I’m struggling to get excited by politics at the moment. Somehow the summer and the sunshine suck the interest out of me. This is the time I start to obsess over weather models.
And there is potentially something for the ages in store there. Several global models and their ensemble sets are throwing out the landmark heatwave, the one which gets remembered for posterity: in other words, that June-July 1976 spell but with 50 years of climate change.
In these scenarios this current hot spell is just a warm up act.
Several are not though. They’re just showing an extended spell of quite hot weather with some showers.
One to keep an eye on.
I have to say looking at tonight's output, apart from the possibility of a brief (18-24 hour) incursion into the south in ten days, it all looks pretty average through to the end of the month.
I've also heard early August may be less settled (to be fair, August can be a very wet month) but that's a very long way off.
Are you on ayahuasca?
Whatever this is, it certainly is not “average”
It’s glorious, and it looks like a forecast for Rome rather than London, but it is not average
Apart from Saturday 19th, my home town is forecast for two weeks of Scorchio. Up here in the far north, the next couple of days look more mixed but next week is shaping up to be another fairly decent one.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
I’m struggling to get excited by politics at the moment. Somehow the summer and the sunshine suck the interest out of me. This is the time I start to obsess over weather models.
And there is potentially something for the ages in store there. Several global models and their ensemble sets are throwing out the landmark heatwave, the one which gets remembered for posterity: in other words, that June-July 1976 spell but with 50 years of climate change.
In these scenarios this current hot spell is just a warm up act.
Several are not though. They’re just showing an extended spell of quite hot weather with some showers.
One to keep an eye on.
I have to say looking at tonight's output, apart from the possibility of a brief (18-24 hour) incursion into the south in ten days, it all looks pretty average through to the end of the month.
I've also heard early August may be less settled (to be fair, August can be a very wet month) but that's a very long way off.
Are you on ayahuasca?
Whatever this is, it certainly is not “average”
It’s glorious, and it looks like a forecast for Rome rather than London, but it is not average
Apart from Saturday 19th, my home town is forecast for two weeks of Scorchio. Up here in the far north, the next couple of days look more mixed but next week is shaping up to be another fairly decent one.
Roll on Autumn, this hot weather absolutely does my head in.
I’m struggling to get excited by politics at the moment. Somehow the summer and the sunshine suck the interest out of me. This is the time I start to obsess over weather models.
And there is potentially something for the ages in store there. Several global models and their ensemble sets are throwing out the landmark heatwave, the one which gets remembered for posterity: in other words, that June-July 1976 spell but with 50 years of climate change.
In these scenarios this current hot spell is just a warm up act.
Several are not though. They’re just showing an extended spell of quite hot weather with some showers.
One to keep an eye on.
I have to say looking at tonight's output, apart from the possibility of a brief (18-24 hour) incursion into the south in ten days, it all looks pretty average through to the end of the month.
I've also heard early August may be less settled (to be fair, August can be a very wet month) but that's a very long way off.
Are you on ayahuasca?
Whatever this is, it certainly is not “average”
It’s glorious, and it looks like a forecast for Rome rather than London, but it is not average
Apart from Saturday 19th, my home town is forecast for two weeks of Scorchio. Up here in the far north, the next couple of days look more mixed but next week is shaping up to be another fairly decent one.
I’m struggling to get excited by politics at the moment. Somehow the summer and the sunshine suck the interest out of me. This is the time I start to obsess over weather models.
And there is potentially something for the ages in store there. Several global models and their ensemble sets are throwing out the landmark heatwave, the one which gets remembered for posterity: in other words, that June-July 1976 spell but with 50 years of climate change.
In these scenarios this current hot spell is just a warm up act.
Several are not though. They’re just showing an extended spell of quite hot weather with some showers.
One to keep an eye on.
I have to say looking at tonight's output, apart from the possibility of a brief (18-24 hour) incursion into the south in ten days, it all looks pretty average through to the end of the month.
I've also heard early August may be less settled (to be fair, August can be a very wet month) but that's a very long way off.
Are you on ayahuasca?
Whatever this is, it certainly is not “average”
It’s glorious, and it looks like a forecast for Rome rather than London, but it is not average
Apart from Saturday 19th, my home town is forecast for two weeks of Scorchio. Up here in the far north, the next couple of days look more mixed but next week is shaping up to be another fairly decent one.
Roll on Autumn, this hot weather absolutely does my head in.
No details. Usually an ominous sign with Sir Keir Traitor
Give it a rest. They way you continually talk this country down, you are a bit rich throwing 'traitor' around.
Piss off. Having a gloomy outlook on a message board isn't giving away territories to potentially hostile countries and 'hiring them back' for millions of pounds drawn out of our defence budget. Or giving away 12 years of fishing rights for a vague promise to stop choking off our imports using SPS checks - which is against WTO rules anyway. Or shutting down homegrown AI projects whilst paying Google millions to host data in a way that even a local council wouldn't allow. Or allowing China to build a vast surveillance and detention centre within a stone's throw of parliament. I could go on.
The man is a national security risk.
Given your repeated shilling for Russia, I'll just LOL at that...
(Oh, and I could add your health and diet 'advice'... )
And the same point again: LG1983 is a bloke on the internet, SKS is the actual PM making all sorts of decisions quite contrary to the British national interest. One of these is clearly a threat to be taken much more seriously than the other.
On the Internet, bots and trolls hold immense power.
Which is why stuff like anti-vax sentiment ends up killing thousands.
Are you seriously saying SKS giving away British territory to allies of the Chinese is a lesser threat to British interests than Leon and Luckyguy1983 complaining about this on the internet?
Are you seriously saying the bots and trolls spreading misinformation and foreign propaganda are not a threat to our interests?
Well yes, but neither Leon nor LG fall into that category. And I'd be surprised if you suggested they were. Whereas SKS very much falls into the category of British Prime Minister acting weirdly against British interests.
LG wrt MH17 and Ukrainian biolabs, to name just two. So yes, spreading misinformation and foreign propaganda. Both, as it happens, were Russian misinformation and propaganda.
