventually resolved by making changes at the provider's server(s).

Go into the shop ant let them deal with it.

BigButSlimmerBloke – Member

spongebrain in link to right wing rant rag shocker <<yawn>>

Typical lefty response! Has no argument and so resorts to abuse! Thicko!

Fairly easy to get round – get an interest only mortgage for your house, then put the difference in a bank account. They can't touch your 'savings' as you'll still have the mortage debt.

What, 100% mortgage? They don't exist anymore!

What if the bank won't lend you money because you have insufficient income?

What about all the assets you have which aren't property?

This is a wealth tax which will raid your savings as well as levy tax on significant assets.

First off why the **** are you reading the Express?. Diana's dead, get over it.

WTF has Diana got to do with it? Can you advise me on what newspaper I should be reading? The Socialist Worker perhaps?

Good lad Andy, I really, really hope you win the party leadership contest and get to impose your new policies – it will make Labour unelectable for the next thirty years

Let's hope so!