You might also have thought the invasion of Ukraine might have led China to conclude that mounting an invasion in far more challenging circumstances might end very badly for them.
That fact that China is building large logistics ships who's only purpose is to land equipment on to beaches suggests Xi isn't thinking that way. I suspect the lesson China will draw from Putin's folly is the need to be fully, totally prepared before going to war.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I have been in the room at Rudding Park where Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton stayed when they visited Tony Blair up in Sedgefield.
They stayed separately to each other as the visits were at different times.
The status of their nocturnal activities, Nelson with the delightful Winnie and Bill with Hillary, is not known or documented in the room.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
*snip*
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
*snip*
That must have been quite a night. Makes Nick Palmer look tame by comparison.
Well, there's an image over lunch I wasn't expecting...☹️
I have nothing anywhere near as good as any of these, and neither am I likely to as I do not move in such exalted circles.
But I did once go to a pre-season soccer friendly in the non league. and told a young left back he was talented and should play professionally if he got the chance.
He thanked me, said he hoped he would and was most humble.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
Isn't that three steps? Julia, Julia's mum and then Hitler. Impressive nonetheless.
If this is a willy waving contest, I can match that. I met Salim Bin Laden in the 1980s ( the one who killed himself in a Florida plane crash and whose English widow married his brother Abdullah. Salim was a half brother of Osama.
Ted Danson was in a film with Kevin Bacon. My sister-in-law's sister-in-law was in a film with Ted Danson. I have played charades at family gatherings with my sister-in-law's sister-in-law. So I am 3 steps from Kevin Bacon himself.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
Well I didn't think the John Paul story was worth telling. He pissed everyone off as he always relied on other people's gear.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
Isn't that three steps? Julia, Julia's mum and then Hitler. Impressive nonetheless.
I don’t know how steps work
I once fucked a girl who once fucked Eric Faulkner of the Bay City Rollers. Try and beat that
What? Too early? I dare say it’s 6.45pm somewhere and in fact I know it is. Because it’s 7.10pm and I just went up to the bar man here in Rangoon and I said “I dare say I’d like my usual gin and tonic”
I actually did it. And I’m now sitting here enjoying that gin and tonic with some deep fried chicken skin and chili in my exciting, lively hotel bar
I once delivered a pizza to early 90s Madchester also-rans Northern Uproar. Does that count?
That’s very good
Do you remember when this was a brilliant Viz meme? Ah, Viz. When it was funny… it was really very very funny
Anyway the meme was Lame-to-Claim Celebrity Anecdotes. I dare say yours is right up there, delivering pizza to the band members of Northern Uproar
I had a friend who used to go an NA meeting which was also attended by “the posh colonel” - that really obscure character from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum who had about two lines once every six episodes. And occasionally they would get the bass guitarist from the house band that appeared in the kids’ show Rainbow, in the distance behind Bungle and Zippy
I could never beat that
Isn't it meant to be anonymous? Does Freddy deserve to have his demons discussed on Britain's premier political betting website?
Me and Brian Mcfadden played the same Poker Tournament in Dublin 18 yrs ago. I was also briefly Tony Guoga (Who is really nice in real life) on his laptop playing as him on his own site, he's now a crypto bro having been an MEP.
“I was also Tony Guoga on his laptop” might be one of my favourite PB lines of the post-Covid era
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
The lady who lived until 2020 (aged 101) was married at the age of 17 to a 93-year-old veteran. A lot of these sort of ‘marriages’ were encouraged at the time, either to loose relatives or as a big FU to the government.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
Isn't that three steps? Julia, Julia's mum and then Hitler. Impressive nonetheless.
I don’t know how steps work
I once fucked a girl who once fucked Eric Faulkner of the Bay City Rollers. Try and beat that
What? Too early? I dare say it’s 6.45pm somewhere and in fact I know it is. Because it’s 7.10pm and I just went up to the bar man here in Rangoon and I said “I dare say I’d like my usual gin and tonic”
I actually did it. And I’m now sitting here enjoying that gin and tonic with some deep fried chicken skin and chili in my exciting, lively hotel bar
If kisses can count, I am only one link away from one of East 17.
I can up that, I’ve actually shaken hands with all of East 17.
I was working at their concert as a volunteer charity collector back in the university RAG days, and we got given passes to the afterparty. It all got quite messy with a free bar until well after midnight.