I daresay Starmer believes he is acting in British interests wrt Chagos. I'd disagree with him, but lots of people were annoyed when we 'let' various countries leave our imperial embrace. That is viewed rather differently now by most people.
(Again, before anyone starts screeching, I think the Chagos Islands deal is a bad one for several reasons. But it is arguable, e.g. because of the ICJ ruling against us. I certainly don't think it's 'traitorous'. Starmer isn't a traitor; he hasn't even said he likes Deltics...)
A Venn Diagram of PB, Netweather and Rail UK Forums would show significant overlap.
I feel like there's a few Sheldons on this site.
Leonard: We had a vote. Three of us voted for airplane. Sheldon voted for train, so we're taking the train. Sheldon: Don't say it like that, Leonard. Say it like, "We're taking the train"
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
I’m struggling to get excited by politics at the moment. Somehow the summer and the sunshine suck the interest out of me. This is the time I start to obsess over weather models.
And there is potentially something for the ages in store there. Several global models and their ensemble sets are throwing out the landmark heatwave, the one which gets remembered for posterity: in other words, that June-July 1976 spell but with 50 years of climate change.
In these scenarios this current hot spell is just a warm up act.
Several are not though. They’re just showing an extended spell of quite hot weather with some showers.
One to keep an eye on.
I have to say looking at tonight's output, apart from the possibility of a brief (18-24 hour) incursion into the south in ten days, it all looks pretty average through to the end of the month.
I've also heard early August may be less settled (to be fair, August can be a very wet month) but that's a very long way off.
Are you on ayahuasca?
Whatever this is, it certainly is not “average”
It’s glorious, and it looks like a forecast for Rome rather than London, but it is not average
The numbers on your app are understating the actual UK maxima because London won’t be the hottest place.
What @stodge is doing, which is absolutely the norm in weather forum world (especially in winter when snow is in the offing), is looking beyond the current and even the next heatwave and focusing on what the longer term patterns are showing, and those are more mixed.
But the raw output of even the coolish operational run of this evening’s GFS model (widely used mainly because its free to view output is more generous than the parsimonious but significantly more accurate European model) gives max temperatures of 31, 33, 32, 31, 30, 26, 28, 32, 31, 32, 35, 29, 25, 25, 25, 26, 26
So it’s that last 5 days of 25/26 that is the coolish end of month we’re discussing.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
My sobering thought for the evening.
I calculated I will need to sell my sparkling wine for at least £35 a bottle, and my still for £18, in order to break even.
I’m struggling to get excited by politics at the moment. Somehow the summer and the sunshine suck the interest out of me. This is the time I start to obsess over weather models.
And there is potentially something for the ages in store there. Several global models and their ensemble sets are throwing out the landmark heatwave, the one which gets remembered for posterity: in other words, that June-July 1976 spell but with 50 years of climate change.
In these scenarios this current hot spell is just a warm up act.
Several are not though. They’re just showing an extended spell of quite hot weather with some showers.
One to keep an eye on.
I have to say looking at tonight's output, apart from the possibility of a brief (18-24 hour) incursion into the south in ten days, it all looks pretty average through to the end of the month.
I've also heard early August may be less settled (to be fair, August can be a very wet month) but that's a very long way off.
Are you on ayahuasca?
Whatever this is, it certainly is not “average”
It’s glorious, and it looks like a forecast for Rome rather than London, but it is not average
Apart from Saturday 19th, my home town is forecast for two weeks of Scorchio. Up here in the far north, the next couple of days look more mixed but next week is shaping up to be another fairly decent one.
Roll on Autumn, this hot weather absolutely does my head in.
I adore it. The world seems kinder and sweeter
Each to their own. 26-7c is about as much as I can handle nowadays. More if I’m on the beach abroad, but in the UK this its too hot for me right now. I went to Portugal with a few mates last month, and we were reminiscing about taking a two pack of Piz Buin 4&6 factor sun cream in the old days.. now it’s 30 & 50!
I’m struggling to get excited by politics at the moment. Somehow the summer and the sunshine suck the interest out of me. This is the time I start to obsess over weather models.
And there is potentially something for the ages in store there. Several global models and their ensemble sets are throwing out the landmark heatwave, the one which gets remembered for posterity: in other words, that June-July 1976 spell but with 50 years of climate change.
In these scenarios this current hot spell is just a warm up act.
Several are not though. They’re just showing an extended spell of quite hot weather with some showers.
One to keep an eye on.
I have to say looking at tonight's output, apart from the possibility of a brief (18-24 hour) incursion into the south in ten days, it all looks pretty average through to the end of the month.
I've also heard early August may be less settled (to be fair, August can be a very wet month) but that's a very long way off.
Are you on ayahuasca?
Whatever this is, it certainly is not “average”
It’s glorious, and it looks like a forecast for Rome rather than London, but it is not average
The numbers on your app are understating the actual maxima.
What @stodge is doing, which is absolutely the norm in weather forum world (especially in winter when snow is in the offing), is looking beyond the current and even the next heatwave and focusing on what the longer term patterns are showing, and those are more mixed.
But the raw output of even the coolish operational run of this evening’s GFS model (widely used mainly because its free to view output is more generous than the parsimonious but significantly more accurate European model) gives max temperatures of 31, 33, 32, 31, 30, 26, 28, 32, 31, 32, 35, 29, 25, 25, 25, 26, 26
So it’s that last 5 days of 25/26 that is the coolish end of month we’re discussing.
Ah. “Fantasy island” as us weather nerds say
No forecast is much use beyond 10 days, certainly 14
And the next 14 in london look superb. Pretty much unbroken sunshine
I may have to revise my opinion that London weather has turned to shite. Instead it seems to get stuck in grooves much more than in the past
That can be terrible. Months of cool rain as in 2023. Or months of sun
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
My sobering thought for the evening.
I calculated I will need to sell my sparkling wine for at least £35 a bottle, and my still for £18, in order to break even.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
Only 9% too!
