pap

Did you read the rest of my post? Anyway, driving a Beemer is great fun. Rear wheel drive cheap flash. What's not to like?

I'm 39, and the only reason I get that reference is because I make a habit of watching films from the 1970s Once you're a confident driver, I think most of the work is actually keeping an eye on everyone else and staying alert for that dangerous moment of road-borne tw4ttery. Had a near miss on the way down, someone trying to get into the outside lane without the whole mirror and signal part going on.

#3 stupid signage First off, here's a recreation of the sign for the M3 at the end of the A34. It's from memory, but the key components are appropriately missing. Yes, after travelling all the way down the A34, we're not actually going to tell you where the M3 goes. I quite like it. It evokes tales of when we messed with the signs during the war to confuse any invaders, except targeted at Northerners. The other one that fills me with dread is "How Am I Driving?". Dude, you're in a truck on a busy motorway. I'd hope you'd fkn know!

Lived in NI for three years. The airport run was always "tractor willing". I have known your pain.

It's a good idea to find out the local tolerance level anywhere you go, I reckon. In the US, it often changes from state to state. You can do "ten over" in NC with no real problems. They'll nick you for being five over in Virginia.

I can see that you're taking a hard line here, Bateman - but just so we're clear, eyelashes aside, cars DO have faces. I'm seeking to clarify that your objection is simply a reaction to a girly girl, showing the world that she is a girly girl, specifically by devaluing a perfectly crap car by covering it in "personality", and not some kind of deviant reaction to the widely-held view that cars DO have faces. Some cars even have back faces. Check the high visibility vehicles over on the Highway to Hell thread. The backs of those cars are laughing at those that slow down for them.

If it's not universal, you're means testing to extent, even if it is a crude and cheap instrument like the implementation of the child benefit cuts. The real kicker there was that broadly, I could live with some sort of cutoff point, but we still apparently lack the nous to suss combined household income through the tax system, so they went for the quick and dirty option of discriminating on a single salary, and therefore discriminated on those that choose to have a full time parent at home. I'd be affected in either calculation, so I've no axe to grind on that score, but I can see why others might. Unfortunately, means testing has too often just been about reducing the claimant count while simultaneously sending large wads to cash to Tory-leaning businesses like ATOS, that literally could not support themselves without the government handouts they get. The fit to work tests have been widely criticised, with some serious cases of misdiagnosis. The arrangement at present is broadly, "we'll give you more money if you take away more of their money". I love being in the US and telling their people that we'll fix any foreigner that falls injured here to the best of our abilities. It's something approaching genuine civilisation, isn't it? We lose those things at our peril, and on the assumption that we don't all blow each other to pieces in the next 20 years, soft power is going to become more important. Being able to say, "yeah, and we bung every citizen $100 a week, just for being British, like" would be fun.

Do not enter a box junction unless your exit is clear. Source: the ol' package from the Transvaal.

That's very much the impression I've had for years. Seem to remember some cycling training back in the day that dealt with dual carriageways. The OB were insistent that cars going down it would be doing 80MPH, even then. I've done the East Lancs from Liverpool to Leigh on a bicycle, an A road. OB were not lying, although most people are merciful and slow down a bit.

After you've finished dodging them?

#2 The abundance of cars that you think might be OB but aren't. Few people stick to the speed limit. Sometimes, you need to go over the limit to move out of danger, especially if one of those truckers from #1 looks like they're about to crush you as they reach over for a copy of Razzle, or whatever the seedier Eastern European alternative is. Let's be honest though, people like the thrill of doing something they shouldn't, or getting somewhere slightly faster than they should. Any bonus time from the roads can be wasted elsewhere! At least, that's the theory I hear people speculate on in public houses and the like. Actual OB have been sound as fúck with me any time I've ever had any dealings with them. They once questioned the wisdom of me doing 70 down a foggy A34 with a Ford Fiesta half-filled with furniture back in the day. Just on Saturday, OB pulls past me and politely directs me to use the left-hand lane through the medium of a flashing sign. Total respect for the what they have to deal with and they way they do stuff. I think most on this forum would probably agree that they use quite a bit of discretion on the motorways. Few are getting nicked for 80mph on motorways unless something else is going on, such as crap conditions, erratic driving, etc. Fake OB? Fúck them, especially the speed limited high visibility vans that companies are so fond of. I wonder how many times Fake OB been the catalyst for rear-enders, people slamming on as they see some slow-moving vehicle with high visibility livery looming into view. I have no general problem with high visibility vehicles per se, but think we need to differentiate between the authorities and corporate vans. Colour coding is a possibility. If that's not possible, then maybe something like this would work.

