alastairq

How to become a millionaire round these parts? First nip down to Bridlington sea front after dark.....and half-inch a couple of those council life belts. Then hot-foot back home, go snipping bits of a neighbour's holly bush, and gather a few bits of weed. Tie the whole lot round each belt, and then go hang it on your electric gates! The belts can go back and be slung down the Bridlington promenade after New Year....No-one will notice, honest.

The only time I stepped foot in France,the place made me poorly.... But, i suppose, that was Marseilles for you? {Or, to be reet, it was Port de Bouc, pre-the oily crisis]

We have a big crem right in the middle [dead centre??] of nowhere.. Miles from any town, but, erm, central? Most graveyards are attached to village churches...aside from one into which someone had lobbed a massive rock sometime back in the past... Not yet answered the question of what will 'replace' the crems, once fossil fuels are 'banned?' What will happen to the crems?

Not much urban area round here, and plenty enough of open spaces....Enough for poodle-cross dogs to disappear for days in...

Not round here they don't!!

I think the narrower wheel treads look better on stock when viewing end-on. Of course, being a titewad I'd be inclined to save money and only replace the endmost wheelsets? I have one or two pieces of stock utilising the narrower [proto-87, is it called?] wheel treads, and they seem to rattle through Peco code 75 turnouts ok? Of course, there's nothing to prevent folk from adopting narrower check rail gaps, or even, a slightly narrower gauge [to achieve same effect]?

With the current ardent campaign around glurble warming, and the protesters at Drax power station, etc etc...I do wonder.....how the crematorium industry is going to survive? I believe most operate off gas? Gas from where? There also seems to be world-wide worries about what goes up our flues? i currently cannot visualise an eco-friendly method of compact disposal of the ever-increasing hordes of dead bodies? Could they be pelletised and burnt in Drax, so putting something back into the community? Burial is a no-no...Look what happened in London, when they ran out of places to stick dead bodies? They had to invent Surrey! Heaving folk over the side at sea will raise an uproar from the shellfish industry, for starters. This will have a knock-on effect on the posh restaurant industry, surely? I think Bridlington is already having to face up to this problem? Seeing as, historically, it is the place where most West Ridingers went to die? Or is the whole issue of how to dispose of the mounting piles of dead, something that we dare not talk about in our global warming conversations??

I wonder what the uptake might have been had the jabs been administered Army-fashion? [Drop drawers, bend over]

Pigeon probably shot down & eaten up on the Wolds...

i received my boooostahjab yesterday. Wasn't until this morning that I had any evidence I'd even been jabbed at all! Did the deed via my GP, rather than the NHESSS.....[Being considerate and leaving a dose for a needy youngster?} Anyway....there was a large room set aside for jabberwockies to sit for 15 minutes afterwards, as a check/confirmation...I'm not sure what the medical professionals were expecting to happen, but.....? An observation, though....Of the dozen pricked individuals...with a good generational spectrum.....only two of us actually sat there [well distanced]....not totally engrossed on our phones! One older fella had nodded off, and been sat there for nearly an hour, without being noticed...I guess my arrival from the prickin' rooms woke him up? Knew he'd been there about an hour because we all had labels stuck to our fronts, with the time of departure written on.......in big writing, so the volunteer who was keeping an eye on anyone who might start convulsing, could see... Didn't pay to sit at the back...

Yeah, that'll work....

Dumplings are easier to eat........

Not the sort of social behaviour one needs if in the early stages of osteoporosis?

Pardon my higgerance, but.....what are these ''office parties'' that seem to be the topic of conversation all the time? HAving never had, or wanted, an ''office'' [never mind a thing called a 'desk?] involved in any of my 50 years of money-grabbin' earning....It all seems to me to be 'other-wordly'.... Whatever happened to a quick ''merry Christmas'' and soddin' off home as quickly as possible? I must admit to preferring to scootle off home to family etc, than to hang around having to listen to pretentious majors spouting their Sandhurst-created waffle n bull... I'm too darned large for small talk.... Spent 2 minutes booking a booster jabber, and 26 hours trying to cancel it...

Some ''large ladies'' there...?

Like I secretly laugh when people tell me they can 'drive?