The excellent H.I.Sutton has a video out on China's build-up for an invasion of Taiwan. They are building a fleet of barges whose only purpose is amphibious landing.
The sound quality is poor, but it's a case where the content matters far more than the presentation. I am changing my view to a *likelihood* that China tries to take Taiwan by force within the next four years.
You would have thought that the invasion of Ukraine would have prompted the West to prepare seriously for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but there's not much sign of the required urgency.
You might also have thought the invasion of Ukraine might have led China to conclude that mounting an invasion in far more challenging circumstances might end very badly for them.
CHIPS Act in the US?
EDIT: It's an interesting piece of game theory.
1) Current State a) Taiwan is the only source of high end microchips (some of) b) If the Chinese invade, they plan to destroy the capability c) Either this succeeds causing a hi-tech recession in every country, or China gets control and gets to dictate to other countries as it pleases
2) CHIPS act a) - b) - c) If the destruction succeeds, the US is the sole supplier of theses chips. They can invoke devastating sanctions on China or anyone who allow smuggling on the chips to China. If the destruction doesn't succeed, then China can't use the chip supply to control international reaction.
They aren't, as S Korea has advanced fabs, too. And US manufacturing is technically still quite some way behind Taiwan (and S Korea).
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
He's my mum's idea of what a man should look like.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
Isn't that three steps? Julia, Julia's mum and then Hitler. Impressive nonetheless.
I don’t know how steps work
I once fucked a girl who once fucked Eric Faulkner of the Bay City Rollers. Try and beat that
What? Too early? I dare say it’s 6.45pm somewhere and in fact I know it is. Because it’s 7.10pm and I just went up to the bar man here in Rangoon and I said “I dare say I’d like my usual gin and tonic”
I actually did it. And I’m now sitting here enjoying that gin and tonic with some deep fried chicken skin and chili in my exciting, lively hotel bar
If kisses can count, I am only one link away from one of East 17.
I can up that, I’ve actually shaken hands with all of East 17.
I was working at their concert as a volunteer charity collector back in the university RAG days, and we got given passes to the afterparty. It all got quite messy with a free bar until well after midnight.
Kudos for admitting that
It’s not as if I bought tickets, and what 1990s student doesn’t turn down a free bar in exchange for a couple of hours shaking a collecting tin?
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I had a wee next to Jarvis Cocker in the gents toilet at Watord Gap services.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
He's my mum's idea of what a man should look like.
I cannot believe they are so devoid of original ideas in the world of TV that they are re-making Bergerac
Cannot be as shit as the new Van Der Valk's with Marc Warren though.
A revealing interview (20 minutes) with Andrew Hale, a Senior Policy Analyst from the Heritage Foundation on GB News. It is about UK relations with a Trump administration.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
He's my mum's idea of what a man should look like.
Really really long nose and ginormous elaborate hat?
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I had a wee next to Jarvis Cocker in the gents toilet at Watord Gap services.
He’s too famous for Lame to Claim but the anecdote isn’t good enough for “Coke with the Pope”
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
Boringly I think I’ve recounted this before, but hey ho. I was sick on Sir Peter Scott on the flight back from Sudan, he was also very grumpy about it. One degree of separation from dissing Scott of the Antarctic I guess.
Plus I have some of the same DNA as the most famous man in the world coursing through my veins, so suck on that as Donald might say.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
Isn't that three steps? Julia, Julia's mum and then Hitler. Impressive nonetheless.
I don’t know how steps work
I once fucked a girl who once fucked Eric Faulkner of the Bay City Rollers. Try and beat that
What? Too early? I dare say it’s 6.45pm somewhere and in fact I know it is. Because it’s 7.10pm and I just went up to the bar man here in Rangoon and I said “I dare say I’d like my usual gin and tonic”
I actually did it. And I’m now sitting here enjoying that gin and tonic with some deep fried chicken skin and chili in my exciting, lively hotel bar
If kisses can count, I am only one link away from one of East 17.
I can up that, I’ve actually shaken hands with all of East 17.
I was working at their concert as a volunteer charity collector back in the university RAG days, and we got given passes to the afterparty. It all got quite messy with a free bar until well after midnight.
Kudos for admitting that
It’s not as if I bought tickets, and what 1990s student doesn’t turn down a free bar in exchange for a couple of hours shaking a collecting tin?
Free bar is acceptable, you could have made up a real band though
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
Where would me knowing the drummer in T'Pau fit in?