Yes, I just don’t like the taste of alcohol without a mixer of some kind. Bar staff, sometimes get snotty about it, I can’t understand the problem
I’m struggling to get excited by politics at the moment. Somehow the summer and the sunshine suck the interest out of me. This is the time I start to obsess over weather models.
And there is potentially something for the ages in store there. Several global models and their ensemble sets are throwing out the landmark heatwave, the one which gets remembered for posterity: in other words, that June-July 1976 spell but with 50 years of climate change.
In these scenarios this current hot spell is just a warm up act.
Several are not though. They’re just showing an extended spell of quite hot weather with some showers.
One to keep an eye on.
I have to say looking at tonight's output, apart from the possibility of a brief (18-24 hour) incursion into the south in ten days, it all looks pretty average through to the end of the month.
I've also heard early August may be less settled (to be fair, August can be a very wet month) but that's a very long way off.
Are you on ayahuasca?
Whatever this is, it certainly is not “average”
It’s glorious, and it looks like a forecast for Rome rather than London, but it is not average
The numbers on your app are understating the actual maxima.
What @stodge is doing, which is absolutely the norm in weather forum world (especially in winter when snow is in the offing), is looking beyond the current and even the next heatwave and focusing on what the longer term patterns are showing, and those are more mixed.
But the raw output of even the coolish operational run of this evening’s GFS model (widely used mainly because its free to view output is more generous than the parsimonious but significantly more accurate European model) gives max temperatures of 31, 33, 32, 31, 30, 26, 28, 32, 31, 32, 35, 29, 25, 25, 25, 26, 26
So it’s that last 5 days of 25/26 that is the coolish end of month we’re discussing.
Ah. “Fantasy island” as us weather nerds say
No forecast is much use beyond 10 days, certainly 14
And the next 14 in london look superb. Pretty much unbroken sunshine
I may have to revise my opinion that London weather has turned to shite. Instead it seems to get stuck in grooves much more than in the past
That can be terrible. Months of cool rain as in 2023. Or months of sun
I was talking to a Spanish client in Madrid today (reasonable weather, only 35C, but I spent most of the day in air conditioned offices) and asked if she’d consider moving to London, and her response was “the sky is so low. I feel claustrophobia”.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
Only 9% too!
Yes, I just don’t like the taste of alcohol without a mixer of some kind. Bar staff, sometimes get snotty about it, I can’t understand the problem
I like white wine loaded with ice cubes
Indeed I quite like some chilled reds loaded with ice
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
My sobering thought for the evening.
I calculated I will need to sell my sparkling wine for at least £35 a bottle, and my still for £18, in order to break even.
Are you doing online sales?
Not yet. Will do. First commercial scale harvest this year so still will be available from summer 2026 and sparkling from 2027 onwards.
A Venn Diagram of PB, Netweather and Rail UK Forums would show significant overlap.
Although Josias Jessop would not be terribly welcome on the last given his views on Deltics.
I thought we weren't allowed to swear on PB, and yet the mods allow you to use the d-word?
Heretics and unbelievers are not permitted to speak The Sacred Name.
Now let us pray
Our Penwarden in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your uniflow be done, on earth as in Preston. Give us today our startup. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Lead us not to internal combustion turbines but deliver us from evil. For the kingdom, the power, and the crankshaft cycle are yours now and for ever. Amen.
A Venn Diagram of PB, Netweather and Rail UK Forums would show significant overlap.
I'm partially banned from the latter
You're off the rails?
Um, I triggered a few people after suggesting the DLR is NOT a tram system, and that OO model gauge is a crappy mixture of 1:76 (body shell) and 1:87 (track gauge).
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
Only 9% too!
Yes, I just don’t like the taste of alcohol without a mixer of some kind. Bar staff, sometimes get snotty about it, I can’t understand the problem
I like white wine loaded with ice cubes
Indeed I quite like some chilled reds loaded with ice
I used to drink Red wine and Coca Cola, with ice. I think they do that in Spain quite a bit.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
Only 9% too!
Yes, I just don’t like the taste of alcohol without a mixer of some kind. Bar staff, sometimes get snotty about it, I can’t understand the problem
I like white wine loaded with ice cubes
Indeed I quite like some chilled reds loaded with ice
King Charles served Emmanuel with some Domaine Evremond last night at the banquet.
A stroke of diplomatic genius. It’s English sparkling, but Macron can’t dismiss it or damn it with faint praise, because it’s the work of a French champagne house, Taittinger. And by all accounts (I’ve not yet tasted it despite the estate being about 5 miles from my vineyard) it’s superlative fizz.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
Only 9% too!
Yes, I just don’t like the taste of alcohol without a mixer of some kind. Bar staff, sometimes get snotty about it, I can’t understand the problem
I like white wine loaded with ice cubes
Indeed I quite like some chilled reds loaded with ice
I used to drink Red wine and Coca Cola, with ice. I think they do that in Spain quite a bit.
In a nice closing of the circle, I was at Coca Cola’s Spanish HQ today.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
Only 9% too!
Yes, I just don’t like the taste of alcohol without a mixer of some kind. Bar staff, sometimes get snotty about it, I can’t understand the problem
I like white wine loaded with ice cubes
Indeed I quite like some chilled reds loaded with ice
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
Only 9% too!
Yes, I just don’t like the taste of alcohol without a mixer of some kind. Bar staff, sometimes get snotty about it, I can’t understand the problem
I like white wine loaded with ice cubes
Indeed I quite like some chilled reds loaded with ice
King Charles served Emmanuel with some Domaine Evremond last night at the banquet.
A stroke of diplomatic genius. It’s English sparkling, but Macron can’t dismiss it or damn it with faint praise, because it’s the work of a French champagne house, Taittinger. And by all accounts (I’ve not yet tasted it despite the estate being about 5 miles from my vineyard) it’s superlative fizz.
Only a moron dismisses English fizz now. It’s clearly some of the best sparkling wine in the world
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
Only 9% too!
