McSpredder

‘Today’s 2021 Census data shows 1,040,000 adults in England and Wales say they can’t speak English well or at all.’ https://learningandwork.org.uk/news-and-policy/response-to-census-2021-data-on-english-language-proficiency There are also residents and visitors who can speak fairly good English, but might have difficultly understanding certain UK dialects. ‘An estimated 1.2 million adults in the UK have hearing loss severe enough that they would not be able to hear most conversational speech.’ https://rnid.org.uk/get-involved/research-and-policy/facts-and-figures/prevalence-of-deafness-and-hearing-loss/ Many people can understand normal conversation, but find it hard to distinguish consonants when instructions are shouted. A shout of “Armed police”, can sound like a meaningless “aaaah eeece” to any middle-aged or older person, or to one who has been exposed to industrial noise. ‘The hallmark of presbycusis [age related hearing loss] is the impaired ability to understand high-frequency components of speech (voiceless consonants, such as p, k, f, s, and ch)’ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559220/ Would standard training for police officers include all this sort of information?

Did the insurance company state this condition in any document issued to you in previous years? If not, it sounds as though you been paying for cover that the insurer never intended to provide.

What is going on here? Has the law changed recently? My SGC (valid 2022-2027) includes provision for lending: Table 2 Shotguns transferred - State whether sold, let on hire, given or lent Notes B ….. lending it for more than 72 hours ….. C Under section 32 of the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 ….. sells, lets on hire, lends for more than 72 hours ….. D Under section 33 of the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 ….. lending it for more than 72 hours …..

"It is one of the happiest characteristics of this glorious country that official utterances are invariably regarded as unanswerable" (HMS Pinafore)

Tidal energy supply could be predicted quite accurately (Canute said something along those lines 1000 years ago), and it is certainly much more predictable than wind, solar, wave, etc. There is a great deal of energy in the Pentland Firth, and the Severn Estuary has a very large tidal range (rise and fall). The Rance scheme is Brittany has been generating electricity for nearly 60 years. Is there any ongoing tidal energy development in UK? There are certainly some drawbacks (eg siltation associated with tidal barrages), but are they insurmountable?

Anglian Water website has a calculator. https://www.anglianwater.co.uk/help-and-advice/save-water/water-usage-calculator/ When you enter MM’s information (One resident, 2 baths/week, washing machine used once/week, no dishwasher, no garden hose) the result is an estimated use of 38 cubic metres/year. Estimated annual bill Water £117 + Sewerage £176 = TOTAL £293 In other words, not very different from other PW members are charged in similar circumstances, and only a fraction of what MM is now being asked to pay.

National average water use per person is said to be in the region of 140 litres/day (= 51 cubic metres/year). Is there a very large garden involved? Hosepipes can a lot of water, and the Northumbrian Water website calculator uses a figure of 16 litres/minute for a garden hose (almost 1 cubic metre/hour).

Try to be positive. When I bend down to pick something up I think to myself "The ground seems further away, therefore I must be growing taller".

A colleague where I used to work said we were "over-managed and under-led". That was more than 20 years ago. Plus ça change.

Maybe basic training for security staff should include watching "The Day of the Jackal"

Spent a few days there, way back in 1975, but it was work, not holiday. I'd have loved to see the Ethiopian Highlands and the area around the source of the Blue Nile, but didn’t manage to get much further than Chilalo district and the Awash Valley. If you are interested in structural design, take a look at a few 'tukuls' (round dwellings). Simple principle, but some are quite large.

If it is true that they were tied up first, legislation against crossbows wouldn't have protected them - a person who has been tied up could be killed just as easily by stabbing with a nail file, or being hit over the head with a wine bottle or frying pan.

I wonder whether any geriatric PW members remember Michael Flanders & Donald Swann singing "A song of patriotic prejudice". Easily found on dozens of websites, but gently poking fun at people from other countries might be frowned upon nowadays.

Reminds me of the much-quoted study by Potts, in which two partridge chicks ingested 13 and 14 pellets in a short time period. I have always wondered how those chicks managed to find so many pellets, ‘in a predominantly arable environment where cultivation removes most of the shot from the soil surface’. Is there any reason to think this was typical of the county as a whole, and appropriate for estimating incidence for the UK? Might it be more likely that somebody had accidentally dropped a paper-cased cartridge, which disintegrated to leave 300 pellets in a very small area where those two chicks were living? G.R Potts (2005) Incidence of ingested lead gunshot in wild grey partridges (Perdix perdix) from the UK "It is remarkable that between 1968 and 1978, two chicks sampled from separate broods on the Sussex Downs had, within 3 weeks of hatching, ingested 13 and 14 lead shot. Moreover, the erosion of the individual shot suggests that they were ingested within a short discrete period of time. Somewhat similarly, a grey partridge in Denmark in 1976 had ingested 34 lead shot (Clausen and Wolstrup 1979), a grey partridge in Wiltshire in 1966, 26 (this study) and a pheasant on the Sussex Downs in 1970, 87 (Beer 1988). All these cases occurred in a predominantly arable environment where cultivation removes most of the shot from the soil surface (Esslinger and Klimstra 1983)"

....... why not go even further back than Saxon times? Britons were once led by a woman who really did know how to handle a sword, and maybe it could happen again.