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
Boringly I think I’ve recounted this before, but hey ho. I was sick on Sir Peter Scott on the flight back from Sudan, he was also very grumpy about it. One degree of separation from dissing Scott of the Antarctic I guess.
Plus I have some of the same DNA as the most famous man in the world coursing through my veins, so suck on that as Donald might say.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
I accidentally attended Jeremy Thorpe's 80th birthday party. I followed an acquaintance into a room and got caught up in a receiving line to say happy birthday to the poor old boy. I then helped revive a very glamorous looking Chinese woman who was on the arm of someone in a Russian admiral's uniform. He presented Jeremy with a bottle of vodka then his 'companion' feinted. It was a very strange occasion.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
I accidentally attended Jeremy Thorpe's 80th birthday party. I followed an acquaintance into a room and got caught up in a receiving line to say happy birthday to the poor old boy. I then helped revive a very glamorous looking Chinese woman who was on the arm of someone in a Russian admiral's uniform. He presented Jeremy with a bottle of vodka then his 'companion' feinted. It was a very strange occasion.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
Boringly I think I’ve recounted this before, but hey ho. I was sick on Sir Peter Scott on the flight back from Sudan, he was also very grumpy about it. One degree of separation from dissing Scott of the Antarctic I guess.
Plus I have some of the same DNA as the most famous man in the world coursing through my veins, so suck on that as Donald might say.
Not sure a scion of Jesus of Nazareth should be telling people to "suck on that".
I can report that China totally dominates the new car market here in junta-ruled south central Myanmar. Probably not a massive market, in the wider scheme, but interesting
20, 40 , 60 years ago it must have been very different, they might even have driven new British cars, at one point
I can report that China totally dominates the new car market here in junta-ruled south central Myanmar. Probably not a massive market, in the wider scheme, but interesting
20, 40 , 60 years ago it must have been very different, they might even have driven new British cars, at one point
If it’s anything like the sandpit, the difference in THREE years is blindingly obvious. China exported almost no cars until 2021, yet they now seem to be 20% of the cars on the roads.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
I accidentally attended Jeremy Thorpe's 80th birthday party. I followed an acquaintance into a room and got caught up in a receiving line to say happy birthday to the poor old boy. I then helped revive a very glamorous looking Chinese woman who was on the arm of someone in a Russian admiral's uniform. He presented Jeremy with a bottle of vodka then his 'companion' feinted. It was a very strange occasion.
Were any dogs present?
You mean to present an arrest warrant or something?
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
He's my mum's idea of what a man should look like.
I cannot believe they are so devoid of original ideas in the world of TV that they are re-making Bergerac
Cannot be as shit as the new Van Der Valk's with Marc Warren though.
Maybe they will redo Columbo in a few years. Millions of kids are now familiar with his catchphrase via Alexander Armstrong.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
He's my mum's idea of what a man should look like.
Really really long nose and ginormous elaborate hat?
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I had a wee next to Jarvis Cocker in the gents toilet at Watord Gap services.
He’s too famous for Lame to Claim but the anecdote isn’t good enough for “Coke with the Pope”
Soz Boz
I have done community theatre with a member of Four Poofs and a Piano.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
Where would me knowing the drummer in T'Pau fit in?
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I had a wee next to Jarvis Cocker in the gents toilet at Watord Gap services.
He’s too famous for Lame to Claim but the anecdote isn’t good enough for “Coke with the Pope”
Soz Boz
I have done community theatre with a member of Four Poofs and a Piano.
I can report that China totally dominates the new car market here in junta-ruled south central Myanmar. Probably not a massive market, in the wider scheme, but interesting
20, 40 , 60 years ago it must have been very different, they might even have driven new British cars, at one point
I can report that China totally dominates the new car market here in junta-ruled south central Myanmar. Probably not a massive market, in the wider scheme, but interesting
20, 40 , 60 years ago it must have been very different, they might even have driven new British cars, at one point
If it’s anything like the sandpit, the difference in THREE years is blindingly obvious. China exported almost no cars until 2021, yet they now seem to be 20% of the cars on the roads.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He's just paying the rent. In his final Times column he said people should stop expecting big plans from politicians.
Has he retired from the Times? Didn't know that
I rather liked him, it's a shame he went quite mad after Brexit (like others)
Seems to be partly recovered
He has yes. Replaced by, I'm sorry to report, Fraser Nelson. His debut column last week being a mealy-mouthed offering on Elon Musk's shenanigans.