I agree with you, but keep that on the down low. I drive a BMW, and if you own one, you are legally mandated to have all possible lights on at all times and never let anyone out, especially if it looks like they're desperate. I rebel, of course - and the missus is a new driver cast in my rebellious mould. It's dip lights and courtesy for ms pap and me; fighting the system from within.

Look, it's not small. It's just cold in here.

As many of you know, I now travel from Liverpool to Southampton for every home game. Almost without exception, I drive myself down. As a consequence, I see a lot of Britain's roads. Don't allow me to overstate my case. I'm not a lorry driver, alternating between shoveling pound coins into the nearest fruit machine and furious masturbation. Neither has my career seen me land a company car, which would have seen me become a king of the road and mistress to an increasingly unjustifiable expense account. That said, I use the fúcking things on a regular basis for relatively long journeys. Familiarity breeds contempt. I was wondering where to stick this thread. The chief intent is to provide a thread where people can sound off about the things that píss them off while out and about on the roads. On that basis, it could have easily gone into the Motoring Forum, but then, many of the replies are likely to be quite amusing, so it could just as easily have been muppetised. Ultimately though, the Motoring forum is a bit pants unless people are whipping their wheels out, plus people may have non-motoring solutions to the woes that'll be wailed here. VFTT might suggest a greener alternative. Someone, probably me or Unbelievable Jeff, will moan about trains again. Lord D will probably put it all down to those dastardly Eastern Europeans with their human trafficking and untaxed vehicles. The thread clearly needs scope for non-motoring ideas For right now though, here's a starter to break the ice. #1 Lorry drivers and the age old question: "is 60mph really faster than 59mph?". Those with a grasp of basic maths would suggest that 60mph is faster than 59mph. The clue is in the number. One figure is slightly higher than the other, and everything else being equal, 60mph is your perennial winner in the epic contest of quickness between the tightly placed contenders. Truck drivers do not know this, at least that's the impression I get when travelling on any motorway, ever. How many times have you seen two trucks in single file happily pootling along in the slow lane, only for one to decide that he has to go 1mph faster? Nothing is sudden about this manoeveure. For the next two or three miles, you'll see that classic 60mph vs 59mph play itself out. Other traffic will either swerve into the fast lane to get past quickly, or will have to slam on the brakes as not to the swervers in front of them. Chaos reigns behind the truckers, while nervous drivers in the fast lane genuinely start to ponder whether the central reservation will give them a more dignified end to this life than the bastard in the left-hand-drive juggernaut, meandering in the middle lane and presently having an on-off relationship with your lane markers. They either fúcking love it, or don't know which is faster, 60mph or 59mph. A wholly unnecessary thing to keep continually testing, imo Will someone please tell them the conclusion of the 59vs60mph conundrum? Let's have some more contributions, pls. If you're not píssed off in some way by Britain's roads, you're either dead or viewing this through a timecrack in the 1950s.

