chrisp65

Perhaps a mini poll (it could be something we've done elsewhere already)? VeryBritishProblems @SoVeryBritish · Mar 17 Wanting to help when someone falls over but not wanting to touch a stranger, so just crouching a bit and saying "oh gosh" agree with chappy, VBP is a funny read when you've got 10 minutes....

My missus did a degree based around general science, maths and geology. Very hard work but she loved it. From measuring the moon with a broom handle, to burning the wallpaper by leaving the top off a test tube of chemical she'd mixed, all great. She enjoyed the field trips and Durham Uni summer sessions too. But hard work was quite a theme. Proved a few things to herself that the rest of us already knew about her.

Perhaps you have to first find out how many people here feel 'British' . I dunno, I have a hunch there will be a significant minority that wouldn't automatically by reflex describe themselves as British. Which makes it all the more cruel that we now insist anybody that looks a bit like a suicide bomber needs to overtly profess their Britishness. I could be very wrong....I don't think so.

well done, Spinky 8pints

I always feel dumb in a powercut. says the man who's a known lift menace 'I honestly thought I was pulling the emergency handle, Officer. Then the lights came on and we were both naked.'

Slippers every year off the mother in law. I've got a feeling she's being knowingly ironic in her adoption of the stereotypical mother in law persona. The other thing she does is express surprise every other Sunday when she comes around ours for lunch and I'm cooking it. 'Don't burn it like a typical man!' she says, and we all chuckle. Ten years she's been saying that. Ten **** years.

hehe I believe that toblerone is no more or less than a cunning tax on air travel and unimaginative crimbo gift buyers.

I am not sure it would faze them much; the fact that the moon happens to be the perfect distance from the earth to exactly cover the sun, would be exactly the sort of evidence of order, that would confirm their belief in intelligent design. As opposed to just lucky?

boxing is that new variant of 'amateur', where the state pays you handsomely if you're a prospect once you've maxed out that pot, you go professional...

I don't think there's a worry about it being english dominated. With the double whammy of having 90% of the population and the better ranked national team being english dominated looks fairly obvious. Then you have the issue of do we stick in a minimum quota for the other homies? We wouldn't in rowing or cycling teams so why would that even arise? I think that's the last concern really, the make up of the team. It's the perception of it becoming the 'norm'. Just remember, if it became the norm, home games get distributed differently and what system do you use? Rotate one home game in four is in england? Or tell Northern Ireland they only get 1 home game in 20 'home' matches? It could get horrible, bin it, or just sign it over to england for them to play with. Olympic football is hardly going to be the pinnacle of achievement anyway, perhaps we should make it strictly amateur? That would be ironic, the football being the only truly amateur sport in the GB Olympic Squad.

So, yesterday I had quite a long drive and was feeling a little tired so I stopped at the motorway services to get a strong coffee and a walnut whip. I went along to the Costa Coffee place and asked for a 'Cortado' which is a perfectly decent smallish strongish coffee. But it's not one they have to do that often and as such he didn't have a ready supply of the small paper cups. So he kinda stooped down to look under a shelf unit, put his hands up to grab the worktop and whacked over a full open container of milk. The milk hit the back wall like a wave, rebounded and hit him like a milky tsunami and poured into the lower cup storage shelf. The guy fell on his backside, sat there in a puddle of milk, with milk on the worktop and on the shelf and all his paper cups of all sizes knocked over, covered in milk and rolling around. Carnage. His co-workers checked he was ok, he was, so at that point it became funny. Sat there, he passed one small cortado cup up to his mate who volunteered to complete the order whilst he mopped up and sorted himself out. At which point, I asked if I could have it in a larger cup, as the small ones don't fit in my cup holders.

never heard of him

WTF? essentially its a farce, but set in the west country

slight revision of policy if you're 'rich'*, the suspension from driving will be longer and your licence will be knocked back to only allow smaller engined less powerful vehicles fines will be used to cover the A road and motorway network with average speed cameras * the universally accepted measure of rich being 'more money and stuff than me'

I know where you're coming from and at heart, it's right. It needs a politician to have the balls to truly state the facts and to offer a reasonable and fair solution. Not just pick on one part of society. For me personally the price of petrol is critical to my job, how competitive I can be and my family budget. Perhaps what we need is a recalibration of fines for speeding or bad driving. If the fine for speeding was a £1,500 fine and a 2 week suspension that might have much more impact on speeding than 50p being added to the cost of a litre of fuel. Incidentally, just as a pointless aside to put petrol use into a little bit of context, there's a single Icelandic volcano which is currently active (Baroarbunga) and has for the last 12 months been pumping out more pollutants such as sulphites than the sum total of all european fossil fuel power plants combined. I think we might be screwed.

Palmer Street, Brum @brumpic

it's a fantastically complicated problem, we do need to cut down the use of fossil fuels but to suggest people can just work closer to home is as crass a statement as having previously been told to get on my bike and go and look for work electricity for xbox and smart phone and that light in a room you aren't even in is absolutely not essential, my commuting to earn sufficient money to feed my family is far far more important - perhaps we ration fossil fuels? You get 'x' units from the national grid it's your choice to use them for pathetic things like watching telly or using a laptop. You want to waste resources charging a tablet, fine, get yourself a wind turbine. it's either important or it isn't, you can't say my car is wasteful but your holiday flight isn't, or my commute is bad but your night at the movies is ok

we should also put up the cost of electricity by that way of thinking all those people with a smart phone and a laptop and an xbox AND on demand services on their TV - wasteful use of electricity by some should be stopped by simply cranking up the price oh, thanks for the tip on getting a job closer to home - why I hadn't thought of that I can't imagine, me and my crazy commute, just work closer to home, ideally down the end of a cycle path

so I guess the ultimate guilty pleasure would be a Fanta flavoured Mr Whippy?

I'm not sure there's much of a political angle to football in the UK. Celtic and Rangers apart. Millwall / West Ham also has a political angle with the strike breakers but that's really searching for stuff. This apolitical attitude is a good thing. I suppose back in the bad old days NF type groups tried to recruit at football by promising people some exciting running and chasing games. But generally the football is the be all and end all and not a vehicle for other stuff. There are also niche groups like Dulwich Hamlet, but that's very much a tiny tinydrop in the ocean.

dap, trainer, pump, plimsole, soft shoe, gentleman's outer sporting sock, gym shoe, running shoe, outdoor leisure slipper dap everyone has daps

just taking this opportunity once again: Did anybody in the Upper Holte that night find a red dap? I had to drive home in my socks.

the big one

Get rid Tell her that virginity causes cancer. When in reality, relatively early sexual intercourse is thought to be linked to cervical cancer. So that would be ironic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoZ9XwSzJr8 the upsetter side of working from home...