The Lurker

1 hour ago, jjb1970 said:

One of our neighbours just bought this, a BYD LEAP electric car. I'm not sure if BYD are sold in Britain but he gave me a ride and it's a beautiful car, it loses nothing to European premium brands in terms of cabin ambience and comfort and the neighbour assures me it drives superbly. Chinese cars are really catching up, looking at this it's a properly desirable car.

 

They’re certainly advertised on the telly though I can’t say I have seen one on the road yet. Mind you, there is a certain sameness to the looks of a lot of electric cars that makes Teslas, Polestars, etc indistinguishable at a glance to the untrained eye.

3 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

 

 

Nothing to do with Microsoft. In fact Microsoft failed spectacularly to influence internet browsing with successive generations of internet browsing solutions. Did anyone use Explorer? Does anyone use Edge?

 

 

Yes and yes, sometimes. Explorer was the default on the work pc for many years. It then moved on to Edge, although Chrome is also used a lot. Recently they introduced their own “secure” browser which is basically chrome adapted by group IT.

23 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

 

 

Home  of The Steepest Street In The World.

And the place that first solved how to run Cable Cars (a la San Francisco) round corners IIRC.

Here Comes The War  - New Model Army

21 hours ago, didcot said:

You just know cash will become crap or crash

Catchy name!

4 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

 

 

I have driven through the part of Queensland that the town of Paradise used to be located in.   I do not know why the town is not there any more, presumably they all went and murdered each other with impunity, safe in the knowledge that we lack any   UK style  quirky sleuths to get to the bottom of it all.

 

 True, there was one bloke from The Bill who came down here for a  bit but I think he was a bad'un so he was probably more of a hindrance than a help.

 

Here is the road that Paradise used to be on.  I've done you  a favour and begun it at a slight bend to make it more exciting, but if you want to experience the fun of driving out bush, just click along until you eventually get to a town, or find someone to murder, whichever comes first.

 

https://www.google.com/maps/@-25.4426663,151.9407643,3a,75y,59.13h,76.17t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sO0HS6TsYHl3ku6nk2mrZZw!2e0!5s20220801T000000!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu

 

 

It soon leads on to a Biggenden Road. Wikipedia tells me Biggenden is named after a native word for Stringy Bark Tree.

However, the "den" village name is typical of Kent and Sussex, particularly the Weald. Halfway up the hill to the village next to one I grew up in is Biggenden Oast

https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4489062

So now you know we had stringy bark in Kent...

I too remember the rag’n’bone man into the early 80’s at home.

and didn’t Whitbread retain horses for central London deliveries from their Chiswell Street brewery until they closed it? I seem to recall that was probably the 90’s but I could be making the date up!

Edit / and they rested / retired them at the hop farm at Beltring

Greetings all from a part of the Boring Borough which is still cold and cloudy but which has been snow free.

WFH this week as we are between offices which means I seem to have done more ferrying of others while trying to work! Oh and answering the door to deliveries- three calls in a row interrupted today!

there was talk of pharmacies earlier - we seem lucky here in that there are two independents on the high street plus a Boots, another on the way down to the station and another down in Foots Cray. And given that I am about 90 seconds Walt from the High Street, that’s pretty good. The High Street itself is the usual mix of charity shops, nail bars and takeaways although the Chinese medicine shops seem to have gone.

27 minutes ago, Coombe Barton said:

When  I was seven one of my classmates brought in a pet frog in his pocket.

When we first moved to Singapore, I was six. We frightened a small lizard in the house so that it left its tail behind (classic defence behaviour). The tail continued to wiggle and I wanted it to take it to school show my new classmates. It was put in a matchbox for me but of course by the morning it had long since stopped wiggling. I assume it went in the bin!

4 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

No. It may be different in a technocratic dictatorship but in our democracy it is the politicians who are responsible for policy. 

The politicians are accountable for the policies- the civil service are responsible for seeing that the policies are implemented and as such can have great influence in how they are implemented- Yes Minister was a comedy but it worked because there were grains of truth in it. Michael Gove is well known for wanting grammar to be taught at school again. Now it is taught to the nth degree at primary schools and in such detail that kids spend so long getting the required grammatical constructs in that they forget to write a good story. Fronted adverbials anyone? I am convinced it is the  education establishment’s attempt to make the teaching of grammar so frustrating that it is quietly dropped from the curriculum and we can go back to 70’s when grammar was not taught (at least not to me)

1 hour ago, PhilJ W said:

There is a theory that the same happened to the Neanderthals when our ancestors, the Cro-Magnon showed up carrying pathogens to which they had no resistance. The Neanderthals had been around for between five or six times as long as modern humans have been today but as soon as we turned up it took only a few years for them to disappear.

I am not sure it was “only a few years “. There was significant overlap in some areas and even evidence of Neanderthals replacing local archaic sapiens (in the Levant and IIRC in parts of Western Europe). Lastly there is significant DNA evidence of interbreeding- excluding sub-Saharan Africans, modern humans have up to 4% of Neanderthal DNA.

having said that the theory may well have weight and have led to local extinction events for isolated groups- and I can’t help feeling isolation was a frequent factor given the difficulties of travel at various stages.

2 hours ago, grandadbob said:

Well we had an Amazon delivery about an hour ago, doorbell was deployed and one of our regular happy, smiley drivers waited and handed over the parcel.  Evri are due to deliver in the next hour or so and if it is regular driver Michael he too will wait and hand over the parcel.

Is there something in the water in The Land of Sutt?

Or is it that the local delivery drivers have been warned what might happen if they fail to deliver with suitable politeness to GDB?

Well I suppose Man United are in a similar place, having started life as Newton Heath Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway 

3 hours ago, Tony_S said:

I like to do a drive through on Google maps before I go to new places. I was quite pleased I did when we went to a couple of places recently. One was in Devon and the route shown for a car was clearly a flight of steps. The other was in Canterbury and our friends’ house seemed not to be connected by road. However careful zooming on the street view showed a small sign next to a gap in a hedge stating authorised vehicles only. 
Tony

I used google maps / street extensively when preparing for our US and Canadian trips in the past few years. I found it very useful for picturing in advance where we’d be going.

As a child I was given Railways in the Years of Pre-Eminence  by OS Nock. IThe Golsdorf "masterpiece" was always one of my favourites in it.

21 hours ago, Hroth said:

When did the Dark Ages become Medieval?

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67750403

 

They're barely post-Roman!

 

It wasn’t just me then!

On 30/12/2023 at 18:13, Nearholmer said:

Now, that is interesting, because where I grew up the electricity supply had originally been from a smallish gas-engine and dynamo setup at the gasworks (someone has come up with a photo of it since I expressed mystification about it yesterday) and although the place was connected to the grid by the time I was a kid, the street lighting still all went off at 11pm. It was still like that when I moved away in 1982 but ceased to be sometime shortly after. It had never occurred to me that that might have been a throwback to a nightly shutdown of the dynamos.

Paddock Wood where I grew up had that too - I moved away in 85 - but I am not aware of a local gasworks or electricity station that might have led to a lights off time; I’d always assumed it was a function of being a (semi) rural place.