I've got a lot of agreement with your points, MLG - plus there is evidence in holy books themselves that whatever got written down is simply the best guess of the men and women of the time. Genesis describes creation in less than two pages. This is Earth, the Moon, the Sun and anything that lived on Earth. You'd get as much detail if you asked a six year old to have a stab at explaining how we all came to be. The moon, a mystery for centuries, is merely passed off as the light for the night sky. The Qu'ran does a better job thousands of years later. By that time, people are aware that the moon is only reflected light, so contemporary human understanding ends up in a holy book. Going back further and looking at polytheistic pantheons of Greek, Roman and Scandinavia adds even more weight to your argument, and is a lot easier to follow. They basically invented gods for everything that they either didn't understand or didn't fully comprehend. The only big question science can't account for without some kind of cosmic chicken and egg situation is how we got here in the first place. The Big Bang as sole explanation is both spiritually and scientifically unsatisfying. Scientifically, it's fúcked the minute someone asks how the precursor matter (the stuff that blew up and made our universe) came to be. Spiritually, it's akin to entropy. Yes, yes, entropy is wonderful on its own, and I'm sure that many atheists spent time navel-gazing, marvelling at the sheer unlikelihood of them being here in the first place, and have felt rather smug about that. For most people though, it's not very nourishing spiritual fayre, which is why the holy books and the stories within have become so ingrained in our language and culture and phrases like "random" are relatively new. I've said before that I feel atheism is too strong a position for me to take, arrogant even. I find Dawkins' brand in particular just as depressingly evangelical as those inaccurate old books or the wide-eyed acolytes of a modern-day charismatic church. For those reasons, I can't fully commit to the ol' atheism, even though I've no time for organised religion. I agree with Dawkins that we're social animals and we'd have done the co-operative stuff anyway. That is not a tough shout to make. We've found people all over the world who had never heard of Christianity, yet had built civilizations and communities regardless of never hearing the good word of Christ. That said, I can't honestly tell you "there is no God", and neither can Dawkins. None of us have a fcking scooby. The problem with any demolition job on organised religion is that it leaves nothing to replace it with, especially for those that have taken comfort in the belief that a supernatural being is interested and involved in their day-to-day lives. Martin Luther replaced Catholicism with Protestantism, in his own mind and further afield. Islam displaced a number of local and international religions when it was introduced. Believe it or not, the majority religion in Eastern Arabia used to be Nestorian Christianity. I make these points to illustrate what a tough job you have on your hands. Historically, it has usually taken religion to displace religion. Sure, there have always been people who have not been particularly devout, but most of them would probably still have feared going to hell, even if they did a good job of pretending otherwise. The phenomenon of non-belief, or at least not subscribing to any religion whatsoever, is relatively new. Cameron still refers to this country as a Christian country, Dawkins' runs his take on atheism like a religion in its own right and fragments of pre-Islamic faith still exist in the "Islamic World" to this day. MLG vs Irrational Belief, eh? Good luck with that. Until we've something that people can get behind (humanism is still a no-go, judging by the state of the planet), existing religious fables are always going to be a draw and you'll have a tough time saying "nope, it's all shít. The job of life is to work things out for yourself", even though I'd be in agreement with that statement.

I actually really liked the idea. Seem to remember some research that at a certain level, it's actually cheaper than means testing. I think people forget just how much money this country generates. The problem is usually getting the money back to the taxpayers, and usually about efficiency. Take the recent thread from Battydays about his missus doing temp nursing, as an example. IMO, all that agency money is wasted. The NHS would do a ton better if it was realistic about the amount of money it should be paying people or the amount of people it should hire in the first place. The NHS will permanently have temporary nurses until it is dismantled or serious reform is attempted. That's just one example. I'm sure others have similar stories, but in summary, I reckon we spend a lot of money that we just don't need to spend. I liked the idea of a Citizen's income because the vast majority of us pay something approaching 50% of our income. A non-means tested government universal payment would have reinforced the notion of "put in", "get back", something that people seem to have forgotten in the recent wave of demonisations.

That party you were invited to was in September, and he was the first of our school year to turn 40. If memory serves, I remember you:- a) updating Facebook all day with progress of your journey. b) not turning up at the party, and then announcing you were at a Kings of Leon gig with the missus. I am no Inspector Morse, and what with all the other theories I entertain, I may not have given this the love that it deserves, but if you haven't been invited to anything else, perhaps it's merely incompatibility with your party going modus operandi and basic expectation. Usually, the expected outcomes to a party invite are "I'll go" or "I won't", not "I'll go", "I'm on my way" and "I'm at Kings of Leon, despite it being one of my best pal's birthdays and despite never mentioning it before". Refining your responses to the expected outcomes may yield a greater number of invitations.