Parris had some good contributions: he did one article on going into courts as an observer and noting the human cost of crime in the criminals and victims. He also did one in the Gordon Brown age when he pointed out that intolerable things can continue for a long time. But he then did one about a East coast seaside town about how they were depressing and poor and should be abandoned by the Conservatives as a dead loss, and I went right off him. I'm sure he makes some good points occasionally, but that will always colour my opinion of him, and there aren't that many Speccie columnists I like anyway, although that junkie travel writer is occasionally interesting.
I've been off Parris since 2007, when he wrote a poisonous Christmas column about stringing piano wire at neck height across cycle paths (Rod Liddle did something similar more recently). Then pretended it was a joke (as they always do) to avoid looking himself in the mirror.
At the time (as now) it was a practice that happened occasionally, causing serious injury for some.
Apart from the other things wrong with it, this part is bizarre "lodged high in hedgerows at cyclist level. Forgive me, but pedestrians were not the culprits here". What does he think modern cyclists use, penny farthings? Cyclists, particularly road ones, don't have their hands substantially higher than pedestrians.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
I accidentally attended Jeremy Thorpe's 80th birthday party. I followed an acquaintance into a room and got caught up in a receiving line to say happy birthday to the poor old boy. I then helped revive a very glamorous looking Chinese woman who was on the arm of someone in a Russian admiral's uniform. He presented Jeremy with a bottle of vodka then his 'companion' feinted. It was a very strange occasion.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
I accidentally attended Jeremy Thorpe's 80th birthday party. I followed an acquaintance into a room and got caught up in a receiving line to say happy birthday to the poor old boy. I then helped revive a very glamorous looking Chinese woman who was on the arm of someone in a Russian admiral's uniform. He presented Jeremy with a bottle of vodka then his 'companion' feinted. It was a very strange occasion.
“I accidentally attended Jeremy Thorpe's 80th birthday party” is top notch. PB on form tonight
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I have been in the room at Rudding Park where Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton stayed when they visited Tony Blair up in Sedgefield.
They stayed separately to each other as the visits were at different times.
The status of their nocturnal activities, Nelson with the delightful Winnie and Bill with Hillary, is not known or documented in the room.
Me and Brian Mcfadden played the same Poker Tournament in Dublin 18 yrs ago. I was also briefly Tony Guoga (Who is really nice in real life) on his laptop playing as him on his own site, he's now a crypto bro having been an MEP.
“I was also Tony Guoga on his laptop” might be one of my favourite PB lines of the post-Covid era
He had a bet on South Africa in their ODI against Pakistan that day too.
A revealing interview (20 minutes) with Andrew Hale, a Senior Policy Analyst from the Heritage Foundation on GB News. It is about UK relations with a Trump administration.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
I accidentally attended Jeremy Thorpe's 80th birthday party. I followed an acquaintance into a room and got caught up in a receiving line to say happy birthday to the poor old boy. I then helped revive a very glamorous looking Chinese woman who was on the arm of someone in a Russian admiral's uniform. He presented Jeremy with a bottle of vodka then his 'companion' feinted. It was a very strange occasion.
Feinted? You mean like moved left then dodged right in case Thorpe tried to shoot her?
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
He's my mum's idea of what a man should look like.
I cannot believe they are so devoid of original ideas in the world of TV that they are re-making Bergerac
Cannot be as shit as the new Van Der Valk's with Marc Warren though.
My brother was an extra in an episode of Bergerac but I’m not including this in the current discussion as we aren’t talking about major links with celebs, just low level stuff.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
He's my mum's idea of what a man should look like.
I cannot believe they are so devoid of original ideas in the world of TV that they are re-making Bergerac
Cannot be as shit as the new Van Der Valk's with Marc Warren though.
Maybe they will redo Columbo in a few years. Millions of kids are now familiar with his catchphrase via Alexander Armstrong.
They'll probably cast someone like Will Mellor to play him.
Carbon Capture, now Cold Fusion, jeez these guys truly are gullible. Oh but cold fusion is just around the corner, yeah, the same corner it was just around 40 years ago, the corner between reality and imagination.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
He's my mum's idea of what a man should look like.
I cannot believe they are so devoid of original ideas in the world of TV that they are re-making Bergerac
Cannot be as shit as the new Van Der Valk's with Marc Warren though.