Yes, I just don’t like the taste of alcohol without a mixer of some kind. Bar staff, sometimes get snotty about it, I can’t understand the problem
I like white wine loaded with ice cubes
Indeed I quite like some chilled reds loaded with ice
I used to drink Red wine and Coca Cola, with ice. I think they do that in Spain quite a bit.
That has got to result in a sin bin with upgraded punishment (due to no mitigating circumstances) of a period of enforced viewing of GB News....
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
Only 9% too!
Yes, I just don’t like the taste of alcohol without a mixer of some kind. Bar staff, sometimes get snotty about it, I can’t understand the problem
I like white wine loaded with ice cubes
Indeed I quite like some chilled reds loaded with ice
Peasant
It’s a delicious way to enjoy wine. The Greeks did it. As did the Roman emperors
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
My sobering thought for the evening.
I calculated I will need to sell my sparkling wine for at least £35 a bottle, and my still for £18, in order to break even.
Are you doing online sales?
Not yet. Will do. First commercial scale harvest this year so still will be available from summer 2026 and sparkling from 2027 onwards.
I’m struggling to get excited by politics at the moment. Somehow the summer and the sunshine suck the interest out of me. This is the time I start to obsess over weather models.
And there is potentially something for the ages in store there. Several global models and their ensemble sets are throwing out the landmark heatwave, the one which gets remembered for posterity: in other words, that June-July 1976 spell but with 50 years of climate change.
In these scenarios this current hot spell is just a warm up act.
Several are not though. They’re just showing an extended spell of quite hot weather with some showers.
One to keep an eye on.
I have to say looking at tonight's output, apart from the possibility of a brief (18-24 hour) incursion into the south in ten days, it all looks pretty average through to the end of the month.
I've also heard early August may be less settled (to be fair, August can be a very wet month) but that's a very long way off.
Are you on ayahuasca?
Whatever this is, it certainly is not “average”
It’s glorious, and it looks like a forecast for Rome rather than London, but it is not average
Apart from Saturday 19th, my home town is forecast for two weeks of Scorchio. Up here in the far north, the next couple of days look more mixed but next week is shaping up to be another fairly decent one.
Roll on Autumn, this hot weather absolutely does my head in.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
My sobering thought for the evening.
I calculated I will need to sell my sparkling wine for at least £35 a bottle, and my still for £18, in order to break even.
Which do to think will be easier to achieve? I assume the sparkling?
As a teenager, we used to stop off at Three Choirs on the way to Wales. My grandfather was a fan of their Bacchus. Though he said it wasn't great value.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
Only 9% too!
Yes, I just don’t like the taste of alcohol without a mixer of some kind. Bar staff, sometimes get snotty about it, I can’t understand the problem
I like white wine loaded with ice cubes
Indeed I quite like some chilled reds loaded with ice
I used to drink Red wine and Coca Cola, with ice. I think they do that in Spain quite a bit.
That has got to result in a sin bin with upgraded punishment (due to no mitigating circumstances) of a period of enforced viewing of GB News....
Un calimocho. Originally from the Basque Country, so be careful about dissing it.
Red wine with lemonade is more common, and both are highly civilised on hot summer days. Frankly, it's going to be one of the smaller adaptations we will need to make if the British climate carries on like this.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
Only 9% too!
Yes, I just don’t like the taste of alcohol without a mixer of some kind. Bar staff, sometimes get snotty about it, I can’t understand the problem
I like white wine loaded with ice cubes
Indeed I quite like some chilled reds loaded with ice
I used to drink Red wine and Coca Cola, with ice. I think they do that in Spain quite a bit.
That has got to result in a sin bin with upgraded punishment (due to no mitigating circumstances) of a period of enforced viewing of GB News....
Un calimocho. Originally from the Basque Country, so be careful about dissing it.
Red wine with lemonade is more common, and both are highly civilised on hot summer days. Frankly, it's going to be one of the smaller adaptations we will need to make if the British climate carries on like this.
In fact, I think I will make one now.
Kalimoxto (as I know it) is fine. Red wine & lemonade (Tinto de verano) is good too. Also a good option in Granada if you're hungry and don't want to be wasted after seven or eight "free" tapas.
Ministers accused of betrayal after pausing Grenfell contract investigations
Survivors and bereaved families of the Grenfell Tower fire have accused the government of “incompetence or outright indifference” after it paused investigations into possible public contract bans for firms criticised in connection with the 2017 blaze that killed 72 people.
Photo agencies are to boycott the rest of the Oasis reunion tour, including the first “homecoming” gig in Manchester on Friday, over restrictions imposed on how newspapers, magazines, TV broadcasters and digital publishers can use pictures from the gigs.
The band’s management has told photo agencies and publishers that they own the rights to shots taken at the concerts for just a year, and then they will lose ownership of the images for any future use.
Caribbean leaders are backing Jamaica’s petition to King Charles on reparations as the region prepares to step up its pursuit of reparative justice for slavery, the prime minister, Andrew Holness, has said.
Speaking at this week’s leaders summit for the Caribbean Community (Caricom), a bloc of 20 member and associate member states, Holness said Jamaica had secured “broad support” from the region for its petition to the king, the island’s head of state.
The petition asks Charles to use his authority to request legal advice from the judicial committee of the London-based privy council, the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries, on whether the forced transport of Africans to Jamaica was lawful, if it constituted a crime against humanity, and whether Britain was under obligation to provide a remedy to Jamaica for slavery and its enduring consequences.
Caribbean leaders are backing Jamaica’s petition to King Charles on reparations as the region prepares to step up its pursuit of reparative justice for slavery, the prime minister, Andrew Holness, has said.
Speaking at this week’s leaders summit for the Caribbean Community (Caricom), a bloc of 20 member and associate member states, Holness said Jamaica had secured “broad support” from the region for its petition to the king, the island’s head of state.
