It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
Just leave. There is fuck all they can do about it.
When I came round after my motorbike accident wrist surgery I just pulled my clothes on and staggered out. The nurse told me I "couldn't" and I told him that he "could" fuck off.
Doesn't work out so well for oldies who need a care home place for discharge, though. They constitute much of the burden.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
Oh God, injera. My then wife pretended she liked it. BARF
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
We could play Russia at their own game by encouraging the German right to claim Kaliningrad.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
Total demand isn't sky high. It is that there are a load (20%?) less restaurants than there were 5 years ago so demand per restaurant is sky high.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
was just a tiny part of the fun - the cherry on the cake of cooperation between an increasing authoritarian Germany (the cooperation began pre-Nazi) and the Soviet Union.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
Trouble is that you don't need that many people to fill the hot show or top restaurant, and you still see the same streets on the way out.
Two problems for the blue team there. One is that "Britain's doing great" posters don't sit well with a shabby environment;
The other is that tax cuts in that situation will just annoy people.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
Oh God, injera. My then wife pretended she liked it. BARF
I like injera. Even though it has the texture of old bandages.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
That is a truly terrible state of affairs. It should not be how MPs have to manage their work.
On the upside it is a problem that Ms Crosbie won't personally need to worry about the other side of a GE (even if the Conservatives win that GE).
Don't count on it. Anglesey last unseated a sitting MP in 1950.
Yeah, but the previous sitting lady MP was unseated (and against the run of play).
Hardly. She was one of four, almost half, of Liberal MPs who were defeated in 1951 (my mistake on the year). In fact, the swing against her was considerably less than the swing that unseated her neighbour in Merioneth.
(Had there been a Tory candidate in Carmarthen they might well have lost that too. It was a terrible year for the Liberals.)
I was thinking more against the run of play in that Cled won for Labour in a year where Labour were eviscerated elsewhere.
My political history tends to focus on the Labour perspective rather than the other runners and riders. That said I am far less Labour-centred than I used to be. Perhaps I am being sucked in to PB posters constant ramping of how bad Labour are in government and opposition and how fantastic the Conservatives in government are. I am not quite there yet, but getting there.
Well, again, they were hardly eviscerated. They won their highest ever share of the popular vote and lost 22 seats while picking two up (Anglesey and Merioneth). Had the Liberals actually stood more candidates (they went from 475 and 9% of the vote to 109 and 2.5% of the vote) Labour might still have clung on to power. In the absence of Liberal candidates two-thirds of their voters went Conservative which was crucial in flipping those 21 seats.
Labour's voter inefficiency in 1951 could prove quite the model for the 2024/5 result. Starmer, a hapless moderate in the vein of Attlee wins most votes, but less seats than the Churchillian returnee Johnson.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
Nail on head here. Things got a lot better from about 2000 onwards, although you also got some shite PFI architecture and also a rash of what I call “Tesco towers” (cheap apartment blocks that tend to be on top of a Tescos).
Again, Britain traditionally spends fuck all on this aspect of public life and so the lowest common denominator has tended to predominate.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
Oh God, injera. My then wife pretended she liked it. BARF
I like injera. Even though it has the texture of old bandages.
Goes well with Malagousia. Probably.
I like the concept of it, but the texture is really off-putting.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Surprised the vivino doesn't list the units/alc content on all the wines. I had somehow assumed that was a legal thing here. It's nice to know just from a 'is this a cheeky mid-week evening bottle? Or would that be very unwise?'.
CNN - LIVE UPDATES The latest on the new Congress and House speaker vote
How the day will unfold: Congress can’t really function until it has a House speaker; the position is filled on the first day of a new Congress, Jan. 3, even before members-elect take the oath of office.
Members will meet in the morning to tie off loose ends and close the 117th Congress. Then, at noon Eastern time, the clerk of the House will gavel in the new Congress and will call a quorum. The first major order of business will be the speaker election. Democrats will place Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’ name into nomination, and Republicans are set to place McCarthy’s name.
Then the clerk will call the roll and each member will state the name of the person whom they are voting for. If no one amasses a majority of votes cast, it goes to a second ballot. If another ballot is needed, it is not clear if Congress will recess the chamber or if members will continue voting.
Members can vote for anyone they want: There’s no rule that the speaker is a House member. Members can vote for anyone, and they can protest by skipping the vote or voting “present.” The vast majority will vote for their party’s leader.
Both parties met last year to determine their leadership, with Democrats selecting Jeffries and Republicans agreeing to nominate McCarthy, but by a margin that signaled a possible floor fight ahead. McCarthy faces a long-shot challenger: hard-right Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona. The challenge highlights the opposition McCarthy is up against and could draw votes away from him.
If neither wins a majority, a "floor fight" happens: Lawmakers will continue voting until someone wins the majority. They can take successive votes. They can adjourn to horse trade and deal among themselves. But the House does not kick off the new Congress until a speaker is elected. This is what people are talking about when they refer to a “floor fight.” It’s when House members require multiple ballots, or votes, to elect their speaker. In the 200-plus years since the first two-year Congress met in 1789, such floor fights have occurred just 14 times, according to the House historian.
It doesn't always require 218 votes: One important thing to remember is that McCarthy does not technically need 218 votes to become speaker. A majority of those present and voting is required to get the speakership, which is usually 218 lawmakers. But if enough people skip the vote or vote “present,” the number of votes required for a majority can drop.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
I did raise a wry smile when, faced with increased demand for Tef from the west (health influencers branding it the new Quinoa!) - the Ethiopian government banned its export.
Seriously, you can keep your fecking Tef!
Fascinating country, though.
Fifteen years ago, I did a month-long loop around the north. In particular, the Simien mountains were spectacular.
Would love to go to the Danakil depression, if/when the security situation fully resolves itself.
Just leave. There is fuck all they can do about it.
When I came round after my motorbike accident wrist surgery I just pulled my clothes on and staggered out. The nurse told me I "couldn't" and I told him that he "could" fuck off.
Such gratitude. Did you clap for Boris Johnson every Thursday too?
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
Oh God, injera. My then wife pretended she liked it. BARF
I like injera. Even though it has the texture of old bandages.
Goes well with Malagousia. Probably.
I like the concept of it, but the texture is really off-putting.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Surprised the vivino doesn't list the units/alc content on all the wines. I had somehow assumed that was a legal thing here. It's nice to know just from a 'is this a cheeky mid-week evening bottle? Or would that be very unwise?'.
I do look at the alcohol by volume as I don't like wines over 14%. But I would lobby the government to rescind the requirement to put calories on restaurant menus.
Kills the evening stone dead to see that your chosen main course is actually 1,457kcals.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
I did raise a wry smile when, faced with increased demand for Tef from the west (health influencers branding it the new Quinoa!) - the Ethiopian government banned its export.
Seriously, you can keep your fecking Tef!
Fascinating country, though.
Fifteen years ago, I did a month-long loop around the north. In particular, the Simien mountains were spectacular.
Would love to go the Danakil depression, if/when the security situation fully resolves itself.
Probably not for a while…
Yeah Simien and Bale mountains are ace. But your diesel freezes overnight because they don't put the antifreeze in.
CNN - LIVE UPDATES The latest on the new Congress and House speaker vote
How the day will unfold: Congress can’t really function until it has a House speaker; the position is filled on the first day of a new Congress, Jan. 3, even before members-elect take the oath of office.
Members will meet in the morning to tie off loose ends and close the 117th Congress. Then, at noon Eastern time, the clerk of the House will gavel in the new Congress and will call a quorum. The first major order of business will be the speaker election. Democrats will place Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’ name into nomination, and Republicans are set to place McCarthy’s name.
Then the clerk will call the roll and each member will state the name of the person whom they are voting for. If no one amasses a majority of votes cast, it goes to a second ballot. If another ballot is needed, it is not clear if Congress will recess the chamber or if members will continue voting.
