Proceedings of the Castle Aching Parish Council, 1905

[Matti8]

20 minutes ago, Annie said:

I not an Australian and I'm not English either.  I'm a New Zealander.  No one can argue with our track record of keeping COVID-19 out and our citizens alive.  I think the World Cup was a mistake, I think the Olympics in Tokyo is another mistake.  I think anyone who leaves their own country and travels to another at the moment is an idiot.  So where would you like me to cast my first stone? 

 

Australia/New Zealand did a fine job at first of making sure Covid was at a minimum. In fact I known that it was probably the best countries to be in last year due to it having a very minimal amount of cases. However, this lockdown that happened recently there is absolutely silly. Do you not understand that this will never end? A coronavirus like any other virus will mutate like it has and will continue to. It doesn't just go away, it will always be here in some capacity. Tell me, would you gladly continue to go into lockdown over some new cases a couple years from now?

[Matti8]

@Annie Nobody else wants to have any of these conversations either. So please can we all try not to say such provoking things?

[Annie]

36 minutes ago, Matti8 said:

Tell me, would you gladly continue to go into lockdown over some new cases a couple years from now?

Since you have asked me directly I'll give you an answer.  Yes I would be perfectly happy for lockdowns to continue when it is plain they are needed to control an outbreak.  Pandemics are likely to be an on-going situation and maintaining strong border controls are the only way to stop viruses such as the latest Delta variant from devastating the population.  So far our health dept contact tracers have done an excellent job of helping to shut down outbreaks before they happen or else we would have had thousands dead just like most other countries who haven't been as careful.

If I may give an example of another health issue relevant to New Zealanders. We have a very high UV index here and risk of skin cancers is a problem.   in Summer the health dept will issue warnings when the UV index is high and remind us or the precautions to take to be sun safe.  Nobody in their right mind would complain about the warnings and the steps we are advised to take.  Having had a skin cancer related tumour cut out of the back of my neck I can assure you that it is no joke.  And yet there are those who say the the strict precautions against COVID-19 should be set aside and we should just get used to the notion that deadly pandemics might kill our family members, friends and neighbours from time to time. 

 

[monkeysarefun]

3 hours ago, Matti8 said:

 

 

 

I hate that we even have to get into in depth conversation about Covid on a forum like this. But both of you are speaking foolishly. You cannot honestly say that the UK, AU or etc. is any better. Western countries are a joke and none have any moral high ground than another. You speak about some fair in the US yet ignore the World Cup nonsense with thousands crammed into a stadium. Then afterwards English fans cause destruction because they lose. It's really a "he who has not sinned cast the first stone" situation.

 

 I didnt realise that to mention one example of stupid I  then  needed to list other examples for balance.  OK, speaking as Australian we had some idiotic risks like having the tennis in Melbourne at the start of the year but at least we made everyone quarantine no matter how important they thought themselves to be which provided much entertainment when overly paid tennis players complained about a mouse in their rooms.

 

Go west young tennis player, if you want to see what a mouse plague really  looks like!

Edited July 13, 2021 by monkeysarefun

[monkeysarefun]

1 hour ago, Matti8 said:

 

Australia/New Zealand did a fine job at first of making sure Covid was at a minimum. In fact I known that it was probably the best countries to be in last year due to it having a very minimal amount of cases. However, this lockdown that happened recently there is absolutely silly. Do you not understand that this will never end? A coronavirus like any other virus will mutate like it has and will continue to. It doesn't just go away, it will always be here in some capacity. Tell me, would you gladly continue to go into lockdown over some new cases a couple years from now?

 

 

Australians have always been border control enthusiasts, we love them.

 

  For instance you can't take fruit between certain states. You can be driving through the Nullabor in the middle of nowhere hoping you don't get murdered by the serial killers and two blokes  dressed like Steve Irwin in a 4wd will pull you over and check your stuff for oranges.

 

Flying into the country up until recently you'd be sitting in your seat taxiing along happily and two blokes dressed like Steve Irwin , probably a different two from the ones in the 4wd but who knows, would walk through the cabin and spray  you with fly spray.

 

We've had quarantine stations since the early days of the colonies, usually on some wind swept forlorn headland where if the internees weren't sick on arrival they would at least leave with a nasty cough.  Many are now happily repurposed as luxury hotels with attached ghost hunting facilities.