My brother was an extra in an episode of Bergerac but I’m not including this in the current discussion as we aren’t talking about major links with celebs, just low level stuff.
I used to exchange comments on Twitter about old TV with Reece Dinsdale, now flounced to Bluesky but a nice chap, about his Episode of Bergerac "Tennis Racket" where he played a precocious McEnroeesque British Tennis prodigy.
A revealing interview (20 minutes) with Andrew Hale, a Senior Policy Analyst from the Heritage Foundation on GB News. It is about UK relations with a Trump administration.
Jeez, that's worrying. Trump is a thin-skinned king with a long memory and things like sending activists to help Kamala will be punished in a painful manner. So they are going to threaten the UK with tariffs and if profound apologies and policy changes do not result, they will turn the screws on us.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
He's my mum's idea of what a man should look like.
I cannot believe they are so devoid of original ideas in the world of TV that they are re-making Bergerac
Cannot be as shit as the new Van Der Valk's with Marc Warren though.
My brother was an extra in an episode of Bergerac but I’m not including this in the current discussion as we aren’t talking about major links with celebs, just low level stuff.
I used to exchange comments on Twitter about old TV with Reece Dinsdale, now flounced to Bluesky but a nice chap, about his Episode of Bergerac "Tennis Racket" where he played a precocious McEnroeesque British Tennis prodigy.
That was the one - my brother was a ball boy. Made a nice change for him as he was usually called a ball bag.
A friend’s father once told Princess Anne to ‘fuck off out of here’.
He didn’t realise it was her, she had some unruly dogs attacking other dogs/harassing other animals in the countryside somewhere, one of the dogs was his so he was quite het up.
A revealing interview (20 minutes) with Andrew Hale, a Senior Policy Analyst from the Heritage Foundation on GB News. It is about UK relations with a Trump administration.
Jeez, that's worrying. Trump is a thin-skinned king with a long memory and things like sending activists to help Kamala will be punished in a painful manner. So they are going to threaten the UK with tariffs and if profound apologies and policy changes do not result, they will turn the screws on us.
You would have thought this might have occurred to Starmer and Labour before they did what they did. “What happens if Harris LOSES and we are left with a vengeful President Trump? Is it worth the potential grief for the UK, maybe we should hang back and not send 100 activists to help the Dems? It won’t make any difference to her chances either way”
They are clueless flailing childish idiots. We are governed, without exaggeration, by morons who can’t think more than 10 minutes ahead
A revealing interview (20 minutes) with Andrew Hale, a Senior Policy Analyst from the Heritage Foundation on GB News. It is about UK relations with a Trump administration.
Jeez, that's worrying. Trump is a thin-skinned king with a long memory and things like sending activists to help Kamala will be punished in a painful manner. So they are going to threaten the UK with tariffs and if profound apologies and policy changes do not result, they will turn the screws on us.
You would have thought this might have occurred to Starmer and Labour before they did what they did. “What happens if Harris LOSES and we are left with a vengeful President Trump? Is it worth the potential grief for the UK, maybe we should hang back and not send 100 activists to help the Dems? It won’t make any difference to her chances either way”
They are clueless flailing childish idiots. We are governed, without exaggeration, by morons who can’t think more than 10 minutes ahead
They were just simply hoping that he wouldn't win, like lots of people. I got it wrong too with my prediction.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
He's my mum's idea of what a man should look like.
I cannot believe they are so devoid of original ideas in the world of TV that they are re-making Bergerac
Cannot be as shit as the new Van Der Valk's with Marc Warren though.
My brother was an extra in an episode of Bergerac but I’m not including this in the current discussion as we aren’t talking about major links with celebs, just low level stuff.
I used to exchange comments on Twitter about old TV with Reece Dinsdale, now flounced to Bluesky but a nice chap, about his Episode of Bergerac "Tennis Racket" where he played a precocious McEnroeesque British Tennis prodigy.
That was the one - my brother was a ball boy. Made a nice change for him as he was usually called a ball bag.
Bloody hell. What a coincidence. There were around 100 episodes of the original run.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
I accidentally attended Jeremy Thorpe's 80th birthday party. I followed an acquaintance into a room and got caught up in a receiving line to say happy birthday to the poor old boy. I then helped revive a very glamorous looking Chinese woman who was on the arm of someone in a Russian admiral's uniform. He presented Jeremy with a bottle of vodka then his 'companion' feinted. It was a very strange occasion.