Members can vote for anyone they want: There’s no rule that the speaker is a House member. Members can vote for anyone, and they can protest by skipping the vote or voting “present.” The vast majority will vote for their party’s leader.
Both parties met last year to determine their leadership, with Democrats selecting Jeffries and Republicans agreeing to nominate McCarthy, but by a margin that signaled a possible floor fight ahead. McCarthy faces a long-shot challenger: hard-right Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona. The challenge highlights the opposition McCarthy is up against and could draw votes away from him.
If neither wins a majority, a "floor fight" happens: Lawmakers will continue voting until someone wins the majority. They can take successive votes. They can adjourn to horse trade and deal among themselves. But the House does not kick off the new Congress until a speaker is elected. This is what people are talking about when they refer to a “floor fight.” It’s when House members require multiple ballots, or votes, to elect their speaker. In the 200-plus years since the first two-year Congress met in 1789, such floor fights have occurred just 14 times, according to the House historian.
It doesn't always require 218 votes: One important thing to remember is that McCarthy does not technically need 218 votes to become speaker. A majority of those present and voting is required to get the speakership, which is usually 218 lawmakers. But if enough people skip the vote or vote “present,” the number of votes required for a majority can drop.
SSI - So get your popcorn ready by 12 noon in DC = 5pm UK
In addition to the main event, catch the Geek Show featuring soon to be Rep. George Santos (R-?!?!).
Will they start with a vote to see how close McCarthy is? My understanding is that he doesn't actually need 218, he needs a majority of those present and voting (as opposed to voting "present"). Its possible he will be elected with 217 or even 216 votes. I think Pelosi was elected with 217 the last time.
That is a truly terrible state of affairs. It should not be how MPs have to manage their work.
On the upside it is a problem that Ms Crosbie won't personally need to worry about the other side of a GE (even if the Conservatives win that GE).
Don't count on it. Anglesey last unseated a sitting MP in 1950.
Yeah, but the previous sitting lady MP was unseated (and against the run of play).
Hardly. She was one of four, almost half, of Liberal MPs who were defeated in 1951 (my mistake on the year). In fact, the swing against her was considerably less than the swing that unseated her neighbour in Merioneth.
(Had there been a Tory candidate in Carmarthen they might well have lost that too. It was a terrible year for the Liberals.)
I was thinking more against the run of play in that Cled won for Labour in a year where Labour were eviscerated elsewhere.
My political history tends to focus on the Labour perspective rather than the other runners and riders. That said I am far less Labour-centred than I used to be. Perhaps I am being sucked in to PB posters constant ramping of how bad Labour are in government and opposition and how fantastic the Conservatives in government are. I am not quite there yet, but getting there.
Well, again, they were hardly eviscerated. They won their highest ever share of the popular vote and lost 22 seats while picking two up (Anglesey and Merioneth). Had the Liberals actually stood more candidates (they went from 475 and 9% of the vote to 109 and 2.5% of the vote) Labour might still have clung on to power. In the absence of Liberal candidates two-thirds of their voters went Conservative which was crucial in flipping those 21 seats.
Labour's voter inefficiency in 1951 could prove quite the model for the 2024/5 result. Starmer, a hapless moderate in the vein of Attlee wins most votes, but less seats than the Churchillian returnee Johnson.
Of course in 1951 there were two factors that didn't really repeat themselves. First, the overall alignment of Labour versus everyone else, especially the Tories standing down in Lib-Lab contests. Second, the uncontested seats in NI, where the Unionist side would probably have taken 155,000 votes - closing most of their overall UK vote deficit versus Labour of 231,000.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
Total demand isn't sky high. It is that there are a load (20%?) less restaurants than there were 5 years ago so demand per restaurant is sky high.
Speaking of which (sort of) I went to see ABBA Voyage over the hols.
Absolutely amazing. Just as @NickPalmer said it was.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
I did raise a wry smile when, faced with increased demand for Tef from the west (health influencers branding it the new Quinoa!) - the Ethiopian government banned its export.
Seriously, you can keep your fecking Tef!
Fascinating country, though.
Fifteen years ago, I did a month-long loop around the north. In particular, the Simien mountains were spectacular.
Would love to go to the Danakil depression, if/when the security situation fully resolves itself.
Probably not for a while…
There is a cookery programme I quite enjoyed where the chef goes to various out-of-the-way places to find & cook dishes. He went salt mining in the Danakil Depression in one of them and, boy, did it look like proper hard work. I don't envy those folks one bit.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West...
Only if a rolling shitshow run by a mass murderer appeals.
Farage is, I suppose, just about enough of a tw@t for that.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
The service the Royal Mail provided is one that belongs in the past though. There are a plethora of firms able to handle deliveries nowadays so let them get on with it.
Though I'd abolish the universal service guarantee. If you want to live in the sticks in an area that's difficult to get to then that should be your prerogative, but then you should take responsibility for that. Either pay more yourself to get someone to do the final mile delivery, or have a more accessible collection point that you go to in order to pick up your stuff.
My in laws live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Their village has a post office and everything is delivered there. They go to collect their post from there, not the other way around, because where they live simply getting the post to the office is the service fulfilled.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Surprised the vivino doesn't list the units/alc content on all the wines. I had somehow assumed that was a legal thing here. It's nice to know just from a 'is this a cheeky mid-week evening bottle? Or would that be very unwise?'.
I do look at the alcohol by volume as I don't like wines over 14%. But I would lobby the government to rescind the requirement to put calories on restaurant menus.
Kills the evening stone dead to see that your chosen main course is actually 1,457kcals.
Yeah - I was just idly clicking about it and thought 'wonder how strong this is' and couldn't see anything. Then went to another wine which did have the info and it was 17.5%. It might as well just call itself 'port' at that stage.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Surprised the vivino doesn't list the units/alc content on all the wines. I had somehow assumed that was a legal thing here. It's nice to know just from a 'is this a cheeky mid-week evening bottle? Or would that be very unwise?'.
I do look at the alcohol by volume as I don't like wines over 14%. But I would lobby the government to rescind the requirement to put calories on restaurant menus.
Kills the evening stone dead to see that your chosen main course is actually 1,457kcals.
I dilute anything (red) above 14%. Sacrilege these days but in the past it was quite normal to do so. A strong 14.5% red diluted to 13% or 12.5% remains intense enough but the fruit expresses itself better and you lose the burning sensation in the throat. It also goes further.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
Cycle lanes in the UK are often poorly used because they are extremely badly designed, presumably by people who have never ridden a bike in their life. Heaven knows why; you only have to look at a typical town in the Netherlands or Germany to see how to do it properly.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
The most disappointing and surprising example I've seen from a mainstream politician was Ségolène Royal.
CNN - LIVE UPDATES The latest on the new Congress and House speaker vote
How the day will unfold: Congress can’t really function until it has a House speaker; the position is filled on the first day of a new Congress, Jan. 3, even before members-elect take the oath of office.
Members will meet in the morning to tie off loose ends and close the 117th Congress. Then, at noon Eastern time, the clerk of the House will gavel in the new Congress and will call a quorum. The first major order of business will be the speaker election. Democrats will place Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’ name into nomination, and Republicans are set to place McCarthy’s name.
Then the clerk will call the roll and each member will state the name of the person whom they are voting for. If no one amasses a majority of votes cast, it goes to a second ballot. If another ballot is needed, it is not clear if Congress will recess the chamber or if members will continue voting.
Members can vote for anyone they want: There’s no rule that the speaker is a House member. Members can vote for anyone, and they can protest by skipping the vote or voting “present.” The vast majority will vote for their party’s leader.
Both parties met last year to determine their leadership, with Democrats selecting Jeffries and Republicans agreeing to nominate McCarthy, but by a margin that signaled a possible floor fight ahead. McCarthy faces a long-shot challenger: hard-right Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona. The challenge highlights the opposition McCarthy is up against and could draw votes away from him.