 

And pets, don't smuggle them in or our deputy PM will have them knocked off , like Johnny Depp and his missus almost found out when they smuggled in Pistol and Boo a couple of years ago.  Pistol and Boo lived but Johnny Depp and his missus had to make a hostage video saying how sorry they were and its been all down hill for them ever since.

 

Even the Royals dont get an exception, no forelock tugging here. Back in the Castle Aching period Princess someone -  I dont remember which one , but say it was Princess Alexandria  - arrived in her fancy yacht with her beagles and wanted to take them ashore in Melbourne.  "Sorry Princess Alexandria or whoever, no exemptions for you, they stay aboard"  said some minor official, uncowed  by the big floppy hat she was wearing, and they did. 

 

So we'll happily embrace lockdown especially since it means that for at least 12 months I haven't been mooned by  European backpackers at Bondi, or had to put up with endless singing of "Wonderwall" at odd hours. 

.

 

 

 

Edited July 13, 2021 by monkeysarefun

[Edwardian]

6 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

So it is weird to see the US and the UK is seemingly winding everything down, despite daily new infection rates that are in another order of magnitude from ours. 

 

That has, indeed, crossed the minds of many of us.

 

Quite what crosses the vacuum inside our Prime Minster's head is anyone's guess.

 

Now they've realised how stupid and irresponsible the experiment will be, but they cannot bring themselves to admit they were wrong, so they are, not for the first time, back to mixed messaging: ''Rejoice! You are free to discard your masks (but actually it might be rather a good idea to keep wearing them)''

 

Feckwits.

 

6 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

The UK strategy is being labelled 'brave' and 'experimental' by health people here when asked about it .  Your vaccination rate is light years ahead of ours  though, plus here like NZ, we have always had a zero tolerance of any cases in the community and every breakout is jumped on with full force until the numbers drop to zero.

 

Yes, the one element of the fight against Covid that was not managed by HMG has been a brilliant success.

 

6 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

I follow a youtuber in the US who has a kind of travel log and on Sunday he was at a 'Renaissance  Faire' in Alabama.

 

Apart from realising  that in the US the "Renaissance"  means knights, unicorns, vikings, sexy  mermaids  and star wars, it was sobering to see there was  barely  a single mask in sight in the sizeable crowd, the first one appeared at about the 10 minute mark with some young bloke at the Knife throwing.  All up, probably a dozen masks in the crowd of several hundred during the 30 minute video.

 

My Gosh! 

 

My mind was boggling at the thought of what a 'Renaissance  Faire' in Alabama might be like.

 

Ever the optimist, my first thought was Alabamans embracing Humanism and learning Perspective.

 

Then I realised it was probably more likely to involve a shooting gallery (exterminate the indigenous population with your arquebus and win a continent), petard-hoisting, and, since we're in the South, the ever popular Blindfolded Justice game, aka Pin-the-Crime-on-the-Black-Man.

 

 

6 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

 

Assuming that Alabama must have everyone vaccinated to cause this attitude, I checked their rate - its the lowest in the US at 33%. 

 

 

Darwinism at work right there.

[Nearholmer]

9 hours ago, uax6 said:

I dispute this point

Further down thread it turned into a formal definition of ‘reliability’, and a wager that can never be tested (because three year old sixty year old cars are unobtainable). So, the dispute will probably go forever unresolved.

 

 

Edited July 13, 2021 by Nearholmer

[alastairq]

10 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

o, the dispute will probably go forever unresolved.

 Suffice to say, in my personal experience, I have never ever had to call upon  Breakdown services for any of my old motors [70-plus, and 50-plus years old] despite both doing duty as dailies for quite a while now. [Especially during  last year..]

My newest motor was made this century, and is 18 years old, and thus far has never conked out, neither has its predecessor, which is 25-plus years old. I have however, suffered several punctures with these two. Do these count?

 

Reliability of moderns has been measured in the press. It does not look good when we expect a modern to be ultra reliable.  The fact is, things go wrong with any bit of machinery.  I admit if I had a new [or nearly new] car and it required dealer attention to rectify a fault or 6, I would indeed be miffed.

 

One aspect of maintenance that old vehicle owners are subject to, and caught out with, if not particularly aware, is that of the quality of 'new' consumable spare parts.

Firms have had batches of stuff like points, condensers, and other consumable spares batch made to order [in China, mostly but not exclusively] and the quality has been suspect to say the least. This  in order to keep the prices down [or the profits up?], seemingly expecting old car owners to not travel the mileages one associates with car travel today..... When they do, these parts suddenly develop shortcomings, not seen back in the days of Lucas and BMC.