The petition asks Charles to use his authority to request legal advice from the judicial committee of the London-based privy council, the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries, on whether the forced transport of Africans to Jamaica was lawful, if it constituted a crime against humanity, and whether Britain was under obligation to provide a remedy to Jamaica for slavery and its enduring consequences.
This pilot framework will be decided once the legal issues are resolved and agreed in the EU
So not agreed yet
Hello ECHR
Oh god. He hasn’t actually got any agreement at all, ye
He is so dismally wet
Got an agreement to try to agree an agreement....
I know I keep banging on about this, but Starmer needs to stop seeking agreements by consent using legal frameworks, and start imposing solutions by force without consent. The small boats should be turned around and sent back whence they came.
If the French disapprove they can start a war. If the lawyers disapprove then laws should be passed to disapply human rights legislation outside the UK jurisdiction against the armed forces. If the Navy disagree, then a new branch ("Border Security") should be created to do it and the RN can bugger off to the Falklands.
But we need to stop asking people, since they obviously aren't getting it done.
You’re asking those deemed with that task to try and force boats to turn back to France and what happens when some sink and people drown. Practically forcing a boat to turn round isn’t easy notwithstanding the moral issues.
You bring them ashore safely then fly them to a processing centre outside Europe
And if necessary leave the ECHR
This present position cannot continue if the country wants to prevent a Farage coronation
That's a bit like someone in Germany in 1931 saying "Round up all the Jews to prevent Hitler a Hitler coronation".
Hard to see the difference between your proposed treatment and the disease you're trying to avoid.
To compare my comments with 1931 Germany is unworthy of you @Benpointer
They would be processed and either allowed back into the UK or their claim rejected
I think my analogy is fair.
I cast no aspersions on you as a person - I believe you to be decent and fair but...
My point is that your proposed solution is as bad as the outcome it seeks to avoid. Leaving the ECHR would itself be a terrible step imo.
Your analogy was quite shit. As fantastical as the idea is, the idea of the Weimar Government rounding up and presumably deporting jews to prevent the rise of the Nazis is absolutely not equivalent to what did happen to them. Many jews would have happily exchanged being 'rounded up' and removed to a safe third place with the actuality of the final solution.
This might be the stupidest of your posts so far. “The Jews would have been grateful to have been rounded up and deported rather than experience the Holocaust.”
Good fucking grief
You are suggesting that there is no difference in the desirability of being deported and the desirability of being put in a death camp? And you're trying to call me stupid?
Caribbean leaders are backing Jamaica’s petition to King Charles on reparations as the region prepares to step up its pursuit of reparative justice for slavery, the prime minister, Andrew Holness, has said.
Speaking at this week’s leaders summit for the Caribbean Community (Caricom), a bloc of 20 member and associate member states, Holness said Jamaica had secured “broad support” from the region for its petition to the king, the island’s head of state.
The petition asks Charles to use his authority to request legal advice from the judicial committee of the London-based privy council, the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries, on whether the forced transport of Africans to Jamaica was lawful, if it constituted a crime against humanity, and whether Britain was under obligation to provide a remedy to Jamaica for slavery and its enduring consequences.
Caribbean leaders are backing Jamaica’s petition to King Charles on reparations as the region prepares to step up its pursuit of reparative justice for slavery, the prime minister, Andrew Holness, has said.
Speaking at this week’s leaders summit for the Caribbean Community (Caricom), a bloc of 20 member and associate member states, Holness said Jamaica had secured “broad support” from the region for its petition to the king, the island’s head of state.
The petition asks Charles to use his authority to request legal advice from the judicial committee of the London-based privy council, the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries, on whether the forced transport of Africans to Jamaica was lawful, if it constituted a crime against humanity, and whether Britain was under obligation to provide a remedy to Jamaica for slavery and its enduring consequences.
Caribbean leaders are backing Jamaica’s petition to King Charles on reparations as the region prepares to step up its pursuit of reparative justice for slavery, the prime minister, Andrew Holness, has said.
Speaking at this week’s leaders summit for the Caribbean Community (Caricom), a bloc of 20 member and associate member states, Holness said Jamaica had secured “broad support” from the region for its petition to the king, the island’s head of state.
The petition asks Charles to use his authority to request legal advice from the judicial committee of the London-based privy council, the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries, on whether the forced transport of Africans to Jamaica was lawful, if it constituted a crime against humanity, and whether Britain was under obligation to provide a remedy to Jamaica for slavery and its enduring consequences.
A Venn Diagram of PB, Netweather and Rail UK Forums would show significant overlap.
I'm partially banned from the latter
You're off the rails?
WTF did you do to get banned partlally from the Rail UK Forums?
Um, I triggered a few people after suggesting the DLR is NOT a tram system, and that OO model gauge is a crappy mixture of 1:76 (body shell) and 1:87 (track gauge).
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
My sobering thought for the evening.
I calculated I will need to sell my sparkling wine for at least £35 a bottle, and my still for £18, in order to break even.
Which do to think will be easier to achieve? I assume the sparkling?
As a teenager, we used to stop off at Three Choirs on the way to Wales. My grandfather was a fan of their Bacchus. Though he said it wasn't great value.
3 choirs (based, readers, in Newent) produce some of the cheapest wine in England.
They’ll never grace the upper echelons of the English fine wine hierarchy, but they’ve got the business model down pat.
Caribbean leaders are backing Jamaica’s petition to King Charles on reparations as the region prepares to step up its pursuit of reparative justice for slavery, the prime minister, Andrew Holness, has said.
Speaking at this week’s leaders summit for the Caribbean Community (Caricom), a bloc of 20 member and associate member states, Holness said Jamaica had secured “broad support” from the region for its petition to the king, the island’s head of state.
The petition asks Charles to use his authority to request legal advice from the judicial committee of the London-based privy council, the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries, on whether the forced transport of Africans to Jamaica was lawful, if it constituted a crime against humanity, and whether Britain was under obligation to provide a remedy to Jamaica for slavery and its enduring consequences.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
My sobering thought for the evening.