If neither wins a majority, a "floor fight" happens: Lawmakers will continue voting until someone wins the majority. They can take successive votes. They can adjourn to horse trade and deal among themselves. But the House does not kick off the new Congress until a speaker is elected. This is what people are talking about when they refer to a “floor fight.” It’s when House members require multiple ballots, or votes, to elect their speaker. In the 200-plus years since the first two-year Congress met in 1789, such floor fights have occurred just 14 times, according to the House historian.
It doesn't always require 218 votes: One important thing to remember is that McCarthy does not technically need 218 votes to become speaker. A majority of those present and voting is required to get the speakership, which is usually 218 lawmakers. But if enough people skip the vote or vote “present,” the number of votes required for a majority can drop.
SSI - So get your popcorn ready by 12 noon in DC = 5pm UK
In addition to the main event, catch the Geek Show featuring soon to be Rep. George Santos (R-?!?!).
Will they start with a vote to see how close McCarthy is? My understanding is that he doesn't actually need 218, he needs a majority of those present and voting (as opposed to voting "present"). Its possible he will be elected with 217 or even 216 votes. I think Pelosi was elected with 217 the last time.
There is no preliminary voting, just actual roll call(s) of members, in alpha order.
Nancy Pelosi was elected Speaker in 2021 with 216 votes.
Certainly possible Kevin McCarthy (R-Weathervane) will be elected on first attempt. But would NOT bet on it!
Addendum - one interesting metric will be, how many votes are cast for Hakeem Jeffries? Note that 213 Democrats were elected to US House in 2022 midterms.
My guess is that HJ will get all of them on initial rollcall.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
I did raise a wry smile when, faced with increased demand for Tef from the west (health influencers branding it the new Quinoa!) - the Ethiopian government banned its export.
Seriously, you can keep your fecking Tef!
Fascinating country, though.
Fifteen years ago, I did a month-long loop around the north. In particular, the Simien mountains were spectacular.
Would love to go the Danakil depression, if/when the security situation fully resolves itself.
Probably not for a while…
Yeah Simien and Bale mountains are ace. But your diesel freezes overnight because they don't put the antifreeze in.
The ultra well-travelled PB demographic revealing itself again.
Ethiopia was on the list of possibles for this summer as my son demanded somewhere more exotic than our planned trip to the Basque country, but we've ended up opting for Georgia.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
Cycle lanes in the UK are often poorly used because they are extremely badly designed, presumably by people who have never ridden a bike in their life. Heaven knows why; you only have to look at a typical town in the Netherlands or Germany to see how to do it properly.
Or indeed in Paris where they all said it couldn't be done. Until they did it. Bike numbers up massively.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
FYI - don't fall for the "empty cycle lanes" thing. They are empty because cyclists don't get caught in congestion.
For example, the one in the Meadows in Edinburgh is one of the most used in Scotland but is usually completely empty - the cyclists have already got to work/pub.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Surprised the vivino doesn't list the units/alc content on all the wines. I had somehow assumed that was a legal thing here. It's nice to know just from a 'is this a cheeky mid-week evening bottle? Or would that be very unwise?'.
I do look at the alcohol by volume as I don't like wines over 14%. But I would lobby the government to rescind the requirement to put calories on restaurant menus.
Kills the evening stone dead to see that your chosen main course is actually 1,457kcals.
I dilute anything (red) above 14%. Sacrilege these days but in the past it was quite normal to do so. A strong 14.5% red diluted to 13% or 12.5% remains intense enough but the fruit expresses itself better and you lose the burning sensation in the throat. It also goes further.
It's a ruse by the Laithwaites of this world to offer a lot of very high alcohol reds which can mask all kinds of imperfections in the wine itself.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
The most disappointing and surprising example I've seen from a mainstream politician was Ségolène Royal.
And conversely the most pleasantly surprising counter-example was Giogia Meloni.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
I did raise a wry smile when, faced with increased demand for Tef from the west (health influencers branding it the new Quinoa!) - the Ethiopian government banned its export.
Seriously, you can keep your fecking Tef!
Fascinating country, though.
Fifteen years ago, I did a month-long loop around the north. In particular, the Simien mountains were spectacular.
Would love to go the Danakil depression, if/when the security situation fully resolves itself.
Probably not for a while…
Yeah Simien and Bale mountains are ace. But your diesel freezes overnight because they don't put the antifreeze in.
The ultra well-travelled PB demographic revealing itself again.
Ethiopia was on the list of possibles for this summer as my son demanded somewhere more exotic than our planned trip to the Basque country, but we've ended up opting for Georgia.
The country or the state? I hope the former, just because it has always appealed to me.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
Cycle lanes in the UK are often poorly used because they are extremely badly designed, presumably by people who have never ridden a bike in their life. Heaven knows why; you only have to look at a typical town in the Netherlands or Germany to see how to do it properly.
I don't get why they don't just copy them? There is a funny Dutch guy who reviews the cycle provision in Edinburgh and the poor man needs therapy.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
Cycle lanes in the UK are often poorly used because they are extremely badly designed, presumably by people who have never ridden a bike in their life. Heaven knows why; you only have to look at a typical town in the Netherlands or Germany to see how to do it properly.
Why is there fucking litter and rubbish everywhere? Even Russia looked cleaner when I was there last month. Blyat.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
Cycle lanes in the UK are often poorly used because they are extremely badly designed, presumably by people who have never ridden a bike in their life. Heaven knows why; you only have to look at a typical town in the Netherlands or Germany to see how to do it properly.
My local council seems to think you need big two-way cycle lanes on both sides of the road, leaving no room for pull-in bus bays.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
FYI - don't fall for the "empty cycle lanes" thing. They are empty because cyclists don't get caught in congestion.
For example, the one in the Meadows in Edinburgh is one of the most used in Scotland but is usually completely empty - the cyclists have already got to work/pub.
Great, laudable aim, the public will I am sure support this.
BUT - how will this be achieved in practice? Expanding current medical schools? New schools? Who will provide the training?
Like many a popular opposition facing a very unpopular government I suspect detail will be very, very light, and promises will not have any details.
I want a labour government, and as soon as possible, but I want more detail.
(And I know this is a tweet, but does anyone truly expect Reeves would have the answers to my questions?)
There have been five new medical schools opened already this century so opening some more is surely not beyond imagination.
My complaints would be that not enough is done to address poor retention but that would take more than a tweet, and I suspect the numbers are being fudged so that 7,500 new medical students should be divided by the four, five or six years they will be in training.
Five new medical schools? Not sure of the intake, but generously 200 each? That’s a thousand.
Reeves is suggesting 6,500 more than that. If she is aggregating the training years then that’s as bad a lie as the 40 hospitals. And if it’s not, how the actual F is that to happen? Medical training happens a lot in clinic, not just in uni lecture theatres. Training places will be needed.
Fudged or aggregated counting of medical students is not a lie, so should not be compared with the 40 new hospitals, which will certainly not be 40 new hospitals. It might be misleading to those who read it as 7,500 more newly-qualified doctors a year.
So you're saying "training 7500 more doctors" doesn't mean 7500 more doctors qualifying? I wouldn't expect very many to fail, so if "training 7500 more doctors" means "training 1500 more doctors in each of the five years so only 1500 more qualify each year (less a few failures)" then calling it "not a lie" is generous, to say the least.
I'm saying "We’ll train 7,500 more doctors ... a year" probably means there will be 7,500 more medical students being trained to be doctors. But since medicine is (usually) a five-year course, that only requires admitting 1,500 more students to year one. After a time, there will be 1,500 more first years, 1,500 more second years, ... and 1,500 more fifth years, making 7,500 additional medical students. At least, that is how I read it.
And I do not think this should be controversial. If it were announced that your daughter's school were to double in size, surely you would expect there to be twice as many pupils at the school, not twice as many in each year which would mean the school being seven times as big.
I'm saying that if people hear "we'll train 7500 more doctors a year" most people will interpret that as "7500 more doctors a year will qualify", and that Reeves knows this.