Feinted? You mean like moved left then dodged right in case Thorpe tried to shoot her?
Bah! That's a good anecdote spoilt with clumsy spelling. I of course meant fainted.
My Lame to Claim is that I helped “punk poet” John Cooper Clarke back-comb his hair in a club toilet in Hereford in about 1982
*sits backs, smugly*
My naff random celeb...
I was once fireman on a heritage railway, went inside to uncouple us off our train, climbed back into the cab to find no driver and instead some random bird in there. Was about to utter some remark along the lines of "who are you and what on earth are you doing on my engine uninvited" when the penny dropped that there had been some fuss made about Lucy Worsley doing some sort of photos op that day...
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
I accidentally attended Jeremy Thorpe's 80th birthday party. I followed an acquaintance into a room and got caught up in a receiving line to say happy birthday to the poor old boy. I then helped revive a very glamorous looking Chinese woman who was on the arm of someone in a Russian admiral's uniform. He presented Jeremy with a bottle of vodka then his 'companion' feinted. It was a very strange occasion.
“I accidentally attended Jeremy Thorpe's 80th birthday party” is top notch. PB on form tonight
Thank you. It's better than my only other anecdote which is starring in an episode of Channel 4's Car Booty against my will.
A revealing interview (20 minutes) with Andrew Hale, a Senior Policy Analyst from the Heritage Foundation on GB News. It is about UK relations with a Trump administration.
Jeez, that's worrying. Trump is a thin-skinned king with a long memory and things like sending activists to help Kamala will be punished in a painful manner. So they are going to threaten the UK with tariffs and if profound apologies and policy changes do not result, they will turn the screws on us.
You would have thought this might have occurred to Starmer and Labour before they did what they did. “What happens if Harris LOSES and we are left with a vengeful President Trump? Is it worth the potential grief for the UK, maybe we should hang back and not send 100 activists to help the Dems? It won’t make any difference to her chances either way”
They are clueless flailing childish idiots. We are governed, without exaggeration, by morons who can’t think more than 10 minutes ahead
Utter morons and when labour complain about Musk interefering in UK politics this gets thrown back at them,.
At least people from the other parties who went over to campaign for the Hapless Harris, like Robert Buckland former Tory Minister, went as individuals not through an organised group.
Carbon Capture, now Cold Fusion, jeez these guys truly are gullible. Oh but cold fusion is just around the corner, yeah, the same corner it was just around 40 years ago, the corner between reality and imagination.
Wrong
This is hot fusion - billions of degrees. ITER, which will probably achieve breakeven, is building now.
Cold Fusion is about equivalent to using crystals to improve your aura.
I saw Sophie Okonedo in (the foyer of) the National Theatre yesterday, ie not on stage at eg the Lyttleton where you might expect to see her, so I win if we time-weight our experiences.
Rachel from Accounts hits the back of the net. She is Alexander Isak
With a per capita decline?
Population is growing more than 0.1% so per capita that is recessionary.
Only because of immigration, our birthrate is well below replacement level.
Cut immigration further and per capita it will be growing too
It doesn't work that way, cut immigration and you cut all the production and demand that those migrants do.
So we'd probably be officially in recession were it not for migration, but evading a recession because of a per capita decline isn't replacing the fact that it's a decline either way.
A friend’s father once told Princess Anne to ‘fuck off out of here’.
He didn’t realise it was her, she had some unruly dogs attacking other dogs/harassing other animals in the countryside somewhere, one of the dogs was his so he was quite het up.
But the question we all need to know is whether Princess Anne did indeed "fuck off" ?
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
No, you don’t understand. It’s either got to be a genuinely impressive “I did this with them”” anecdote - eg “I did coke with Pope John Paul the Second in a Spoons in Walsall in 1981” OR it’s got to be so pathetically feeble it’s funny
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
I trod on Bergerac”s foot at the airport. He was very grumpy with me about it. I was 10.
I accidentally attended Jeremy Thorpe's 80th birthday party. I followed an acquaintance into a room and got caught up in a receiving line to say happy birthday to the poor old boy. I then helped revive a very glamorous looking Chinese woman who was on the arm of someone in a Russian admiral's uniform. He presented Jeremy with a bottle of vodka then his 'companion' feinted. It was a very strange occasion.