 

So in many ways, running an old car as it should be run these days is as much limited by the quality of bits one used to be able to obtain with confidence at every local go-faster shop.

 

As for safety?

 I read, almost every other day, of people suffering horrible mangly deaths in motor vehicle collisions around Yorkshire/Lincolnshire area....all driving, or being driven in, modern motors.

This, despite air bags, collapsible engineering, safety features galore, etc.....

So it seems, in spite of apparent increases in survivability in a crash, there are folk out there determined to undermine that assertion.

[Nearholmer]

Have a read of this little lot https://www.ciht.org.uk/media/8190/141111_ciht_road_safety_final.pdf

 

In short, despite hugely increased mileages driven over the years, fatalities have fallen in absolute terms, and dramatically so in per mile driven terms. Not all about car design, of course, road design and medical progress have played their parts too.

 

The peace-time peak in road deaths neatly coincided with the period of ‘classic’ cars such as are under discussion here: 1966. Hence seat belt laws, and all the constructional changes, since then.

 

 

[Regularity]

8 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Hence seat belt laws

Promoting that was one of the few decent decent things Jimmy Saville did, although his reasons for wanting to restrain people in their seats may have been suspect.

[uax6]

Being a daily classic driver I accept the fact that in safety terms my 1960's built vehicle may not be as safe as a 2020 built one as part of the deal. I'm also very aware that I might forget to wake up in the morning! I have seen the results of various crashes that have involved moggy thous, and there have been injuries that are fairly similar to those that you would get in a modern car. Mind you the big plus is that the speed of the moggy tends to be lower than that of a modern car, which makes a big difference. Not that I drive slowly, I'm happy to do the legal limit, but tend to hover around the 60 mark.

 

I'm realistic about life, in as much as I am very aware that one day it will be my last, and that that day is getting rapidly closer the older I get, but I want to do things that I enjoy at the same time. I would be much more worried about volunteering as a p-way or S&T worker on a preserved railway than I would be driving to the railway in the minor...

 

Andy g

[monkeysarefun]

21 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Have a read of this little lot https://www.ciht.org.uk/media/8190/141111_ciht_road_safety_final.pdf

 

In short, despite hugely increased mileages driven over the years, fatalities have fallen in absolute terms, and dramatically so in per mile driven terms. Not all about car design, of course, road design and medical progress have played their parts too.

 

The peace-time peak in road deaths neatly coincided with the period of ‘classic’ cars such as are under discussion here: 1966. Hence seat belt laws, and all the constructional changes, since then.

 

 

Our peak would have been late 70s, early 80s I reckon.

 

In the early 70s  Holden, Ford and Chrysler were engaged in a muscle car war, fitting bigger and bigger V8 engines into cars without the same upgrade to tyres, brakes and suspension technology,

 

These beasts were  often undrivable in the wet, especially by someone with a few hours experience but were very affordable on the second handarket a few years later. Consequently they were bought as first cars by many teenagers. 

 

My school year got through unscathed somehow, I guess we had a low revhead quota, but the year below mine was devastated.

 

Of the 40 or so in the year, I can think of 8 that died in car smashes - all  single vehicle, car into tree, car  rollover and so on type crashes.

 

Edited July 13, 2021 by monkeysarefun

[Nearholmer]

Motorbikes were the downfall for too many of my peers. I had to appear at coroner’s court as a witness to the smash that killed a guy a year older than me, and a guy from my year perished on the crossroads outside the flat where I was living a couple of years later - heard the squeal of tyres, and the horrible thud, on a dark evening, and that was Dougie, aged 19. There were countless other incidents too, but we carried  on riding the things!

[alastairq]

These days it's the 50-somethings that expire whilst using their motorcycle.

 

I don't think it's necessarily ''high'' speeds that result in deaths these days.

 

 

 

 

[DonB]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

Motorbikes were the downfall for too many of my peers. I had to appear at coroner’s court as a witness to the smash that killed a guy a year older than me, and a guy from my year perished on the crossroads outside the flat where I was living a couple of years later - heard the squeal of tyres, and the horrible thud, on a dark evening, and that was Dougie, aged 19. There were countless other incidents too, but we carried  on riding the things!