@DecrepiterJohnL - basic maths failure I'm afraid. If there are twice as many in each year of a school, there will be twice as many in total, not seven times as many. If, say, there are 30 in each year, there are 210 pupils in total. Double that and there will be 420 pupils - 60 in each year. I think you meant that, if it were announced that there would be 210 more pupils at the school, you would expect 420 pupils in total, not 240 in each year.
I’d love to see a focus group of the public on who thinks it’s 7,500 new doctors qualifying each year vs 7,500 spread across all training years. I’d expect the former to win by some margin.
It’s classic politics. It’s not a lie, but is phrased to sound far more than it actually is.
And the former would be correct. Labour are proposing doubling the number who graduate each year from approx 7.5k to 15k.
"‘More than that: We will implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in British history doubling the number of medical students so our NHS has doctors it needs.’"
There should be no shortage of applicants good enough to become doctors even with double the places.
Our neighbour's daughter applied for medicine, got A*AA at A-Level, and didn't get a place.
She should apply to Leicester, we prefer post exam candidates. Some schools are very poor predictors, and in particular private schools over egg them.
Overall 75% of those applying for Medicine get in, albeit often not on their first go. We are finding out via the locked down kids whether there is scope for relaxing entry requirements, as many more got in that year than anticipated.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
Cycle lanes in the UK are often poorly used because they are extremely badly designed, presumably by people who have never ridden a bike in their life. Heaven knows why; you only have to look at a typical town in the Netherlands or Germany to see how to do it properly.
My local council seems to think you need big two-way cycle lanes on both sides of the road, leaving no room for pull-in bus bays.
Need decent floating bus stops. Again, these are everywhere in the Netherlands/Germany.
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney (1931)
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob, When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job. They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead, Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime? Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime; Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell, Full of that Yankee Doodley Dum, Half a million boots went slogging through Hell, And I was the kid with the drum!
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time. Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
Cycle lanes in the UK are often poorly used because they are extremely badly designed, presumably by people who have never ridden a bike in their life. Heaven knows why; you only have to look at a typical town in the Netherlands or Germany to see how to do it properly.
My local council seems to think you need big two-way cycle lanes on both sides of the road, leaving no room for pull-in bus bays.
Need decent floating bus stops. Again, these are everywhere in the Netherlands/Germany.
My theory is that it's deliberate, they can't improve bus travel to be anywhere near as good as driving so they are deliberately trying to make driving worse.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
I don't really understand this approach, if you like a drink. It is, for me, always good to try new things. Sure you will come a cropper, but you will also make REALLY pleasing discoveries
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
Cycle lanes in the UK are often poorly used because they are extremely badly designed, presumably by people who have never ridden a bike in their life. Heaven knows why; you only have to look at a typical town in the Netherlands or Germany to see how to do it properly.
My local council seems to think you need big two-way cycle lanes on both sides of the road, leaving no room for pull-in bus bays.
The local council rejected a plan to put the segregated bike lane in the pavement on each side of the road, which, with a bit of cleverness wouldn't have meant reducing the road width by much. The reason - it would have reduced the pavement by about 6 inches of width in a dozen feet. At the narrowest point.
So they and put a double cycle lane on one side of the road. And eliminated the bus lane.
So now every time a bus stops, the traffic flow stops for miles back. Including all the buses.
We've already had head ons in the bike lane - you get some people going really fast and the two "lanes" are about 2 foot wide each.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Surprised the vivino doesn't list the units/alc content on all the wines. I had somehow assumed that was a legal thing here. It's nice to know just from a 'is this a cheeky mid-week evening bottle? Or would that be very unwise?'.
I do look at the alcohol by volume as I don't like wines over 14%. But I would lobby the government to rescind the requirement to put calories on restaurant menus.
Kills the evening stone dead to see that your chosen main course is actually 1,457kcals.
I dilute anything (red) above 14%. Sacrilege these days but in the past it was quite normal to do so. A strong 14.5% red diluted to 13% or 12.5% remains intense enough but the fruit expresses itself better and you lose the burning sensation in the throat. It also goes further.
It's a ruse by the Laithwaites of this world to offer a lot of very high alcohol reds which can mask all kinds of imperfections in the wine itself.
I have used Laithwaites forever , ie as Bordeux Direct many moons ago, never had issues with their wine , even the 15% ones but 14% is the sweet spot for me. Not so keen on the wishy washy watery ones.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
Cycle lanes in the UK are often poorly used because they are extremely badly designed, presumably by people who have never ridden a bike in their life. Heaven knows why; you only have to look at a typical town in the Netherlands or Germany to see how to do it properly.
Why is there fucking litter and rubbish everywhere? Even Russia looked cleaner when I was there last month. Blyat.
A burned out Volvo V40 resting on St Brides Common for the last few days reminded me of the early1990s. Do you remember trying to spot the make and model to pass away the moments back in the day?
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
"the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO" - an interesting description of an operation specifically to invade a place with a differing culture, wipe out that culture and turn it into a clone of the invading state. Oh, and steal all their stuff.
By that measure, the East India Company were definitely anti-imperialist.
Great, laudable aim, the public will I am sure support this.
BUT - how will this be achieved in practice? Expanding current medical schools? New schools? Who will provide the training?
Like many a popular opposition facing a very unpopular government I suspect detail will be very, very light, and promises will not have any details.
I want a labour government, and as soon as possible, but I want more detail.
(And I know this is a tweet, but does anyone truly expect Reeves would have the answers to my questions?)
There have been five new medical schools opened already this century so opening some more is surely not beyond imagination.
My complaints would be that not enough is done to address poor retention but that would take more than a tweet, and I suspect the numbers are being fudged so that 7,500 new medical students should be divided by the four, five or six years they will be in training.
Five new medical schools? Not sure of the intake, but generously 200 each? That’s a thousand.
Reeves is suggesting 6,500 more than that. If she is aggregating the training years then that’s as bad a lie as the 40 hospitals. And if it’s not, how the actual F is that to happen? Medical training happens a lot in clinic, not just in uni lecture theatres. Training places will be needed.
Fudged or aggregated counting of medical students is not a lie, so should not be compared with the 40 new hospitals, which will certainly not be 40 new hospitals. It might be misleading to those who read it as 7,500 more newly-qualified doctors a year.
So you're saying "training 7500 more doctors" doesn't mean 7500 more doctors qualifying? I wouldn't expect very many to fail, so if "training 7500 more doctors" means "training 1500 more doctors in each of the five years so only 1500 more qualify each year (less a few failures)" then calling it "not a lie" is generous, to say the least.
I'm saying "We’ll train 7,500 more doctors ... a year" probably means there will be 7,500 more medical students being trained to be doctors. But since medicine is (usually) a five-year course, that only requires admitting 1,500 more students to year one. After a time, there will be 1,500 more first years, 1,500 more second years, ... and 1,500 more fifth years, making 7,500 additional medical students. At least, that is how I read it.
And I do not think this should be controversial. If it were announced that your daughter's school were to double in size, surely you would expect there to be twice as many pupils at the school, not twice as many in each year which would mean the school being seven times as big.
I'm saying that if people hear "we'll train 7500 more doctors a year" most people will interpret that as "7500 more doctors a year will qualify", and that Reeves knows this.
@DecrepiterJohnL - basic maths failure I'm afraid. If there are twice as many in each year of a school, there will be twice as many in total, not seven times as many. If, say, there are 30 in each year, there are 210 pupils in total. Double that and there will be 420 pupils - 60 in each year. I think you meant that, if it were announced that there would be 210 more pupils at the school, you would expect 420 pupils in total, not 240 in each year.
I’d love to see a focus group of the public on who thinks it’s 7,500 new doctors qualifying each year vs 7,500 spread across all training years. I’d expect the former to win by some margin.
It’s classic politics. It’s not a lie, but is phrased to sound far more than it actually is.
And the former would be correct. Labour are proposing doubling the number who graduate each year from approx 7.5k to 15k.
"‘More than that: We will implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in British history doubling the number of medical students so our NHS has doctors it needs.’"