Who's the most "famous" person you've met? Question of the day on PB.
Not met him directly, however, back on the six stages of Kevin Bacon, a school friend of mine's dad was a Deputy Head at Aylestone school at the time I believe the world famous author Sean Thomas was there.
A friend’s father once told Princess Anne to ‘fuck off out of here’.
He didn’t realise it was her, she had some unruly dogs attacking other dogs/harassing other animals in the countryside somewhere, one of the dogs was his so he was quite het up.
Talking about my activities last night (ooh er missus) I eventually went to see 10 Nights at the Riverside which was excellent. You keep telling us what a good Muslim boy you are I think you would find it super entertaining and interesting.
Carbon Capture, now Cold Fusion, jeez these guys truly are gullible. Oh but cold fusion is just around the corner, yeah, the same corner it was just around 40 years ago, the corner between reality and imagination.
Hot fusion.
Don't know the detail, but I'm not sure where £410m is going to get us with tokamak approaches, unless there's something quite new to explore (presumably there is - it's many billions otherwise to do anything at useful scale). The alternative approaches, targets hit with lasers etc, would seem more appropriate for a few hundred million of development money.
On today's topic, pathetic claims to fame - I've been both to JET and inside the AWE without working at either.
On other pathetic claims to fame, I once knocked over Brandon Flowers' drink at a Killers gig. Well, it was actually a British Sea Power gig, with Killers as the support act, before they were famous. Bought him a replacement. He took it well.
A revealing interview (20 minutes) with Andrew Hale, a Senior Policy Analyst from the Heritage Foundation on GB News. It is about UK relations with a Trump administration.
Jeez, that's worrying. Trump is a thin-skinned king with a long memory and things like sending activists to help Kamala will be punished in a painful manner. So they are going to threaten the UK with tariffs and if profound apologies and policy changes do not result, they will turn the screws on us.
I've tried to get this AI summarised but the transcript is over 3,000 words. Suffice to say that Trump will use whatever weapon is at his disposal to advance goals far outside the usual foreign policy goals and those will include tariffs on the UK to force changes in UK domestic policy.
A friend’s father once told Princess Anne to ‘fuck off out of here’.
He didn’t realise it was her, she had some unruly dogs attacking other dogs/harassing other animals in the countryside somewhere, one of the dogs was his so he was quite het up.
But the question we all need to know is whether Princess Anne did indeed "fuck off" ?
My Dad complained about the racket coming from the club under his office in Matthew Street, Liverpool.
There was a really crap pop band practicing for their evening gig.
if that was them that is excellent
Yes. My seeing U2 support the Lemon Kittens in a pub in London back in the day pales into insignificance.
My watching a chap called Rowan Atkinson in some student Fringe production at the Edinburgh Festival before it got far too big (the Fringe I mean). About 1978?
My sister was canvassed by Jess Phillips in the general election who was not happy when she politely, but firmly, asked her to go away as she was busy trying to sort out the dogs.
I mean, I have mentioned this one before, but I think asking Harold Shipman, who taught a class I attended for a while, how his day has gone, and receiving the reply that an old lady had 'died on him', then having quite an earnest conversation on how you dealt with that kind of thing, is sort of seared on my memory.
A revealing interview (20 minutes) with Andrew Hale, a Senior Policy Analyst from the Heritage Foundation on GB News. It is about UK relations with a Trump administration.
Jeez, that's worrying. Trump is a thin-skinned king with a long memory and things like sending activists to help Kamala will be punished in a painful manner. So they are going to threaten the UK with tariffs and if profound apologies and policy changes do not result, they will turn the screws on us.
You would have thought this might have occurred to Starmer and Labour before they did what they did. “What happens if Harris LOSES and we are left with a vengeful President Trump? Is it worth the potential grief for the UK, maybe we should hang back and not send 100 activists to help the Dems? It won’t make any difference to her chances either way”
They are clueless flailing childish idiots. We are governed, without exaggeration, by morons who can’t think more than 10 minutes ahead
A point the interviewee made with some force. It occurs to me that there has been a "phony war" approach to Trump: that we could just insult him and giggle with impunity. Those days are rapidly drawing to a close and we have to work out what to do when Trump kicks the shit out of us. I don't think Starmer can cope. All Badenoch will do is give a stupid grin and agree with whatever Trump says. Farage can cope because he's an Anglosphere patriot and doesn't mind if Trump kicks UK because Farage's loyalty lies elsewhere. So all the signs are not good really...