Not quite. Although there is much visible dereliction of the maintenance bays [a pity really] the housing is still extant, and expanding. The main military buildings opposite the [Alamein Barracks, as was] ex-forces housing [officers got a posher-looking ''estate'' than t'uther ranks] is pretty much expensively refurbished and repurposed as an Army, Airforce & Navy cadet training and administration centre. with Admin blocks, accommodation blocks, canteen & cookhouse, classrooms, etc. All the old hangers [one was once an EU grain mountain!]...have been utilised by various companies making stuffs...[Industrial estate] including specialized [posh] portable buildings, etc The main ex-airfield-proper has long been turned over to a [mainly Army] training area. Over the decades much has been done to create an artificial off-road training area, maintained [when last I worked] by the same company looking after places like Strensall, etc. This involves quite a bit of continual financial investment, since, to be an off-road training facility, maintenance must be conducted, mainly to give those who train on a Monday the same training conditions as those who train on a Friday. I spent some 20 years working at the Defence School of Transport https://www.army.mod.uk/who-we-are/our-schools-and-colleges/transport/ at Leconfield ....a repurposed RAF base [was still an RAF base, of sorts, until some 10 years ago or so...when the RAF ASR lost the contract for air sea rescue.]. I spent 15 years as a specialist in the MDTS [as was..FAMS to those old fahrts] and often we would use Driffield training area in deference to solely using the Leconfield off-road area.....mainly because of potential overcrowding, especially when there was a 'surge'... This usage was bid for, and paid for, by the School itself [paying the Strensall lot]....{School became the DCLPA, because the MoD likes initials}...So whenever budget cuts had to be made, poor old Driffield's usage got knocked on the head, aside from combat training. Also, much activity at Driffield by various Reserve units, RAF, USAF, etc....a lot of activity going on at night time, without lights. [So folk used to think the place wasn't used....a parent once complained that their little Johnny nearly got killed riding his off road motorcycle at night on the Driffield training area [illegallly]....by almost being run down by some 30-odd tonne 8 wheeler waggins careering around in the dark without lights. They seemed to think nowt went on after dark in the military! So the place may look neglected, but only a small part is actually thus.... Currently a lot of air activity using the training area [touch & go?} by Ospreys. Very noisy things...rattle the windows where I live.

The key word there is ''presently'....

Wots an app?

I don't often contribute to this topic. Mainly due to my lack of enthusiasm for 'modern' cars. Bit not long back I happened to wander onto Youtube, and onto one of the Carwow videos. This one focussed on the lack of 'cheap' cars...and why this is currently so...and why cheap car [new cars] wil be a thing of the past, in the future. Now, I have no idea of the veracity of the carwow's 'statements' in the video [not being much interested in stuff that left their factory this century....whoever that factory belonged to?]....but the part that interested me concerned how governments [including, most prominently, the EU!!!]...are setting targets for makers to reach regarding stuff like CO2, [with fines if they fail]...but that the targets being set are in fact easier to meet [less stringent] for larger SUVs [the greatest market share]...than they are for the small cars. Hence the forecast is, we will no longer see cheap new cars being sold [lower profit margins are another issue]... DAcia Sanderos aside [and they are getting more & more costly as each year passes...the current models being considerably more expensive, even in basic form [basic form being the only form that would interest me.....I have, absolutely, no need for connectivity, or electric windows.....] I fear we as a driving public will be doomed to expensive SUV models to clog up the narrow streets of our towns & cities, with, for the majority, no alternative options if earning less than a modest 20 k a year! Bicycles? Fine, so let the low earners use bicycles, therefore having to live within inner city or inner urban areas...and so the lack of choice goes on. Which will get worse as governments target the green voting public by placing restrictions on cost & availability of petrol, perhaps? Anyway, possibly worth a look-see? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WYBR0tlPA8

To be fair, when the actual map is expanded, it doesn't look so bad....each blob being a separate, reported, incident. Trouble with the mapping is, the blobs don't contract with the scale of the maps.

If the not-my-cats that visit from next door are anything to go by, the cat would be the only living thing capable of eating everything else without a qualm...

On the plus side, exactly how many of Northern Powernongens' outages listed, are actually within the normal range of powernongens normal daily outages? [Due to works, repairs, new cables, etc etc?] Or do they ''normally' publish an entirely blank map? How many outages would we have if we had gone over to entirely renewable energy sources? Could too many offshore wind farms actually contribute to greater continental drift? Or do we already have too many frightening events to worry about that little snippet?

TAlking to the engineers who were putting our [my?] cables underground this summer, it seems underground cables are also much cheaper to maintain, than overhead cables. In 'normal' circumstances, using modern plant machinery, underground cables are also very quick & easy to lay. The issues my village faced were geological one's, which confounded the normal contractor tendering process [the first bunch simply gave up when the contract money ran out...luckily, when they'd actually got the line across the main road...and not halfway across!] This left the Powergen bunch to 'pick up the pieces'.... One issue I noted with the way these jobs were organised was the limitations placed upon the engineers themselves, as a whole. Instead of being [allowed to be?] jacks-of-all-trades, so to speak..there were 'underground' engineers, 'overhead' engineers, and various others in the mix as well. Thus, when one lot had completed their stage, they had to wait until another type of engineer could arrive to continue.....Often the various different 'engineers' would have been allocated more 'urgent' jobs 60 miles away, by an office that simply had a target of getting jobs 'done'..or to be seen to get jobs done', instead of liaising properly with folk on the ground as to who & what were needed. The fella with the platform truck would be there one day...but diverted the next, just when they were needed. Thus the whole job proceeded in fits and starts...and took weeks overall, instead of the actual couple of days all-out work it could have taken. I wasn't inconvenienced at all by the work....nobody was left without power, aside from the one occasion where we had plenty of 'warning'....and were compensated as the job took a lot longer than they'd planned for...the issue being the overhead supply to a farm a mile or so away, which created knock-on issues with half the village's supply. I would suggest one of the problems engineers have had to face, when trying to access the more remote power lines, might be one of ''unsuitable tyres?'' Foisted upon the front line folk by managers who actually knew less about the issue than they wanted their superiors to believe?

Helps drivers with fat thighs actually get into the things?