There should be no shortage of applicants good enough to become doctors even with double the places.
Our neighbour's daughter applied for medicine, got A*AA at A-Level, and didn't get a place.
She should apply to Leicester, we prefer post exam candidates. Some schools are very poor predictors, and in particular private schools over egg them.
Overall 75% of those applying for Medicine get in, albeit often not on their first go. We are finding out via the locked down kids whether there is scope for relaxing entry requirements, as many more got in that year than anticipated.
Thanks - I'll pass that on.
There is also a cohort problem. So many got through with generous grades over lockdown that we had to get some to defer, with knock on effects the next year as fewer places. That effect will tail off quickly.
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney (1931)
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob, When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job. They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead, Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime? Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime; Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell, Full of that Yankee Doodley Dum, Half a million boots went slogging through Hell, And I was the kid with the drum!
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time. Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
Thanks, I've been saying it wrong all these years. No wonder my cap remained empty.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Surprised the vivino doesn't list the units/alc content on all the wines. I had somehow assumed that was a legal thing here. It's nice to know just from a 'is this a cheeky mid-week evening bottle? Or would that be very unwise?'.
I do look at the alcohol by volume as I don't like wines over 14%. But I would lobby the government to rescind the requirement to put calories on restaurant menus.
Kills the evening stone dead to see that your chosen main course is actually 1,457kcals.
I dilute anything (red) above 14%. Sacrilege these days but in the past it was quite normal to do so. A strong 14.5% red diluted to 13% or 12.5% remains intense enough but the fruit expresses itself better and you lose the burning sensation in the throat. It also goes further.
It's a ruse by the Laithwaites of this world to offer a lot of very high alcohol reds which can mask all kinds of imperfections in the wine itself.
I have used Laithwaites forever , ie as Bordeux Direct many moons ago, never had issues with their wine , even the 15% ones but 14% is the sweet spot for me. Not so keen on the wishy washy watery ones.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
Total demand isn't sky high. It is that there are a load (20%?) less restaurants than there were 5 years ago so demand per restaurant is sky high.
Speaking of which (sort of) I went to see ABBA Voyage over the hols.
Absolutely amazing. Just as @NickPalmer said it was.
Really worth seeing.
If you can get a ticket...
Edit: at around £100 a pop.
We went too just before Christmas. I am not huge ABBA fan but the technology and the overall show is awesome.
(Tip: If you know someone with a disability, offer to take them - the wheelchair and disability seats are amongst, if not the, best in the house. Plus they are discounted and 'carer goes free'! No cheating now!)
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney (1931)
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob, When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job. They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead, Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime? Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime; Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell, Full of that Yankee Doodley Dum, Half a million boots went slogging through Hell, And I was the kid with the drum!
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time. Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
Thanks, I've been saying it wrong all these years. No wonder my cap remained empty.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Fair enough.
But calling the SMO anti-imperialist is taking the piss, given that it's pure imperialism.
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney (1931)
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob, When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job. They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead, Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime? Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime; Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell, Full of that Yankee Doodley Dum, Half a million boots went slogging through Hell, And I was the kid with the drum!
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time. Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
Thanks, I've been saying it wrong all these years. No wonder my cap remained empty.
"Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?" was Herbert Hoover's campaign song in 1932 - unofficially but effectively.
Franklin Roosevelt's campaign song: "Happy Days Are Here Again"
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney (1931)
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob, When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job. They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead, Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime? Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime; Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell, Full of that Yankee Doodley Dum, Half a million boots went slogging through Hell, And I was the kid with the drum!
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time. Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Fair enough.
But calling the SMO anti-imperialist is taking the piss, given that it's pure imperialism.
And calling a grotesque war of aggression "SMO" isn't just taking the piss, it is pure twattery.
"I can't remember the UK ever looking so run down and unloved - it just looks dreadful and it's 100% down to the Tories - I drive around the place and just feel depressed - the utter lack of care for how it looks - the disinterest in conserving anything - it's utterly shameful"
I don't agree it is all down to the Tories. I don't agree it is true of all Britain - see Cornwall, where I drove around recently and was very happily surprised. But it is true of too much of Britain
I'm not so sure about the rundown and unloved. Try getting a ticket to a hot show or booking a restaurant or a room in an hotel/B&B somewhere nice. Prices and demand sky high.
The key factor, however, imo is that there is the same tiredness to the current administration as there was in 96-97.
People (will) want a change.
It's the public realm that looks rundown and unloved. But I do think there's a degree of nostalgia playing a part here. I remember the world of the 1980s looking decidedly uglier than now, especially the towns and cities.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts - town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians - 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads - our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing - car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy) - town centre covered shopping precincts - city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
One very noticeable thing is that my local council hasn't swept up fallen leaves this year. Presumably having spent all the money on cycle lanes that nobody will use.
Cycle lanes in the UK are often poorly used because they are extremely badly designed, presumably by people who have never ridden a bike in their life. Heaven knows why; you only have to look at a typical town in the Netherlands or Germany to see how to do it properly.
Why is there fucking litter and rubbish everywhere? Even Russia looked cleaner when I was there last month. Blyat.
A burned out Volvo V40 resting on St Brides Common for the last few days reminded me of the early1990s. Do you remember trying to spot the make and model to pass away the moments back in the day?
I saw a Sierra P100 the other day that was 90% rust yet somehow still moving under its own steam.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Wine Society (I sound like a shill) free delivery even on 1 bottle, huge range, very reliable.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Wine is like electricity generation: you need predictable baseload to complement the intermittency of new wines, and ideally grid scale storage too.
My Sizewell B wines are Macon blanc, Muscadet, Basic Rhone white and red, Beaujolais and various North Italian Reds. That then leaves scope for all the interesting new finds, plus various English wines.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
What the postal strike has reminded me is how little I use Royal Mail and how little I need it. Most of the post they deliver is junk mail now. I needed to send parcels before Christmas and just sent them all through Evri - despite some people's horror stories, everything arrived when it should.
Royal Mail strikers are shooting themselves in the foot as they make it fully clear to almost everyone that they don't need Royal Mail.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
I think you'll find it's Russia invaded wot Ukraine! (In 2014 AND 2022)
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
I did raise a wry smile when, faced with increased demand for Tef from the west (health influencers branding it the new Quinoa!) - the Ethiopian government banned its export.
Seriously, you can keep your fecking Tef!
Fascinating country, though.
Fifteen years ago, I did a month-long loop around the north. In particular, the Simien mountains were spectacular.
Would love to go the Danakil depression, if/when the security situation fully resolves itself.
Probably not for a while…
Yeah Simien and Bale mountains are ace. But your diesel freezes overnight because they don't put the antifreeze in.
The ultra well-travelled PB demographic revealing itself again.
Ethiopia was on the list of possibles for this summer as my son demanded somewhere more exotic than our planned trip to the Basque country, but we've ended up opting for Georgia.
I’ve actually been to the Danakil Depression. It looks like this
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
Politico.com - McCarthy heads to grueling speaker vote with fate in limbo After weeks of backbreaking negotiations, it appears the GOP leader's fate will be decided in real time on the House floor.
As Kevin McCarthy begins the final descent of his turbulent bid for the speaker’s gavel, Republicans are bracing to see whether he lands the plane or crashes and burns.
After weeks of intense, down-to-the-wire negotiations, the California Republican is about out of time to lock down the needed 218 votes. With his yearslong effort to claim the speakership trapped in limbo, he’ll first meet with his party’s conference Tuesday morning behind closed doors, likely making his final case before members head to the House floor to vote.
Early signs Tuesday didn’t point in his favor. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) offered blistering criticism of McCarthy just hours before the vote, saying conservatives had asked for several concessions like commitments on committee seats that, in turn, would get him to 218 votes, but that the California Republican declined.
