chrisp65

**** YEAH!

I just saw that. Truly boils my piss that that man is still around.

Farmers and country types can relax, Boris Johnson has today guaranteed that any and all grants and subsidies they get from the EU now, they will get from the UK government if we leave the EU. say anything, just say anything, promise every group or sector everything and anything they want, guarantee sunshine, wave a pasty from a bus, say anything

delay of announcement on the OS is simply down to confirming the exact spelling of Robert Di Matthews

I wanted to join a golf club, but during the background checks it came out that I had a father.

If, for example, there was a really good whisky available as either alcoholic or non-alcohol, that was proven to be identical in every way in a blind taste test: I'd probably stick with the alcohol free version. I'm not using it to get drunk or dull my faculties. But I genuinely don't know of any such drink. On a Sunday lunchtime we would usually have a nice glass of some sparkling soft drink with elderflower or apple or cranberry or some such. It's just as pleasant as 'plonk'. The problem, to me, with the likes of Kaliber alcohol free lager is that it is attempting to taste like a drink that is not great in the first place. Cheap cold lager is essentially a mass market product to get drunk with. I don't think Carling or Harp or Fosters taste very good. They are ice cold for a reason. So alcohol free lager is an attempt to mimic these tastes and take the alcohol out of the delivery system for getting pissed. Which is a bit self defeating. That's common sense science fact law.

The smooth warming sensation of a decent whisky or rum truly is one of life's pleasures. I don't know of a n/a equivalent. I drink alcohol fairly rarely, a single bottle of beer once every few weeks, or a short when the mood takes me. When I do, I like to try something with a decent and interesting taste. Brains Black before some chilled down can of Guiness. A neat small glass of Penderyn before a tumbler of bells and coke. But nine times out of ten, more than happy to stick to soft drinks. Just so much more convenient to know I can still drive and I haven't done my liver in with 2 drinks a night every night. Having just rambled through all of that, I'm going to a sort of folk gig in a week's time (Friday), I'll have 1 or 2 poncey ales or shorts. But I'm also going to a country/techno gig (Thursday) and will probably get off my tits on lager. Horses for courses.

We had friends that were wine snobs. But they always wanted to know the price of the wine and have a look at the label before they decided if it tasted nice. They split up, we didn't stay in contact with either of them. They had turned us in to inverted wine snobs, we'd spend way too much time looking for a bottle that cost a fiver, had a screw cap and had a funny picture on the label, like an elephant or donkey or a foot or something.

I don't want to out anyone, but I suspect skarroki is actually a part of the official Aston Villa scouting network.

I've currently got my ancient Merc auto set up so soft it does that 'wallow' just like you used to see the cars do on old american cop shows. In my head, I'm permanently in an episode of the Rockford Files. That episode where he has to commute home, hand over his money to teenagers and do a quick 30 minutes of e-mails before tea...

3:10pm for us for some weird reason. School was not an environment where I flourished. Picture your stereotypical 1970's poor town comprehensive and all those stereotype teachers, the incompetent, the hippy, the bully, the drunk and the perv. Add in to the mix my personal and utterly disproportionate dislike of 'uniform' and the school's adoption of uniform blazer and tie.... I left school with two C grades, too thick for sixth form, too skinny and naive for work. So I did a one year 'second chance' course in college. College was a glorious revelation. Now, here I am all these years later, a **** intellectual colossus.

...and yet, as a member and a net contributor we haven't been able to 'make them jump', but once we leave they will respect us more and our negotiators will become much much better at the game? All in a time frame that won't cause the market to wet its collective pants and put all its money somewhere else? All in a time frame that won't risk investment and jobs? All in a time frame that won't be delayed by the main show in town, the battle to be leader of the tory party? All whilst we cut fuel bills, earn more money, have a better NHS, lower taxes and anything else they can add to the wishlist?

Milk and Honey I'm playing hard ball and holding out until they can promise longer, warmer, drier summers and snow on Christmas day. Sad thing is, there are sensible reasons to leave the EU which are not getting a look in whilst people respond better to a pasty waved from a tour bus.

Fair play to the French, cranking up industrial action as the summer tourist season approaches and days before the Euros begin. For all the pasty waving and fear of King Felipe or Hitler, nothing will quite make people vote leave like pictures on the news of French pickets spoiling our hard working holidays. My money is still on a win for leave.

I'm not sure I've suggested packing or cramming us in like robots or sardines or tetris or damaging the quality of life? Quite the opposite. I've suggested we have hundreds of thousands of empty houses and vast areas of the UK that are under populated. As for getting away to the country for peace. I'm not sure those already rammed and crammed in our inner cities can do that at present. It's generally the ones with a softer lifestyle to begin with that can escape their stresses for a quiet week in a nice cottage in Devon or Yorkshire. I don't even think the ever growing population is linked to whether we remain in europe. If we stop euro entry to the UK that's only half of our immigration stopped and far less places for Brits to emigrate to. Indian restaurants will simply have to start employing Bangladeshi chefs again once the cheaper supply of Bulgarian chefs is cut off. I think the population would still grow by a six figure sum the year after we left europe and the years after that. It's just that those coming in wouldn't be French or Portugese. I don't think we've even started to have a sensible conversation (as a country) about this whole thing, we've just got 50% of the population hoping that a vote to leave will return us to a golden age.

Unless we are proposing enforced contraception, those people are going to be alive and eating food and burning food somewhere. So I'm not sure that overall it's any more impact on the environment if they are in Northumberland or Spain. Other than, if it's in planned cities with decent infrastructure then the numbers must mean economies of scale will reduce overall pollution, a little. Obviously there will be a localised impact where there previously wasn't a city, but I'm fairly sure there's room for one more city in Lancashire, and another in Yorkshire, Northumberland, Lincolnshire ... Once we really are facing a genuine squeeze, perhaps we will genuinely start looking at energy efficient housing. Perhaps we'll harvest rainwater. We might even put green roofs on buildings or sports fields on top of schools. Once we're genuinely concerned about the environment, we might reconsider the 1,400,000 tonnes plus of pet food we buy in the UK every year. This island isn't too small. It's just quite badly organised compared with what it could be.

creeping gentrification

I'm not sure what the maximum is. There must be one, being realistic. Current population of england is about 53 million, So a finger in the air first ever guess, 60 / 70 million? That's based on about 5 minutes thinking. Perhaps if houses harvested rainwater we'd have less flash floods and we'd have less drinking water used to flush toilets. Infrastructure. It's a technology that's been used all over the world for decades.

I didn't say we weren't densely populated. I was saying there is still plenty of land. As it happens, the 15 million tons of food waste we produce per annum suggests there is an over production of food too. Just as the 3 billion litres of water lost everyday suggest we don't take any water shortage seriously. It's all about not spending on onfrastructure. Drains, water supply, trains, hospitals, roads. If somebody doesn't don't want more immigrants here, that's a perfectly ok stance. But they shouldn't blame it on a lack of space and a worry about hose pipe bans.

Please please let's not do the small island / no land thing. That is patent rubbish. Just drive around the motorways of the south east and look at the vast areas of countryside. the M4 corridor is almost entirely countryside. We are not running out of space. We are trying to squeeze more and more out of existing facilities. We are closing schools and reducing the number of maternity units. We are consolidating the number of police stations and libraries. We are telling social workers they need to take on more cases and we are giving hospitals less money to cope with the number of people in their catchment area. It's legitimate to say the infrastructure which is being shrunk cannot cope with a growing population. That's logical. We are not running out of space. We are sweating the existing building stock to maximise 'value'. Incidentally, right now it is estimated there are 600,000 empty homes in england.