First time you hit a roundabout in the wet it pays to remember it's a rearwheel drive

Rear wheel drive is not at all scary.

They're reliable. The battery is an Absorbed Glass Matt one, and they're £90 a piece.

They rust on the sills, starting from the front of the rear arches.

They don't leak.

They're reasonably noisy. Noisier than a normal car, even with a hard top. But not at all unbearable.

The boot is rather small, but not stupid. Everything on them is pretty light weight (alloy bonnet etc.), so it's possible that a bike rack could dent the boot. I'd be inclined to get a bike bag and strap that to a proper Mazda boot rack. Or put the bike in the Focus.

That can't be legal, can it?

It's a bit like the mis-matched tyre sizes. It's not explicitly verboten, but you can be sure it's violating construction and use regs somewhere. Certainly a lot of the time a stretched tyre is on a wheel wider than the tyre manufacturer specifies is safe.

I quite like the stretched look, but being keen in the corners I've never been sure I'd like to do it on a performance car!

It's a bit of a religious issue on car forums. A while ago I saw a BMW that had been in a fairly minor prang with stretched tyres, and one of them had come off the rim. Not a great advert.

"Given that my best pal spends his free time playing computer games and drinking beer, I'm amazed that he's managed to find a girlfriend, let alone a wife."

How's that strike you?

Surely you'd need to have two different width wheels to have those tyres fitted?

Nope, 10mm is no problem at all in terms of making the tyre fit. Go and have a look at some of the trendy wendys who've managed to fit 165mm tyres on 8 inch rims at any McDonalds car show.

Being as the tyres were the same size in diameter, with only different widths, I'd doubt it made the slightest difference.

215/55 and 205/55 are different diameters (the 55 is the height expressed as a percentage of the width). Approx 8mm difference between the two. Which would easily be enough to upset some viscous diffs / transfer boxes.

Seems to me you were lucky not to shag your differential.

What the bloke above said. Won't matter on 90% of cars.

That said, I'm surprised you didn't notice. Even tyres that are mismatched by brand can cause some very odd handling, particularly in the wet. You may find that you can go round corners twice as fas now.

Didn't some kid in ammerica build a really small nuke by melting down the sources in several hundred smoke allarms and asking lots of different nuclear engineers/physicists how to do lots of little bits?

I was going to give a reply to this using what I can remember from A-levels, but I realised I'd probably be breaking one of those laws that lets the police bang up you without charge.

Tyres need to match in size on an axle by law. I believe it's an MOT requirement, but I'm not going to google for you.

I seem to recall reading/hearing somewhere that a nuclear device can only be detonated under certain very specific environmental conditions (eg. atmospheric/solar/astrological etc)? That is, you can't just let one off whenever you wanted to?

Sounds like a load of guff to me – from what I can remember of physics, once the detonator mechanism has gone off, it's a chain reaction.

On the other hand, you can be pretty sure that every time someone has let off an atom bomb, they've been examining every variable that could affect the power of the weapon so as to get as much impact for their very considerable investment.

The number of extra deaths occurring in winter varies depending on temperature, the level of disease in the population, and other factors.

They're obviously referring to those killer unseasonably warm winters.

Um, a conversation with a dementia specialist that I had 4 or 5 years ago. The word "about" is used as I can't remember the exact percentage.

Old people die of stupid things. Something like 40% of old people will kick the bucket if you move them from one care home to another.

Speshpaul, I suggest you start writing to the ONS and inform them that their figures are wrong:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=574

Old people just die more when they're cold. It's not so much to do with actually dying of hypothermia as things like their joints stiffening up, causing them to have a lot more falls in their homes.

I knew an ex squaddie, he used to go out on group rides when he was stationed in Germany with his mates. They all had 2 packs of B&H gaffer taped to the handlebars!

That's easy. My old job had a near enough 6 month "off" period. I suggest reading all the technical literature you have.

Whatever she wants. Only jewellery a bloke should wear is a watch.

If you must have one, I suggest you also buy an upright piano. You then have a convenient and safe location in which to "lose" it.

Given that they don't seem able to get together half a dozen well drilled blokes with rifles, body armour and frag grenades, which would be enough to cause chaos in any UK city, I doubt it.

I don't get this. Person has horrible life – stressful job or nagging spouse, or both. Person becomes miserable. Do we remove the source of the horrible life, or do we diagnose depression and dole out some happy pills?

Given what I know about the oil industry (generally people work very hard and work until the job is done, even if that means going on for 36 hours, because liquid money is literally being peed up the wall), I suspect a change of job and a month of getting proper sleep would make a massive difference.

I would only go down the route of seeking a diagnosis if you remove the causes of stress and aren't seeing things straighten out. A "history of mental health problems" is not something you want to be branded with for no reason.

Just because the BNP said it, doesn't mean it's wrong. Lots of old people do die of the cold in the UK. There is genuine fuel poverty, and there are people who are still pricing everything in their heads as if it's 1972 (ie, my gran).

I could never work for my Dad. On the other hand, I'd be quite happy working for my Girlfriend's stepfather. Completely different dynamic in my opinion.

I also know a lot of manual work is better paid than "professions" these days, let alone bog standard clerical work.

I'd be inclined to go for it. I know a lot of people with small businesses, and to me, the fact that he's shown you his order books and accounts suggests that he thinks pretty highly of you. My main concern would be that he has enough cash flow – there are good excel models you can download to produce cash flow statements, and if he isn't doing that already, I'd suggest it / take on the responsibility if I were you. Lack of cashflow is the number one reason for companies going bang…

Given that most lottery tickets are sold to idiots, I can't see it working.

