chrisp65

Of course if you really like Guiness you should drink Brains Black, which is superior.

Meh ... A real working class man would be at work tomorrow as well so Friday isn't that important So renting a converted barn in West Wales for a long weekend and getting the owner to do a little grocery shop for me in advance, that's probs just adding to the charge sheet?

FAGGOTS I bloody love faggots. The Bullmastif Caff, upstairs in Cardiff Market (I think that paints the picture and tells you everything you need to know), they do a giant bowl of faggots swimming in mushy peas with a slice of gravy on the top, a mug of tea and two pieces of buttered white sliced. Freekin' awesome Great Britain grub. You can have a sidey of chips with it too, but I'm on a health kick. Stick that up your tex mex / pan asian / french / italian cuisine.

T, I'm not **** interested you've **** upset me on a **** Friday so **** off. yeah, I take your point, I think my kids are now the sort of kids that I would not have liked when I was in school. You'd get kicked for having the wrong band name written on your school bag (particular dislike of 'Rush' I recall), now my lot are taking piano lessons. Just don't tell my working class mates down the socialist worker I'm paying for extra piano lessons for little Jemima and Gideon.

I don't do facebook. See, I was just trying to big up my kids which is perfectly natural and also trying to throw in the fact that they are in a 'bog standard' non-Goved comprehensive but because of the staff they do exceptional stuff. I talk to parents of kids at other schools about what they've been up to and they are amazed at the programme of events and the facilities at, what is, the default choice state funded comp for our area. It tells me that regardless of location and regardless of the political desire to impose whatever variation of whatever system it basically boils down to whether the teachers and leaders have drive and vision and whether enough parents support them. As for whether there are 'normal' kids any more, about 10% of the pupils won some form of award, which by my mental arithmetic means 88.7% didn't. ------ These exceptionally driven and enthusiastic teachers took the kids to London this week for a couple of nights to see a couple of musicals and generally make a nuisance of themselves around St Pauls. Had I had facebook, I'd have known that all 6 teachers had to be rescued, pissed and emotional, from a stuck hotel lift at about 2:00am.

cool kids are cool We should have a thread where we can just talk about our kids but the jaffas and virgins on this site can't enter and go all Kevin and Perry on us. In a comp of several hundred kids per year group my youngest nipper has just won 'top prize' in two curriculum subjects plus the 'general good egg' award. It's certainly not a comp that believes in solely inclusive group efforts without 'winners'. They have a separate rec room with a costa coffee franchise and a gym with extra equipment for the kids that excel in any way - be it massive personal improvement, excellent attendance, or really good in a particular subject. The rewards just ramp up the better they are. Downside: nipper has just been given a wadge of additional summer homework for selected geeks and nerds and has been invited to some 'summer workshops'

define 'closer' Will this be before or after the USA invents a device that allows the prototype planes we want to buy off them to land on our soon to be completed aircraft carrier that we will be sharing with the French? if it's after that. we'll be fine

This weekend - starting at 3:30pm today, the office is having a second stab at an i.t. hardware and software change over. Logistics mean that I shall be phoneless and without laptop access to the office or to business e-mail accounts until next Wednesday. Today I bid a fond farewell to my trustee plodding blackberry stuff and begin to embrace the the dark side. So this weekend, 4.5 days of absolutely no contact with the office or anything work related - my longest stretch in over 10 years.

I think mine was a response to people linking accents or dress code or looking different to not being British. Noticing somebody in the office is black or wears a turban or has an accent or whatever means absolutely nothing, it certainly doesn't mean they are 'foreign'. I'd prefer to get a selfie with Mo Farah than Nigel Farage. In fact, that name Farage sounds suspiciously continental to me. Anybody arriving from abroad and being shocked at that can **** off back to bongo bongo land. But I don't want to get bogged down in that boring stuff. -- PIES - nobody does pies like us.

fit ones are always welcome

Release the Glarbots!

Never mind the asians and people of sexy skin colour. I'm still pissed off about all the anglo saxons coming over here and pushing us real brits to the periphery. Don't even get me started on the bloody Huguenots. Once we get rid of the 'english' we can worry about these more recent hoards. -------- Sounds a bit silly really, doesn't it.