“Kevin McCarthy had an opportunity to be Speaker of the House. He rejected it,” said Perry, the chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
Twice McCarthy has been on the precipice of taking the gavel, and twice a group of conservatives has worked to block him from the House’s most powerful perch. He bowed out of the race in 2015 amid the House Freedom Caucus opposition. This time, his allies say he’s prepared to fight until the potentially bitter end.
“He’s steadfast. He’s in this until hell freezes,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a McCarthy backer.
How long that fight will last is still unclear. McCarthy supporters say they expect him to keep Republicans on the House floor, instead of trying to adjourn for off-the-floor strategy sessions between ballots, as he hopes to grind down his opponents. And while a speakership vote has gone past the first ballot only once since the Civil War, Republicans are mentally preparing not just for multiple ballots, but also multiple days of voting. . . .
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable. Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US. I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
Russia provides a useful go-to for anyone whose political identity rests on rejecting the current state of affairs in the democratic West. Hence its longstanding appeal to both the far right and far left. It's a bit more inclusive for a disillusioned Westerner than say China or Iran as it doesn't require you to become ethnically Han Chinese (or nominally "communist") or convert to Shia Islam.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Galloway is a trot but all of the non trot far left (CPGB, etc.) grok the essentially anti-imperialist character of the SMO.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Fair enough.
But calling the SMO anti-imperialist is taking the piss, given that it's pure imperialism.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Ethiopian Lasagne was a bit of a revelation to me.
One way and another I find it the most interesting country I have been to. But the cuisine is a disaster. Injera.
I did raise a wry smile when, faced with increased demand for Tef from the west (health influencers branding it the new Quinoa!) - the Ethiopian government banned its export.
Seriously, you can keep your fecking Tef!
Fascinating country, though.
Fifteen years ago, I did a month-long loop around the north. In particular, the Simien mountains were spectacular.
Would love to go the Danakil depression, if/when the security situation fully resolves itself.
Probably not for a while…
Yeah Simien and Bale mountains are ace. But your diesel freezes overnight because they don't put the antifreeze in.
The ultra well-travelled PB demographic revealing itself again.
Ethiopia was on the list of possibles for this summer as my son demanded somewhere more exotic than our planned trip to the Basque country, but we've ended up opting for Georgia.
I’ve actually been to the Danakil Depression. It looks like this
Not sure I could ever enjoy travelling there unless guaranteed air conditioned sleeping quarters.
Our daughter phoned today to say her sister in laws partner died at 6.00am today in Glan Clwyd following a bowel cancer operation on the 22nd December
Apparently he contracted sepsis, had a heart attack early today, and died
It must be remembered that this is under Labour NHS and this group has been under special measures for months
When are all politicians going to get together and agree how to deal with this crisis as it will not be resolved without cooperation across the UK
It can't be resolved without a fundamental change to the NHS. Unfortunately in this country the NHS is a religion and as such can never be challenged or changed.
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney (1931)
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob, When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job. They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead, Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime? Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime; Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell, Full of that Yankee Doodley Dum, Half a million boots went slogging through Hell, And I was the kid with the drum!
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time. Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
Check the penultimate line; you might be shocked.
I stand corrected - sorta! But still no "me" in the song TITLE.
It's a worry everywhere. As a newly planted English vigneron I worry about Gen Z's aversion to alcoholic drinks, although I appreciate it's probably good for the nation's health. Bigger issue (for now) at the cheaper end of the scale though. It seems the trend is to less but better.
In the past I've sneered at wine snobs, asking why, if wine was anything other than a socially acceptable way of getting drunk, there are no non-alcoholic wines. Of course now there are shelves full of them. Clearly I lack the entrepreneurial spark.
From reading PB's winos, I gather French wine is often less flavourful than new world plonk, so that might be another factor.
The new world plonk better than French wine thing is just an old trope from the days in the 1990s when French, Spanish and Italian bulk wines were at their nadir and value for money was much better for (predominantly) Australian wine in the important £5-8 mid market range. And the fashion was for aggressively fruity low acid high alcohol blockbusters.
Since then we've seen a shift to much more variety and a more European style in a lot of new world wines, an increase in their relative price point, and a huge improvement in standard old world products. Convergence in other words.
I would generally go bulk Spanish or new world for cooking wine, Old world for cheap to mid range everyday wines (not least for food miles reasons) and then whatever takes my fancy at the upper end.
Yes that’s my experience, as an avid drinker and Vivino-er of wine
There was a period of New World ascendence, but now almost everyone has caught up with each other, and no nation/region is definitely ahead. Indeed the idea is a bit absurd. Like asking “which region grows the best trees”
The noticeable things now are ubiquity: you can get good or even great wine made almost anywhere. And there are stand out sub genres that come and go in excellence. Greek whites are now great - for now. Balkan reds. High altitude Argie Malbec. English fizz. Israeli wines from Golan. On no account try wine from Colorado
That may or may not be true but it is too much of an effort to find out where those gems are. Because they are nestling in a lot of dross.
Hence the popularity of old world wines. You're not going wrong with the names you know and even the negoces's wines are more reliable than ever.
It’s really not hard. You just need an inquiring mind, the Vivino app, and maybe a bit of intuition/wisdom
It also helps if you travel as much as you drink. I would never have discovered Ethiopia makes really decent red wine if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia and found myself desperate for wine
Yeah a bit of straw donkey syndrome there.
I did it myself - travelled to far off, enchanting places and bought the local wine then brought it home.
Vile once back in rainy old Blighty.
You do realise you can now get exotic wines in rainy old Blighty? Indeed it is possibly the best place in the world to get exotic wines imported
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
Yeah as I said, too much effort to buy bottle by bottle although I'm sure you have fun and there are great bottles out there.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Also, with Vivino, it's no longer an effort to buy bottle by bottle
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Wine is like electricity generation: you need predictable baseload to complement the intermittency of new wines, and ideally grid scale storage too.
My Sizewell B wines are Macon blanc, Muscadet, Basic Rhone white and red, Beaujolais and various North Italian Reds. That then leaves scope for all the interesting new finds, plus various English wines.
My reliable Sizewell wines are Tesco Amarone (really, it's fantastic), a Rhone Valley blend, some Gran Reserva Rioja, Greek whites, good Argie malbec, the sweet sweet wine of Pantelleria
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Most of the remaining non-parcel post is legacy post. It's post being sent because people are still doing things the way they did them twenty years ago. And there seems to be no other way to provide proof of address.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But parcel delivery should not be different. It should be covered by the same standards and regulations as letters etc. As I said, there is no great new technology that has superseded the delivery of physical items so the comparison is wrong. All we have done is allow a poorer and more costly delivery for many for essentially the same service.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
How much of the stuff we receive through the post do we actually need to receive? Letters etc are better sent on email. Takeaway catalogues etc I do not need. Parcels have a choice of bastard companies to screw up deliveries. I like my postie, but his time is short.
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
In the last month Royal Mail have lost a parcel I have sent.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
All of the parcel companies have an Achilles heel - the sub-contractors who actually deliver the parcels to customers. Get a good one and the company perception is good. Get a bad one, and...
You mention DPD, where the local delivery guy repeatedly delivers parcels to houses in the wrong village (I have both driven other people's parcels over to them and received mine from someone else). They have an app we've been forced to download to literally pinpoint location and add pictures etc and their guy just ignores is. No customer service team - they only have a 3rd party team where its £6 a call.
Then we have the Scottish problem where they are all a cartel. They set bonkers pricing for Highlands / Islands with arbitrary lines drawn on a map by a chimp. Notoriously the posh Aberdeen satellite suburb of Westhill is in H&I and pays a gentle 2.5x premium for being less than 10 miles from the city centre depots which is much much closer than a stack of places which aren't H&I. Is there any appeal of this cartel behaviour? No! Fuckers.
All UK delivery companies should be regulated to work on the same basis as the Royal Mail used to be run with no differentiation for remote areas. This is yet another area where we differ from Europe to our cost (not in terms of the specific but rather the general principle). In Europe many services are run by private organisations rather than directly by the State. But they are very strictly regulated - whether it is health care, postal services or transport. There is nothing wrong with private companies being involved in these things but the laisse faire attitude pursued by successive UK governments means customers suffer. The key is not state ownership but proper state regulation.