As for independent MPs, stuff them. I wouldn't want an independent MP. Does any individual MP have the time or knowledge to read, absorb and comprehend every piece of legislation that comes through the house? I doubt it.

I agree with the bloke above.

Bike brakes work very much like car brakes (except that most car brakes us a single piston). To be very specific, they're like motorbike or car race brakes, as they have no dust seals (road car brakes have a rubber bellows attached near the end of the piston to keep muck out of the actual seals and off the piston).

The piston slides in a bore that is a very close fit – almost to the point of being an inteference fit, so dirty pistons can stop them moving properly in the bore. The seal is a square section o-ring. As the piston is pushed out hydraulic pressure, it deforms into a parallelogram sort of shape, due to the fact that it's gripping the piston slightly. When braking pressure is release, the o-ring goes back to a square profile, dragging the piston back away from the pad.

In my experience of brakes that are dragging and I have dismantled then rebuilt, you either have dirty pistons or ruined seals. Far more often than not, it's dirty pistons. I suspect all the procedures that are around involving pumping the pistons out, then manually pushing them back in are actually about cleaning the pistons, rather than getting something to lubricate the piston / seal interface. The seals are far too tight on the piston, and you want them to grip the piston anyway to provide the self retract mechanism!

Anodised alu is dyed. You can't dye stuff white. So it has to be painted / powder coated.

Neither have I. I'm not sure what the point of trunding around on some bits of wood at 5mph is. Except for the potential of breaking one's neck, cycling at 5mph.

If I'm going to break my neck, I want to be doing at least double digit speeds, if not treble digits…

PS: I also do not understand caving. If you cock up, you've got a good idea that you have for a long time. And they used to pay people good money to go down holes in the ground around here.

Load of rubbish from the above replies. Farmers just enjoy being cruel to animals. After you left the farmer came round with a bottle of shampoo to spray in all the little lamb's eyes.

They've just got it 'right'.

If by they, you mean him, and by him you mean Tullio Campagnolo, then you're right.

There's a very good chance of getting rid of our awful system this time though, as long as we get what most people want which is a hung parliament.

I certainly don't. We'd have weeks (months?) of uncertainty, and the economy would go even further down the toilet.

Constituency boundaries. You can have two constituencies (let's say A and B) with 1000 people in each, and a total of 1499 Tory voters and 501 Labour voters. If there are 1000 Tory voters in A, then A will return a Tory MP. B will still have an overall Labour majority, and return a Labour MP.

So with a rough 75:25 split, you can get a 50:50 split in terms of MPs elected.

In odder situations, you can have constituencies C, D, E and F, where C consists of 1000 votors, D, E and F all consist of 500 voters each, but each constituency still gets an MP…

If you look back at the 2005 election, the split between parties wasn't that big in terms of overall votes cast – I think it was 36% to the Tories and 37 or 38% to Labour, but a massive difference in seats.

There have been arguments in the past for the redrawing of constituency boundaries as Labour tend to do well for the number of votes actually cast for them.

However, there is an element of this kind of exaggerated result built into the first past the post system, which can be useful in terms of avoiding hung parliaments…

Buy new kit. I wear whatever synthetic jerseys are cheap as they always end up mank. Or if you have the money, buy something with merino in it.

Because nobody makes 4130 lightweight bars?

PVA glue and matchsticks. You stick a bit of PVA glue in, hammer in some matchsticks (best if you burn the heads off first). Let it all dry and you can screw in as normal.

Worked for me on door handles and door frame hinges in the past.

I live in a former pit village and work primarily in a former pit town. I can assure you that it is far from grim.

We must have different standards of grim. Most of the places round here (North Notts / Derbyshire) that had pits and now don't are still conspicuously poor areas. Some, like Manton, are horrendous.

To me, the closure of the pits and the miner's strike is a very ugly time in our history. Towns that used to rely on mining are still fairly grim places, over 25 years on from the miner's strike.

Nevertheless, you have to remember the background. We were losing millions of working days a year to strikes in the 1970s – we have lost less working days since 1990 than we have in single years of the 70s. Ultimately, the unions had to be faced down, and the miners were unfortunate enough to be the people who took Thatcher on.

Because people need to be able to justify spending the big cash on their fancy kit, so they say that you "need" X level of kit.

Fancy, lightweight kit is nice, and does make a small difference, but ultimately the rider is far more important than the bike.

Lat long can be convered to OS National grid, but it's a faff. So avoid stuff that doesn't give you National Grid as a native output.

I own a Hero. I used a mate's Iphone 3GS for about 5 minutes in the pub. I'd have swapped like a shot in terms of basic usability – the Iphone is just a lot faster. The Hero also has no proximity sensor so it is very easy to hang up a call with your face.

As for apps, there are good ones about – Cardiotrainer for keeping track of exercise etc. via the GPS.

Quechua T4.1 from Decathlon. £100 though. You can stand up in it, put up a table and have your dinner in in, and so on.

Wouldn't mess about with any tent you can't stand up in across a large area of (ie, the £60 big Vango domes Go Outdoors occasionally sell).

Maguras are stupidly reliable in my experience.

I've given up on commercially available bars, and had my local chippy turn up a 32 inch piece of yew with a 31.8mm central clamp area, and then steam bent with a 2 inch rise. Works out at about 760mm once the bend has taken out a bit of width. It's clamped in the stem so that the compressible heartwood is aligned to absorb shocks from the trail.

It gives fantastic control, and the shock absorption of the yew is buttery smooth, but unfortunately you need to be built like Michael Phelps to ride my bike.