 

 

Xmas eve 1958, a sudden drop in temperature equals icy surface. On a Norton Dominator  at about 10 MPH in heavy traffic,  a guy pulled out of a side street, and collected me, Broken Tibia and Fibula  Six months in a plaster cast , thigh to toes, no "screw it back together" in those days!  Taken to hospital -- a typical (for then) Nightingale Ward, 30 beds occupied by I appendix and 29 Motorbike accident patients.  never rode a motor bike again. Result was that I was not conscripted for National Service,  still not sure if that was a benefit or not. 

Yes, there were a number of my peers who met the Grim Reaper while riding these machines.

[rocor]

12 hours ago, Annie said:

 What the plump thatch haired schoolboy and his crew of cretins are proposing to do with their 'experimental' approach to the plague is utterly criminal and irresponsible. 

 

 

 

I read this, and had the sudden realization of exactly who he is. He is Billy Bunter in middle age.

[rocor]

4 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Further down thread it turned into a formal definition of ‘reliability’, and a wager that can never be tested (because three year old sixty year old cars are unobtainable). So, the dispute will probably go forever unresolved.

 

 

 

Though there are, at a price that if you have to ask, you can not afford.

 

https://www.classicandsportscar.com/gallery/continuation-classics-12-best-new-old-cars

Edited July 13, 2021 by rocor
They should have been there (strange how these things never get noticed on the first proof reading)

[Regularity]

1 hour ago, alastairq said:

These days it's the 50-somethings that expire whilst using their motorcycle.

 

I don't think it's necessarily ''high'' speeds that result in deaths these days.

Actually, this is the cause. Many “returning bikers” aren’t used to the power and speed that modern bikes can produce from a nominally similar or even smaller engine size compared to their youth, and simply don’t show enough respect for their machine.

[alastairq]

3 minutes ago, Regularity said:

Actually, this is the cause. Many “returning bikers” aren’t used to the power and speed that modern bikes can produce from a nominally similar or even smaller engine size compared to their youth, and simply don’t show enough respect for their machine.

 Yes, I appreciate that.

Which is why, when I worked, skilled motorcycle instructors would collar any other instructor who asked for, or was known to have obtained, a motorcycle, to give them familiarisation training on modern machines..

 

Sorry, my post included the second sentence inadvertently..I had deleted a lot of what I originally typed,  for reasons of, basically, not wanting to put my old professional hat on.

Thus, in truth it is out of context.....[and my deleting is atrocious.]

[rocor]

7 minutes ago, Regularity said:

Actually, this is the cause. Many “returning bikers” aren’t used to the power and speed that modern bikes can produce from a nominally similar or even smaller engine size compared to their youth, and simply don’t show enough respect for their machine.

 

Their powerful steeds, in return, do not seem to show any reticence in dissing them either.

[Nearholmer]

I’ve never hankered after a modern bike partly for that reason. In the 1970s/early-80s, I had two old British bikes, a 1940s Excelsior Manxman 250, and a 1954 Excelsior 125, plus various cheap and simple CZ machines up to 350, which were deeply retro-tech, to ride while the Britishers were being worked on. Then, one day, I tried a friend’s Yamaha 250.
 

Bl@@dy heck! 

 

It had the power of all my bikes added together, in a lighter package. [Having just checked, an RD250 was only 30hp, which shows how feeble mine were!]

 

Nope, I thought, this is not for me. And they’ve only got more powerful since. I gave-up motorcycling after only a few years, because I actually preferred to go back to the push-bike.

Edited July 13, 2021 by Nearholmer

[wagonman]

As someone might have said: "four wheels good, two wheels bad"...

[DonB]

3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I

Nope, I thought, this is not for me. And they’ve only got more powerful since. I gave-up motorcycling after only a few years, because I actually preferred to go back to the push-bike.

In my case, after recovery from 6 months in Plaster, (outlined above), I also went back to cycling to get back some muscle in the damaged leg, and so that I didn't "learn to limp". I didn't walk anywhere for a year, and re-joined a cycling club,  Rode with their touring group for years until marriage, a largish garden,  and offspring limited such activity. 

[webbcompound]

Of course you don't need to have just two wheels to ride a motorcycle. This was my mount of choice for many years (not this one, I have no photos unfortunately). Nice and stable if you hit that patch of diesel and plenty of room for the shopping as well.

[Nearholmer]

Is that one of those Dnieper or Voschkod, or whatever they're called, BMW-alikes? Or, is it an actual BMW? Whichever, I rather like them for their retro-ness. A friend used to have one of the Russian ones, and with me on a CZ, a near-copy of a DKW in that case, we made a sort of East European WW2-derived engineering statement when visiting NG railways.