I am in favour of competition with regards to things like parcel delivery - lets have competition and innovation add services and lower prices. The problem is when the private operators decide not to compete and innovate. And with parcels the harsh reality is that we are not the customer - the company sending is.
So lets take a recent example. Order from the Lego store. Lego use DPD whether I like it or not. Lego confirmation states that the package does not need to be signed for. DPD email states the sender requires the package to be signed for. Can I get either Lego or DPD to fix this? No.
So that means staying in - which as I work in the building they are delivering to is fine. Until the app tells you they missed you. And you see the photo taken not of your house. Can you call the depot or customer service as with other operators? No - there is an 0121 automated number which tells you to use the app as you weren't in. There is no online customer service team. The chatbot redirects you to download the app. There isn't even a UK Twitter team. So the only solution is redirect to my closest parcel drop, which is 13 miles away.
Lego don't give a toss - they send a bazillion packages a year. DPD may or may not give a toss - hard to tell as nobody to speak to. The moron last mile subcontractor doesn't care - I did actually speak to him a previous time. So we're all stuck. This is the free market at work...
Which is why we need the state to regulate and ensure minimum standards from the delivery companies.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
If Royal Mail didn't exist you wouldn't bother to create it. More justification for a state broadband supplier than a state postal service.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
I disagree.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
I'm curious how you rate it as a poorer service?Rather than one or two deliveries per day as in the past we can now get parcels delivered many times a day, same or next day, seven days a week, roughly 363 days a year. That's a service better than used to exist in the past.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
Amazon are the exception. They really are good at what they do most of the time. But DPD, Hermes, DHL and the rest really are very poor much of the time. And the PO is going to get far worse with the new plans they have for it which will basically concentrate on delivering junk mail and leave your cards and letters for later deliveries.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
It's going to be next to impossible to serve the Hebrides on equal terms to Herts without gobs of taxpayer subsidy.
Comments
Try Assyrtiko or Malagousia from Greece - there's a lot of choice now so you need to research. If you want Georgian red this is a splendid example
https://www.vivino.com/GB/en/marani-kindzmarauli/w/1144176?year=2020&price_id=31349941
A red wine with many reviews and a 4.4 rating (that's REALLY high). That's gonna be good. And just £15
There is pleasure in this discovery. It feels like you are exploring the world from the comfort of your wine glass
They constitute much of the burden.
Britain designs certain things very badly:
- pedestrianised high streets and store fronts
- town ringroads any gyratory systems with metal fencing to corral pedestrians
- 1980s and 90s office blocks on said ringroads
- our particularly clunky version of uPVC double glazing
- car parks (France's car parks by contrast are a tree-shaded or underground colour coded joy)
- town centre covered shopping precincts
- city fringe wasteland with dog-shitty paths and culverted rivers full of trolleys
But most of those were bestowed upon us from the 1970s to the 90s.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-crisis-germany-influencers/
In a square beneath the twin spires of Cologne’s gothic cathedral, around 2,000 protesters gathered in September to urge Germany’s government to break with the Western coalition backing Ukraine and make peace with Russia.
“We must stop being vassals of the Americans,” right-wing German politician Markus Beisicht said from a makeshift stage on the back of a truck. The crowd clapped and waved Russian and German flags...
The keenness for Russia on behalf of the German far right is notable.
Not quite sure are why they are so keen on being "vassals" of the Russians instead of the US.
I guess the latter aren't sufficiently fascist.
was just a tiny part of the fun - the cherry on the cake of cooperation between an increasing authoritarian Germany (the cooperation began pre-Nazi) and the Soviet Union.
Two problems for the blue team there. One is that "Britain's doing great" posters don't sit well with a shabby environment;
The other is that tax cuts in that situation will just annoy people.
Even though it has the texture of old bandages.
Goes well with Malagousia. Probably.
To be honest I also think that the Royal Mail should be a state owned organisation. It was designed as a Government service rather than a money making enterprise and we should return to that. I am not generally in favour of the state owning businesses but then there are things I don't think should be businesses as such.
I am however in favour of private ownership of railways so clearly I have not gone over to the dark side entirely.
I'm just starting on the 2010 Cru Bourgeois, of which I have several cases, as my current daily drinker, and am also trying some 2012s as well as the 2000s and earlier for something more special so I really haven't got the time or inclination to investigate the odd Georgian gem off Vivino.
Not to say mine is a better or worse way than yours of getting the odd bottle here or there but I can't be doing with the here's that great Ethiopian Cabernet you should try approach.
Again, Britain traditionally spends fuck all on this aspect of public life and so the lowest common denominator has tended to predominate.
CNN - LIVE UPDATES
The latest on the new Congress and House speaker vote
How the day will unfold: Congress can’t really function until it has a House speaker; the position is filled on the first day of a new Congress, Jan. 3, even before members-elect take the oath of office.
Members will meet in the morning to tie off loose ends and close the 117th Congress. Then, at noon Eastern time, the clerk of the House will gavel in the new Congress and will call a quorum. The first major order of business will be the speaker election. Democrats will place Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’ name into nomination, and Republicans are set to place McCarthy’s name.
Then the clerk will call the roll and each member will state the name of the person whom they are voting for. If no one amasses a majority of votes cast, it goes to a second ballot. If another ballot is needed, it is not clear if Congress will recess the chamber or if members will continue voting.
Members can vote for anyone they want: There’s no rule that the speaker is a House member. Members can vote for anyone, and they can protest by skipping the vote or voting “present.” The vast majority will vote for their party’s leader.
Both parties met last year to determine their leadership, with Democrats selecting Jeffries and Republicans agreeing to nominate McCarthy, but by a margin that signaled a possible floor fight ahead. McCarthy faces a long-shot challenger: hard-right Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona. The challenge highlights the opposition McCarthy is up against and could draw votes away from him.
If neither wins a majority, a "floor fight" happens: Lawmakers will continue voting until someone wins the majority. They can take successive votes. They can adjourn to horse trade and deal among themselves. But the House does not kick off the new Congress until a speaker is elected. This is what people are talking about when they refer to a “floor fight.” It’s when House members require multiple ballots, or votes, to elect their speaker. In the 200-plus years since the first two-year Congress met in 1789, such floor fights have occurred just 14 times, according to the House historian.
It doesn't always require 218 votes: One important thing to remember is that McCarthy does not technically need 218 votes to become speaker. A majority of those present and voting is required to get the speakership, which is usually 218 lawmakers. But if enough people skip the vote or vote “present,” the number of votes required for a majority can drop.
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/new-congress-sworn-in-2023/h_70df4562d0728b0f808a1b1a28437ad1
SSI - So get your popcorn ready by 12 noon in DC = 5pm UK
In addition to the main event, catch the Geek Show featuring soon to be Rep. George Santos (R-?!?!).
Seriously, you can keep your fecking Tef!
Fascinating country, though.
Fifteen years ago, I did a month-long loop around the north. In particular, the Simien mountains were spectacular.
Would love to go to the Danakil depression, if/when the security situation fully resolves itself.
Probably not for a while…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injera#/media/File:Injera_Texture.jpg
Kills the evening stone dead to see that your chosen main course is actually 1,457kcals.
I have a lot of affection for the postal service and nostalgia for what it once was. I remember feeling put out when they abandoned the second delivery.
But it's a curiosity now, like horse-drawn carriages.
Despite Farage's best efforts it seems that pro-Russian sentiment in the UK, where it exists at all, is largely confined to the Galloway far Left (though I'm aware we have one exception on this site) whereas in the US it's mainly a MAGA Republican affliction and in France and Germany it's full horseshoe with both ends giving it some.
Absolutely amazing. Just as @NickPalmer said it was.
Really worth seeing.
If you can get a ticket...