I calculated I will need to sell my sparkling wine for at least £35 a bottle, and my still for £18, in order to break even.
Which do to think will be easier to achieve? I assume the sparkling?
As a teenager, we used to stop off at Three Choirs on the way to Wales. My grandfather was a fan of their Bacchus. Though he said it wasn't great value.
3 choirs (based, readers, in Newent) produce some of the cheapest wine in England.
They’ll never grace the upper echelons of the English fine wine hierarchy, but they’ve got the business model down pat.
Caribbean leaders are backing Jamaica’s petition to King Charles on reparations as the region prepares to step up its pursuit of reparative justice for slavery, the prime minister, Andrew Holness, has said.
Speaking at this week’s leaders summit for the Caribbean Community (Caricom), a bloc of 20 member and associate member states, Holness said Jamaica had secured “broad support” from the region for its petition to the king, the island’s head of state.
The petition asks Charles to use his authority to request legal advice from the judicial committee of the London-based privy council, the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries, on whether the forced transport of Africans to Jamaica was lawful, if it constituted a crime against humanity, and whether Britain was under obligation to provide a remedy to Jamaica for slavery and its enduring consequences.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
My sobering thought for the evening.
I calculated I will need to sell my sparkling wine for at least £35 a bottle, and my still for £18, in order to break even.
Which do to think will be easier to achieve? I assume the sparkling?
As a teenager, we used to stop off at Three Choirs on the way to Wales. My grandfather was a fan of their Bacchus. Though he said it wasn't great value.
3 choirs (based, readers, in Newent) produce some of the cheapest wine in England.
They’ll never grace the upper echelons of the English fine wine hierarchy, but they’ve got the business model down pat.
And they are based in Newent.
What's wrong with Newent?
Did I say there’s anything wrong with Newent?
One of the warmest microclimates in the West of England.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
My sobering thought for the evening.
I calculated I will need to sell my sparkling wine for at least £35 a bottle, and my still for £18, in order to break even.
Which do to think will be easier to achieve? I assume the sparkling?
As a teenager, we used to stop off at Three Choirs on the way to Wales. My grandfather was a fan of their Bacchus. Though he said it wasn't great value.
3 choirs (based, readers, in Newent) produce some of the cheapest wine in England.
They’ll never grace the upper echelons of the English fine wine hierarchy, but they’ve got the business model down pat.
And they are based in Newent.
What's wrong with Newent?
Did I say there’s anything wrong with Newent?
One of the warmest microclimates in the West of England.
You seemed to be emphasising it rather.... perhaps I misunderstood.
A Venn Diagram of PB, Netweather and Rail UK Forums would show significant overlap.
I'm partially banned from the latter
You're off the rails?
WTF did you do to get banned partlally from the Rail UK Forums?
Um, I triggered a few people after suggesting the DLR is NOT a tram system, and that OO model gauge is a crappy mixture of 1:76 (body shell) and 1:87 (track gauge).
Well DLR is light metro (nowadays the trains and platforms are too small for demand) and OO is a completely random scale - so valid statements on both items...
A Venn Diagram of PB, Netweather and Rail UK Forums would show significant overlap.
I'm partially banned from the latter
You're off the rails?
WTF did you do to get banned partlally from the Rail UK Forums?
Um, I triggered a few people after suggesting the DLR is NOT a tram system, and that OO model gauge is a crappy mixture of 1:76 (body shell) and 1:87 (track gauge).
Have you done the Lille metro, one of the earliest automated systems?
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
My sobering thought for the evening.
I calculated I will need to sell my sparkling wine for at least £35 a bottle, and my still for £18, in order to break even.
Which do to think will be easier to achieve? I assume the sparkling?
As a teenager, we used to stop off at Three Choirs on the way to Wales. My grandfather was a fan of their Bacchus. Though he said it wasn't great value.
3 choirs (based, readers, in Newent) produce some of the cheapest wine in England.
They’ll never grace the upper echelons of the English fine wine hierarchy, but they’ve got the business model down pat.
And they are based in Newent.
'Jam shed' is storming the market in my local Co-op. A cross between wine and ribena - and very drinkable for it.
I assume that they are just mixing in a bit of unfermented grape juice like the Germans (I seem to remember they call it sussreserve (sp)). Don't know why more winemakers don't do it - makes special sense in latitudes like that of the UK.
Re Starmer & Macron’s boat people strategy, what are France going to do with the returnees? And why don’t French police just stop the boats leaving France rather than letting them make the journey, arrive here only for us to send them back?
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
I worked in Finland once many years again for two separate four week stretches.
The first was mid-summer - around end of June. They had all gone - and they admit this - a bit loopy as it was the mid summer and max daylight. Indeed it was a struggle to get flights book as so many Finns coming home for the mid summer party.
Early September was next trip. Already frosty.
Yes, it’s important to remember how unusual this is. I know that, having travelled around Norway before. I’m back in my hotel room, having taken the dog for a good walk around the marina (having a boat is exceptionally popular here); below the window there are people sitting out on the street terrace, eating and drinking (it’s now after 9.30 pm and I have to keep reminding myself that the sun isn’t going to set), and in the marina there are people setting out for evening trips on their boats. Around the harbour there are people in various states of undress, taking the sun.
On my last trip, I remember seeing the restaurants with all their outside seating and wondering why they bothered, since come the evening it was never warm or dry or calm enough for eating out to be enjoyable. Now, I see it.
We were weighing up going in mid-winter for the aurora borealis (which I think doesn't materialise in the summer?) or mid-summer for the midnight sun. When is the mosquito season? - keen to avoid that. Not bothered by the temperature.
A Venn Diagram of PB, Netweather and Rail UK Forums would show significant overlap.
I'm partially banned from the latter
You're off the rails?
WTF did you do to get banned partlally from the Rail UK Forums?
Um, I triggered a few people after suggesting the DLR is NOT a tram system, and that OO model gauge is a crappy mixture of 1:76 (body shell) and 1:87 (track gauge).
Have you done the Lille metro, one of the earliest automated systems?