I've got no problem with a ladies team but like others, feel that a petition is the wrong way to go about it. We're a progressive club with a female owner. A petition implies that the club have been doing something wrong, or is against the idea now. I'd imagine it's be a case of priorities than anything else, and the priorities have long been about youth development.

Very interesting, thanks. I must say, the focus of the file seems extremely askew. Most of the concerns centre around whether Hayman represented a security risk. There doesn't seem to be any appetite to address the allegations/evidence that existed under the Henderson psuedonym. The only concern there seems to be to reiterate the official line. None of the nine people involved in the Henderson correspondence were charged. Furthermore, if proving that Hayman wasn't a security risk was one of the aims of the security service, they did very little to justify their positions save repeat the line that security had not been compromised. This is a man that was in Berlin at the height of the Cold War. This may partially explain any reluctance to name and shame him. This was 1980, after all. Naming our former ambassadors as paedophiles, particularly when they were in Berlin, would have been giving the enemy magazines of ammunition for propaganda. If it ever was a consideration, it was an ill-conceived one. One of the tenets of a democratic society is transparency. It's true up to a point, but when the sh!t really hits the fan, we can be just as grubby as less representative forms of government.

Possibly, but then possibly you're being unrealistic too. You can't really have kids and then expect not to have huge kid-shaped problems. I know that this is superficially about the train service, but it really boils down to having an inadequate support network for your family. That, my friend, is on you.

I used to commute into London. It was shít. Hours of my life taken up every week. I solved it by finding something more suitable for the family and not commuting into London anymore. That was ace

I'd first have to ask, where are you getting your figures from? I'd then have to ask why it was I was getting work offers off the likes of Virgin Care months before anything is official was announced, on the understanding that they have "already got" child services for the South West of England, and why it is that frontline services like child protection are being run for profit. Finally, I'd have to ask why, in a post that lambasted leaders of all colours, why you've got the blues about my statements on the Conservatives.

On this we agree. Cameron has his moments. He has demonstrated deft decorum and choice of phrase during parts of his time in office, not least during the initial findings of official complicity in the Hillsborough disaster. That aside, he's an utter bastard intent on selling the whole state to the private sector, waggling his fingers at the unemployed as he does so. Anyone with an ounce of sense should see this lot for the asset-strippers they are. Sold Royal Mail for a song, have allowed the private sector all over the NHS and in the midst of all this cash, have actually managed to borrow more than Labour did during their entire tenure while implementing a system of austerity and headline-grabbing caps. Miliband is emblematic of the entire Parliamentary Labour Party at the moment. Doesn't know who the f#ck he is or how he should connect with the British public. Electoral strategy tells them they should fight that fruitful C1 marginal ground, which pushes them away from the people that are not necessarily hoodwinked by the benefits dystopia that the Conservative PR department concocts. Miliband validates that bullsh!t every time he tries to achieve some sort of parity with it. Clegg is a political dead man walking. Sure, they may keep some of the seats where they have a good electoral following, but there's a damn good chance Clegg could be unseated in Sheffield. Student power and local embarrassment could be a powerful combination. Will be remembered as the man that destroyed the Lib Dems. Farage. The Goblin King. There's no doubting the relative oratory skill, his appeal to a broad range of people, who all seem to see something slightly different through the prism of UKIP. He'll splatter these goons during debate, and he isn't really that good himself. Weakest in living memory just about covers it.

Gotta say fair play, Jack. Going for the football, which hasn't always been the case. I personally think it's a mistake by potentially both parties, but if Koeman has already got his eyes on other, better players, then Cork's opportunities here are going to be limited. The real test of how fans feel about a player comes when they return to SMS. I think Jack will be warmly welcomed.

I think the main similarity is that refs will keep a closer eye on him. Aggression is a big part of his game. They'll be on the lookout for it, and if he continues to play the way that he does, he'll get the cards his play merits. Accept they are both different kinds of player. They'll get a similar level of scrutiny.