Out of interest in terms of colour what is the colour of a Brazilian? pinky !

yup, agree entirely the Polish guy actually said at one point that once the business was well established he was able to pay people minimum wage if he'd been 'british' he'd have had a film crew from Watchdog jumping out the bushes as he arrived it's all about media agendas so choose your media carefully and then distrust it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOUeauLWEaE

There was a funny little programme on recently with two presenters from the Apprentice. They had a 'white english' young bloke bemoaning the fact that a Polish bloke had come over and set up his own business, got busy and then employed more Polish people. His attitude wasn't 'hey why don't I copy that idea and set up my own decorating company too'. It was, 'that's not fair he should give the jobs to people wot can talk British like'. Clearly this was funny and insightful in its own way. But what I wondered was how much filming they'd had to do to capture that soundbite that they'd clearly been after all along.

Presumably because they "Hamas" are demmed a terrorist organisation by the US and EU and thus the media don't' wish to be seen as mouth piece for terrorist , at least not non-Israeli terrorists I believe in the 1970's and 1980's Sinn Fein were only allowed to have a say on the news if they inhaled helium from a balloon first.

depends where you go tbf .. Up North they are a bit set in their ways and the jukebox will turn off and silence greets any stranger walking in a pub but down in the friendly South you'll get a better reception You're joking right? From my experience people in the Midlands and the North are a lot more friendlier than people from the South. In particular London.

I wouldn't worry too much about pop culture. In reality (no pun intended), a programme like the X Factor gets lots of puff and publicity, but is still very much a minority thing. I honestly have no idea what the format of X factor is, I know Simon Cowell is involved but I wouldn't know the name of any competitor or judge on it - or even whether its currently on! That doesn't make me a snob, according to the official figures, that makes me one of the 88% of people that don't watch it. I'm also one of the 98.5% (ninety eight point five!) that don't watch Big Brother. If you choose to socialise by going to town centre pubs and clubs late at night, if you read a tabloid newspaper, watch pop culture tv and use social media that is dominated by the young and inexperienced then you are going to get that as a major influence in your view of Britain. ** in my day** For me, as a slightly senior person, if people today think Britain is violent or crappy, they clearly didn't grow up in the 1970's with a ready supply of candles for the power cuts, a fear of football violence on a routine basis and police that would regularly give you a kicking because of where you lived. It's not perfect, but it's ok by me. We've still got this ridiculous royal family that the reactionary UKIP types think make us the envy of the world when it's actually just outdated kitsch liked by out dated kitsch loving tourists.

Troon, I'm not the best at communicating genuine emotion, precision or detail. On devolution, my heart says that if I had a chance of a vote, I'd vote for independence. Given a genuine opportunity to decide it would be interesting to see where my 'x' ended up. But the fact that the country can calmly agree to allow part of its territory, it's land mass, it's population to decide for themselves whether they still want to be involved and that the debate has been carried out without violence and chaos has to be a really big credit to the whole country and all sides. A genuine free vote on self determination with the result being honoured by both sides. Regardless of how you vote or how the result goes, that it truly remarkable in a world full of violence and land grabs. If that doesn't make us Great, nothing does.

Care to elaborate on that last part? How will I be bottling it? I think its often called a light hearted throw away comment. If it's been read differently and taken as a personal insult, I apologise. My broad argument was, with a net migration into GB every single year ever and 5,000,000 being given a chance to be something else without even leaving their house but most likely voting to stay in GB, that must be some sort of acid test that GB ain't all that bad.

come on, we all know that I nearly put in my response '14 answers and nobody has mentioned the size of the island'

Great thread. Could almost have been called 'life, the universe and everything'. I guess one cool calm statistical way of looking at it, would more people like to join Britain than leave it? We have part of that answer in the net migration figures, the other part will be delivered in the Scottish referendum, which, I sadly expect Scotland to bottle and vote to stay part of the union.

an experiment we've already demonstrated works but we can live in hope that a little tweek of difference might be about to make all the difference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPrBj_RLTC0 now if somebody new how to get hold of Isaan music ........