We went on a piece of network rail (well network rail maintained) track that I would bet Sunil has never been on last month.
The RNLI Lizard Lifeboat Station has a funicular railway for transporting goods (except fuel) down to the lifeboat and as Mrs Eek was recovering from her broken ankle we got to ride it back up the hill
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
My sobering thought for the evening.
I calculated I will need to sell my sparkling wine for at least £35 a bottle, and my still for £18, in order to break even.
Which do to think will be easier to achieve? I assume the sparkling?
As a teenager, we used to stop off at Three Choirs on the way to Wales. My grandfather was a fan of their Bacchus. Though he said it wasn't great value.
3 choirs (based, readers, in Newent) produce some of the cheapest wine in England.
They’ll never grace the upper echelons of the English fine wine hierarchy, but they’ve got the business model down pat.
And they are based in Newent.
'Jam shed' is storming the market in my local Co-op. A cross between wine and ribena - and very drinkable for it.
I assume that they are just mixing in a bit of unfermented grape juice like the Germans (I seem to remember they call it sussreserve (sp)). Don't know why more winemakers don't do it - makes special sense in latitudes like that of the UK.
Good call. My ex couldn't get enough of it. I don't have a sweet tooth, but great for those who do.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
Only 9% too!
Yes, I just don’t like the taste of alcohol without a mixer of some kind. Bar staff, sometimes get snotty about it, I can’t understand the problem
I like white wine loaded with ice cubes
Indeed I quite like some chilled reds loaded with ice
Stephen Timms - “There are no plans to review the (Motability) Scheme’s qualifying benefits.”
That really is a nonsense. A couple of years ago waiting for my car to be serviced at Sytner BMW in Cardiff (it was still under a gratis service package- I'm not mad) there was a big Motability sign in the showroom.
A Motability car should be restricted to a basic Corsa and none of your fancy metallic colours.
Wouldn't it be better to have it as a simple stipend, so that the recipient could choose between using it for Uber or towards a car payment?
It would. But if they refuse the white Corsa give them the green Invacar from the 1970s ( That is what Motability was meant to replace).
I am very anti Motability. My wife exchange her immaculate c300 cabriolet for a Suzuki Swift (don't ask me why). The Suzuki was ex- Motability and operated by a f*****'' animal who should have been made to take the bus.
Well why did she buy it then? Was she forced to take it or something?
I wouldn't have picked it up. I would have come back in the Mercedes. The car was bought from a Suzuki dealer and they did their best to tidy it up, but even after their efforts one could tell it had been abused. Probably the most disgusting issue was the audio manual looked like it had been eaten by a child and the drivers handbook had the remnants of the driver's breakfast all over it. Looking through the one MOT the guy had not fulfilled the requirements of Motability. I can now see that the rear door and the rear quarter have been repainted, and after nearly a year with us it still stinks of cigarettes. People like that should not be allowed custody of a vehicle with a taxpayer input.
The taxpayer input, as you put it a a disability benefit, which some recipients choose to apply to a scheme run by an independent charity to lease cars. Now that charity is extremely good at what it does and is I believe the largest fleet operator in the country, so get very good deals from car manufacturers.
Should we start applying a 'niceness' or clean living test to individuals when awarding benefits?
PS I still can't see why your wife took the car if it was so shite.
A Venn Diagram of PB, Netweather and Rail UK Forums would show significant overlap.
I'm partially banned from the latter
You're off the rails?
WTF did you do to get banned partlally from the Rail UK Forums?
Um, I triggered a few people after suggesting the DLR is NOT a tram system, and that OO model gauge is a crappy mixture of 1:76 (body shell) and 1:87 (track gauge).
Have you done the Lille metro, one of the earliest automated systems?
No, never been to Lille. Done bits of Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva (tram), Amsterdam, Rome, and Barcelona.
Long distance journeys in Euroland: Pisa to Florence, Rome Airport to Termini, Channel Tunnel to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam, and Ostende to Brussels. Also Geneva to Montreux, and Zurich to Chur.
Stephen Timms - “There are no plans to review the (Motability) Scheme’s qualifying benefits.”
That really is a nonsense. A couple of years ago waiting for my car to be serviced at Sytner BMW in Cardiff (it was still under a gratis service package- I'm not mad) there was a big Motability sign in the showroom.
A Motability car should be restricted to a basic Corsa and none of your fancy metallic colours.
Wouldn't it be better to have it as a simple stipend, so that the recipient could choose between using it for Uber or towards a car payment?
That's exactly what it is @rcs1000 ! Specifically PIP Mobility.
Motability is a separate charit people choose to use.
Burnham went on a tirade last time I heard him speak about rioters stirring up hatred. For a brief moment I thought he meant the lot supporting those two. He didn't, of course. He doesn't mind that sort of rioter stirring up hatred.
A Venn Diagram of PB, Netweather and Rail UK Forums would show significant overlap.
I'm partially banned from the latter
You're off the rails?
WTF did you do to get banned partlally from the Rail UK Forums?
Um, I triggered a few people after suggesting the DLR is NOT a tram system, and that OO model gauge is a crappy mixture of 1:76 (body shell) and 1:87 (track gauge).
Have you done the Lille metro, one of the earliest automated systems?
No, never been to Lille. Done bits of Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva (tram), Amsterdam, Rome, and Barcelona.
Long distance journeys in Euroland: Pisa to Florence, Rome Airport to Termini, Channel Tunnel to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam, and Ostende to Brussels. Also Geneva to Montreux, and Zurich to Chur.
In a second-hand bookshop in Tewksbury today I chanced upon a half-completed Ian Allen list of BR electric and diesel multiple units (c. 1968). Unfortunately they were asking £1 for it, which I considered somewhat excessive, given the improbability of completing the remaining 50%.
Stephen Timms - “There are no plans to review the (Motability) Scheme’s qualifying benefits.”
That really is a nonsense. A couple of years ago waiting for my car to be serviced at Sytner BMW in Cardiff (it was still under a gratis service package- I'm not mad) there was a big Motability sign in the showroom.