Comments
They stayed separately to each other as the visits were at different times.
The status of their nocturnal activities, Nelson with the delightful Winnie and Bill with Hillary, is not known or documented in the room.
Look at @Cookie. He delivered pizza to Northern Uproar in the mid 90s, that’s how to do it
Your story is neither of these things so it’s a pathetic fail. Sorry
My sister-in-law's sister-in-law was in a film with Ted Danson.
I have played charades at family gatherings with my sister-in-law's sister-in-law.
So I am 3 steps from Kevin Bacon himself.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_survived_into_the_21st_century
The lady who lived until 2020 (aged 101) was married at the age of 17 to a 93-year-old veteran. A lot of these sort of ‘marriages’ were encouraged at the time, either to loose relatives or as a big FU to the government.
And US manufacturing is technically still quite some way behind Taiwan (and S Korea).
But it's certainly a very sensible mitigation.
The grooming story is still off limits.
Cannot be as shit as the new Van Der Valk's with Marc Warren though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCT6hH9UQaU
What it reveals will depend on your viewpoint !
Soz Boz
Plus I have some of the same DNA as the most famous man in the world coursing through my veins, so suck on that as Donald might say.
Knowing him, note, not just meeting him.
It makes one despair
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.3908276,-1.4487944,3a,75y,308.92h,80.78t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sp3_-f375W5_qrr4xk4mPig!2e0!6shttps://streetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com/v1/thumbnail?cb_client=maps_sv.tactile&w=900&h=600&pitch=9.218509459095614&panoid=p3_-f375W5_qrr4xk4mPig&yaw=308.92189748995406!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDExMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw==
2024:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.3908336,-1.4487785,3a,75y,323.5h,72.22t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1swvzcvlrKUCUb81Ft6hkU1w!2e0!6shttps://streetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com/v1/thumbnail?cb_client=maps_sv.tactile&w=900&h=600&pitch=17.78390245122185&panoid=wvzcvlrKUCUb81Ft6hkU1w&yaw=323.50233086498173!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDExMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw==
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/16/ministers-pledge-record-410m-to-support-uk-nuclear-fusion-energy
It's largely for a spherical tokamak design, so probably won't work, but probably still a good investment in the necessary engineering capability.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/plan-for-change-to-deliver-jobs-and-growth-in-uk-leading-fusion-industry
*sits backs, smugly*
He didn’t realise it was her, she had some unruly dogs attacking other dogs/harassing other animals in the countryside somewhere, one of the dogs was his so he was quite het up.
They are clueless flailing childish idiots. We are governed, without exaggeration, by morons who can’t think more than 10 minutes ahead
I was once fireman on a heritage railway, went inside to uncouple us off our train, climbed back into the cab to find no driver and instead some random bird in there. Was about to utter some remark along the lines of "who are you and what on earth are you doing on my engine uninvited" when the penny dropped that there had been some fuss made about Lucy Worsley doing some sort of photos op that day...
At least people from the other parties who went over to campaign for the Hapless Harris, like Robert Buckland former Tory Minister, went as individuals not through an organised group.
This is hot fusion - billions of degrees. ITER, which will probably achieve breakeven, is building now.
Cold Fusion is about equivalent to using crystals to improve your aura.
So we'd probably be officially in recession were it not for migration, but evading a recession because of a per capita decline isn't replacing the fact that it's a decline either way.
There was a really crap pop band practicing for their evening gig.
If it's not a ridiculously easy Lab hold then we could be seeing a change.
https://x.com/cluthaman/status/1879884120014332079?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
I, by contrast, have met Lloyd Russell-Moyle.
Don't know the detail, but I'm not sure where £410m is going to get us with tokamak approaches, unless there's something quite new to explore (presumably there is - it's many billions otherwise to do anything at useful scale). The alternative approaches, targets hit with lasers etc, would seem more appropriate for a few hundred million of development money.
On today's topic, pathetic claims to fame - I've been both to JET and inside the AWE without working at either.
On other pathetic claims to fame, I once knocked over Brandon Flowers' drink at a Killers gig. Well, it was actually a British Sea Power gig, with Killers as the support act, before they were famous. Bought him a replacement. He took it well.
.
David Cameron, The Queen, Jurgen Klopp, and The Roling Stones.
Thank you, and goodnight!