Edit: at around £100 a pop.
https://www.natgeotv.com/me/fearless-chef/about
Farage is, I suppose, just about enough of a tw@t for that.
Though I'd abolish the universal service guarantee. If you want to live in the sticks in an area that's difficult to get to then that should be your prerogative, but then you should take responsibility for that. Either pay more yourself to get someone to do the final mile delivery, or have a more accessible collection point that you go to in order to pick up your stuff.
My in laws live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Their village has a post office and everything is delivered there. They go to collect their post from there, not the other way around, because where they live simply getting the post to the office is the service fulfilled.
Nancy Pelosi was elected Speaker in 2021 with 216 votes.
Certainly possible Kevin McCarthy (R-Weathervane) will be elected on first attempt. But would NOT bet on it!
Addendum - one interesting metric will be, how many votes are cast for Hakeem Jeffries? Note that 213 Democrats were elected to US House in 2022 midterms.
My guess is that HJ will get all of them on initial rollcall.
We don't have horse drawn carriages today because they have been superseded by other forms of transport. Postal/courier deliveries still happen in their billions every year. The delivery of physical items, whether letters or parcels, is by no means extinct or even under threat. All that has changed is which company is doing the delivering. This is not new technology, just new management. And given it is providing us with a poorer service I think there is a case for that management to be changed back to what it was before.
Ethiopia was on the list of possibles for this summer as my son demanded somewhere more exotic than our planned trip to the Basque country, but we've ended up opting for Georgia.
For example, the one in the Meadows in Edinburgh is one of the most used in Scotland but is usually completely empty - the cyclists have already got to work/pub.
https://twitter.com/LeahBoleto/status/1610005437314629633?s=20&t=5NK2lgZN6YXqxm1rKl2ykQ
Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eih67rlGNhU
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney (1931)
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodley Dum,
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,
And I was the kid with the drum!
Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
Never read the comments.
It'd be a bit fucking boring if everyone on here were pro Ukraine. Like being on a football forum where everybody supports Crystal Palace.
Very little post has to be by post. This is very different to the situation some decades ago, or before the telephone. The internet has superceded the post.
People still sometimes use horse drawn carriages, in the tourist parts of Vienna, or Central Park, but they're no longer a central part of the transport system.
The post was a central part of the communications system. No longer. Parcel delivery is something different.
But each to their own. At least you are drinking. No one else is, as far as I can see
I was in the Coach and Horses in Soho yesterday - very empty. We really need our pubs to survive this winter
So they and put a double cycle lane on one side of the road. And eliminated the bus lane.
So now every time a bus stops, the traffic flow stops for miles back. Including all the buses.
We've already had head ons in the bike lane - you get some people going really fast and the two "lanes" are about 2 foot wide each.
As for when things go wrong, its important to ensure you deal with a firm that is as put out as you are when things go wrong.
I moved to a new build just before Christmas and for once Amazon provided a far worse service than the Royal Mail over that period. The Royal Mail (and Google Maps) knew and understood our new address and post code already, Amazon did not. Rather than using our postal code to find where we are, they instead sent all our Christmas parcels to a random other street with the same name in a different town.
I chased Amazon for a week for them to resolve this and at first nobody I spoke to seemed to care or be able to resolve it. Our parcels kept getting returned back to the office. Until one day a driver dropped all our parcels at the front door of that other random address in a random other town. Then when I called and demanded a refund, putting them out hundreds of pound as they'd delivered hundreds of pounds of parcels to the wrong person, suddenly they took the problem seriously(!)
Suddenly I was put through to someone who opened Google Maps and saw what was going on and got me to put a pin for where we are, not where they thought we where. Not been an issue since, they learnt their lesson after getting burnt with a few hundred in refunds.
By that measure, the East India Company were definitely anti-imperialist.
There are wine sellers on there that have huge ranges, and they will happily make you a half-case of one Douro red, a Slovenian white, a Georgian orange, an Oregon Pinot Noir, an amazing Gran Reserva Rioja, and some mad eiswein
The case will arrive in 2-3 days and then you have fun working through it. And the Vivino ratings - if there are enough (over 30 minimum) - are pretty reliable
Happy New Year to you also.
(Tip: If you know someone with a disability, offer to take them - the wheelchair and disability seats are amongst, if not the, best in the house. Plus they are discounted and 'carer goes free'! No cheating now!)
But calling the SMO anti-imperialist is taking the piss, given that it's pure imperialism.
Franklin Roosevelt's campaign song: "Happy Days Are Here Again"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqsT4xnKZPg
Happy Days Are Here Again
Jack Yellen and Milton Ager
So long sad times
Go long bad times
We are rid of you at last
Howdy gay times
Cloudy gray times
You are now a thing of the past
Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So let's sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again
All together shout it now
There's no one
Who can doubt it now
So let's tell the world about it now
Happy days are here again
Your cares and troubles are gone
There'll be no more from now on
From now on
Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So let's sing a song of cheer again
Happy times, happy nights
Happy days are here again
Hospitals declare another 'critical incident' as non-urgent treatment postponed
https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/north-wales-hospitals-declare-another-25877271#ICID=Android_DailyPostNewsApp_AppShare
Our daughter phoned today to say her sister in laws partner died at 6.00am today in Glan Clwyd following a bowel cancer operation on the 22nd December
Apparently he contracted sepsis, had a heart attack early today, and died
It must be remembered that this is under Labour NHS and this group has been under special measures for months
When are all politicians going to get together and agree how to deal with this crisis as it will not be resolved without cooperation across the UK
https://twitter.com/TWMCLtd/status/1610044532959092736?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1610044532959092736|twgr^b503dc2a20c29edc551a6543776c65949c2b4fa8|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/3/2145090/-Ukraine-update-Once-again-Ukraine-demonstrates-that-intelligence-is-the-most-important-weapon
My Sizewell B wines are Macon blanc, Muscadet, Basic Rhone white and red, Beaujolais and various North Italian Reds. That then leaves scope for all the interesting new finds, plus various English wines.
Royal Mail strikers are shooting themselves in the foot as they make it fully clear to almost everyone that they don't need Royal Mail.
And the big one regarding poorer service is for those living in the more remote (or actually not that remote) parts of the UK who get absolutely terrible service and pay many times more than the rest of us for it. I have no issue with private companies doing deliveries but they should be made to meet standards that mean we all get the same level of service no matter where we live in the UK.
After weeks of backbreaking negotiations, it appears the GOP leader's fate will be decided in real time on the House floor.
As Kevin McCarthy begins the final descent of his turbulent bid for the speaker’s gavel, Republicans are bracing to see whether he lands the plane or crashes and burns.
After weeks of intense, down-to-the-wire negotiations, the California Republican is about out of time to lock down the needed 218 votes. With his yearslong effort to claim the speakership trapped in limbo, he’ll first meet with his party’s conference Tuesday morning behind closed doors, likely making his final case before members head to the House floor to vote.
Early signs Tuesday didn’t point in his favor. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) offered blistering criticism of McCarthy just hours before the vote, saying conservatives had asked for several concessions like commitments on committee seats that, in turn, would get him to 218 votes, but that the California Republican declined.
“Kevin McCarthy had an opportunity to be Speaker of the House. He rejected it,” said Perry, the chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
Twice McCarthy has been on the precipice of taking the gavel, and twice a group of conservatives has worked to block him from the House’s most powerful perch. He bowed out of the race in 2015 amid the House Freedom Caucus opposition. This time, his allies say he’s prepared to fight until the potentially bitter end.
“He’s steadfast. He’s in this until hell freezes,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a McCarthy backer.
How long that fight will last is still unclear. McCarthy supporters say they expect him to keep Republicans on the House floor, instead of trying to adjourn for off-the-floor strategy sessions between ballots, as he hopes to grind down his opponents. And while a speakership vote has gone past the first ballot only once since the Civil War, Republicans are mentally preparing not just for multiple ballots, but also multiple days of voting. . . .
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/03/mccarthy-speaker-house-vote-00076047