chrisp65

wasn't really sure where to put this, but this is prolly as good a place as any I was particularly enthused by the queen's speech this year. We are to live within our means and reach out to the poorest in society by tackling social problems, deprivation and debt, whilst measuring people's life chances. We are to spread prosperity. Corruption and tax evasion to be tackled. We will tackle poverty. The lowest income families will have help with savings. Public services will help the hardest to reach in society. Mental health provision and support will be improved. The devil is potentially in the detail as always, and I guess it could be derailed if the wrong result comes from the EU referendum. But not a bad set of goals.

May I suggest the 'Mouse-away 3000' by Xia Industries. Rent two for a week, put them either end of the attic.

true story alert: Many years ago I worked in a bar attached to a hotel and we'd get a lot of the bands and celebs stay with us. On the first Style Council tour they all stayed with us, they were all in the bar after their gig. Mr Paul Weller was buying a round and asked what people wanted and somebody asked for an Irish Whiskey. Weller said he wasn't stupid, he knew there was no such thing. The guy insisted there was such a thing and that's what he wanted, an Irish Whiskey. Weller looked at me, I looked at him. He marched up to my bar and with the rest of the crew now silent and watching, 'can I have an Irish Scotch please'. The place erupted in laughter and he announced he'd known all along there was no such thing and was just playing along. They put him right eventually. The man was a god to me, it was fascinating to see he didn't know everything, wasn't universally cool and the people around him felt comfortable enough to take the piss.

Stargazer! Aye fair play, as previously said, it was them and Nazareth. They were my go to band when I needed to noodle an air guitar to song lyrics about wizards.

pah, Rainbow. Showing your age. You need to update and get with the kids, like me mate. My order from last week has arrived, imagine that, walking to a shop, placing an order and waiting to be contacted to go back to the shop a week later to pick it up. Anyway, all downloaded ready for the car for the journey home...

I was trying to draw comparisons from my own experience, and that was all I had.

I'll not make a big deal about it, but if we are to get all flustered and cream our knickers at quotes we'll be top three on the planet. I guess we also have to give equal weighting to his message to Villa fans to 'forget the past'. I'm sure this is just glib and means the 2015 / 16 season. Not 1982 or 1957 or William McGregor or Ian Taylor....... He hasn't even waved his money at the bar yet and people are prepared to put out. He's only told us he's going to wave his money at the bar. Let's be classy and try and keep it in our pants until we've actually seen some drinks lined up on the table.

I'm as pleased as punch that Lerner has gone. I suspect there must be more than just incompetence to this last sad few years and those bizarre postings on the official website. 'We want our Villa back. We want our Villa back.' Well, that didn't happen. It got sold to a guy we know next to nothing about that may or may not be ridiculously rich and may or may not be an arm of the Chinese state. Either directly, or in a more subtle indirect soft power way. But you don't get to be an international billionaire player based in China, if the Chinese state don't approve of you. I guess if we are morally ok with our underpants and phones coming from China, what's the difference. It's not that different to being owned by an american recluse that puts up a military general as a spokesman and only communicates when the pain killers have kicked in. It might be a good thing or it might be a bad thing, we can't know. I'm more happy than worried right now, but I'm very aware that I personally didn't want to be a supporter of the next Man City or Chelsea. But I also accept that the days of the local owner, the holiday shop entrepreneur are long gone if you want your club live on Sky in HD. We've got non league for all that emotional nourishment stuff. Villa are the marketing and entertainments arm of...well, we don't really know what of yet do we. So I'm chuffed, I'm at the party, but I'm at the back, cautious about the new guy in the waistcoat that may or may not be from Stark Industries and that we know nothing about. I'm really hoping this goes well, but I'm always careful what I wish for.

It's a rolling programme of improvements, it will take years. But it is being improved. Locally, we've just got our blue flags back. It's not anywhere near a perfect system, but bloody hell, I know that the water now is (usually) fantastically cleaner than it used to be. You didn't have to test the water in the 70's and the 80's it stank of sewage and it had turds rolling in with the waves. We've been lucky that locally Welsh Water have got their act together and spent a ton of money and radically improved the situation. But it isn't universal. The old system was killing the environment. You wouldn't have eaten a fish caught back then - not that there were many. Now there are fish again, and you can eat them. Sorry to say, we would not have begun the clean up without EU pressure. The proof of that is in our 20 year resistance to their interfering ways. Although, I guess you could argue we were being stubborn and weren't cleaning our bedroom simply because mum was constantly nagging us to clean our bedroom? It is a good point about the vague nature of weather on the water quality. Strong rainfall washes dogshit off the land and nitrates out of the soil and carries more dumped sewage further. Perhaps we have to ask why there are so many nitrates being used to over produce subsidised food that then goes to recycling? It's a far far better system than it was. Not perfect, easily improved, expensive. But better than when we weren't in it. A bit of a metaphor I guess. Incidentally, that Panorama programme is good. It's 7 years old, but still worth a watch.

News this morning that my local beach has been awarded a blue flag for the holiday season. It's probably worth noting, that among all the crazy EU legislation we don't want that costs us millions, one piece we in the UK have particularly resisted is cleaning up the sea. It took from the legislation being passed in the 1970's right through to the 1990's for the UK to grudgingly accept it. So we decided quite late on to comply. Hopefully, if we drop out of the EU, this can be one of the first crazy euro expenses we drop and we can just start pumping millions of litres of untreated human shit straight to sea again, via open pipes. Like the good old days. On the down side, that fish was claimed by the Spanish.

I'm in. I can only do Monday's.

Right now Eric Black is proper stressing over who the hell he drops if we get Bale in for next season.

Spelling varies across the various countries. I guess I have to vote for 'other' as we've only got Irish, American or Scotch on the list. (faux chippy pedantry aside, it is actually a good drink)

red sky at night Villans delight here's hoping for a sensible, ambitious, lucky, competitive, entertaining and competent future not much to ask is it!

Pretty, well 'Priti' is the name of an MP, Priti Patel. Patel, Petal. How many petals on a flower? Eight. If you had eight girls to every boy that would be more than the beach boys, which means.....you've missed out on this week's star prize, a speedboat.

Eventually it will just be catholic priests, and then we'll all be buggered.

woah! woah! wwwwooooaaahhh!! Are we watching or playing?

I would have thought the demographic is pretty much old people and passengers in white vans. But yes, I'd have thought they are going to be rapidly less viable, every cold winter we get. There's always a copy of The Star in every building site staff hut. No idea who puts it there, never seen anybody actually holding a copy. The Star and Motorcycle News.

If you just look at national 'papers and don't count regional, local or free 'papers, about 7,000,000 per day do think they are still a thing, yes.

ToiletteScheisseUberlaufAufregung

No, I didn't take it personal. I'd just looked at something about Buckfast, wanted to respond and tried to tie it in. Not my best effort. I blame the fact it's like a **** TB ward in this office today. I think I need a phonecall requesting I attend a site visit.....

Calm down Tone, maybe a bit less Buckfast for breakfast tomorrow, eh? It wasn't about the politics of it, it was about the stream of misery and fear. It would have been a similar rant had she wanted me to pick up one of those misery memoir paperbacks from Tesco that appear to be really popular. Who reads books about strangers that were abused in some horrible way but have decided to write a book about it, to be slotted in the trolley between the mince beef and toilet rolls. Anyway, thread title suggests it was in the right place.....as was your reply. We get the Guardian / Observer at the moment. I get it on the weekend, it sits at the end of the breakfast bar for a few days, unread. Around Monday / Tuesday I will be asked if I've finished with it. I say yes, having not even opened it. It goes in the stock pile of liner paper for the pets trays. I'm guessing the content is far more worthy. Wouldn't want Basil and Egg pissing on negative stories. Breakfast bar! Guardian! I'm painting a picture here.

Well this is weird, I thought it was only me with such a strange compulsion. Whenever I hear the word Shanghai used on the tv or radio, I can't help but repeat back 'Shanghai!' in my best surprised generic asian man impression.

I got roped in to doing the shopping for an old person at the end of last week. They are housebound and it was my turn to be saintly. I was genuinely upset when part of the shopping list included The Daily Mail. I made a big harumphing deal out of it and considered just saying they never had newspapers by the time I got to the shops. Anyway, I held my nose and bought it. When I got it home, my nipper was curious just how vile it could be, having heard me rant about it an hour earlier, so started leafing through it. We got as far as page 7, but from front cover, pages 2,3 then pages 4,5 and pages 6,7 every page had a minimum of one story that included one of the following three words: immigrant, benefits, rape. One story heroically managed to combine all three. One story was about a woman raped by a black guy she had mistaken for a white guy in the dark when she'd given her consent. If you are an old lady and you are housebound and that is your main source of news of what is happening in the world I guess you are going to have a particular outlook on the world beyond the end of your street. Regardless of what an individual's politics might be, why would you want to put yourself through reading that stuff every single day? If that was a true reflection of life, I'd rather be ignorant of it and just spend my time painting flowers or baking or building a sex dungeon or something. I couldn't be reading that anger and fear every day.

17.05.2016 Nigel Farage: if it's a narrow defeat for the leave campaign we could run the referendum again David Cameron: Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi leader of ISIS would be happy if you vote Brexit Boris Johnson: EU has banned bananas being sold in bunches of more than three