A Motability car should be restricted to a basic Corsa and none of your fancy metallic colours.
Wouldn't it be better to have it as a simple stipend, so that the recipient could choose between using it for Uber or towards a car payment?
That's exactly what it is @rcs1000 ! Specifically PIP Mobility.
Motability is a separate charit people choose to use.
Correct me if I am wrong but the whole premise of Motability was to ensure the appropriate mobility for those requiring assistance. It replaced the horrid three wheeler Invacars from the 1970s. No one on Motability needs an Audi Q8.
You're wrong.
"The Mobility Allowance – now called the mobility component of PIP, formerly Disability Living Allowance – introduced by the government in 1976 was formulated to give people help regardless of ability to drive. It also signalled the government's commitment to giving disabled people choice in the form of a cash allowance, rather than imposing certain types of vehicles on them. The War Pensioners' Mobility Supplement pre-dates the Mobility Allowance by a number of years. However, when the government subsequently introduced the Mobility Allowance they set it at a lower weekly rate than the prevailing War Pensioners Mobility Supplement. This difference continues as both are increased annually by the same metric.
It soon became clear that, despite good intentions, the Mobility Allowance was not large enough to buy and run even the smallest car. The then Secretary of State for Health and Social Services invited the late Lord Goodman and (now Lord) Jeffrey Sterling to consider how disabled people could use this allowance to affordably obtain a vehicle.
Thus, Motability was born in 1977 to enable disabled people to afford a good-quality car from any participating manufacturer, fully insured, serviced, and with breakdown assistance. Motability was set up as a charity so it could also raise funds and make grants, in order to provide customers with a complete mobility package even if their allowance would not cover the type of car and adaptations that they needed.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
I worked in Finland once many years again for two separate four week stretches.
The first was mid-summer - around end of June. They had all gone - and they admit this - a bit loopy as it was the mid summer and max daylight. Indeed it was a struggle to get flights book as so many Finns coming home for the mid summer party.
Early September was next trip. Already frosty.
Yes, it’s important to remember how unusual this is. I know that, having travelled around Norway before. I’m back in my hotel room, having taken the dog for a good walk around the marina (having a boat is exceptionally popular here); below the window there are people sitting out on the street terrace, eating and drinking (it’s now after 9.30 pm and I have to keep reminding myself that the sun isn’t going to set), and in the marina there are people setting out for evening trips on their boats. Around the harbour there are people in various states of undress, taking the sun.
On my last trip, I remember seeing the restaurants with all their outside seating and wondering why they bothered, since come the evening it was never warm or dry or calm enough for eating out to be enjoyable. Now, I see it.
We were weighing up going in mid-winter for the aurora borealis (which I think doesn't materialise in the summer?) or mid-summer for the midnight sun. When is the mosquito season? - keen to avoid that. Not bothered by the temperature.
It's just that you can't see the aurora in the summer because it's so light. Needs to be dark enough for them to show up.
This pilot framework will be decided once the legal issues are resolved and agreed in the EU
So not agreed yet
Hello ECHR
Oh god. He hasn’t actually got any agreement at all, ye
He is so dismally wet
Got an agreement to try to agree an agreement....
I know I keep banging on about this, but Starmer needs to stop seeking agreements by consent using legal frameworks, and start imposing solutions by force without consent. The small boats should be turned around and sent back whence they came.
If the French disapprove they can start a war. If the lawyers disapprove then laws should be passed to disapply human rights legislation outside the UK jurisdiction against the armed forces. If the Navy disagree, then a new branch ("Border Security") should be created to do it and the RN can bugger off to the Falklands.
But we need to stop asking people, since they obviously aren't getting it done.
You’re asking those deemed with that task to try and force boats to turn back to France and what happens when some sink and people drown. Practically forcing a boat to turn round isn’t easy notwithstanding the moral issues.
You bring them ashore safely then fly them to a processing centre outside Europe
And if necessary leave the ECHR
This present position cannot continue if the country wants to prevent a Farage coronation
That's a bit like someone in Germany in 1931 saying "Round up all the Jews to prevent Hitler a Hitler coronation".
Hard to see the difference between your proposed treatment and the disease you're trying to avoid.
To compare my comments with 1931 Germany is unworthy of you @Benpointer
They would be processed and either allowed back into the UK or their claim rejected
I think my analogy is fair.
I cast no aspersions on you as a person - I believe you to be decent and fair but...
My point is that your proposed solution is as bad as the outcome it seeks to avoid. Leaving the ECHR would itself be a terrible step imo.
Thank you for that
However, the question of the ECHR on this subject is not just being discussed here in the UK but in the EU as well who also want to see a change in his particular issue
But that's the way to do it - change the criteria by agreement if they are not right; don't leave the organisation and join the likes of Russia and Belarus on the outside.
This continual daylight is a trial. When the weather is as good as it is now, it seems sad to be going to bed when you can walk the dog in warm sunshine; when you eventually get into bed, sleep comes easy but when you're of an age that the bladder stops you sleeping all the way through, whereas in the darkness of home, returning to sleep is easy, when sunlight is already streaming around the curtains (only the most expensive places here having proper 100% blackout), it's hard to resist the temptation to get up, especially with a dog even more triggered by the light of the day than I am. And so sleep deprivation slowly approaches.
The bottle of wine I ordered in error, then deciding to drink half and keep half, now has so little left in it that it is embarrassing to take it away.
Wine bottles have definitely got smaller over the years. Like chocolate bars.
I wonder if it is in fact true that wine bottles have got smaller over the years? I can imagine that industrial glass-making has lead to tougher bottles and thus lighter and marginally bottles. So my guess is yes.
It’s fluctuated with fashion. Until about 5 years ago (and still in some categories) it had become fashionable to put wine in heavier and heavier bottles, with at times ludicrously deep punts at the base, because consumers had decided this conveyed quality and poshness. The trend was particularly marked in red wines.
Then the wine cognoscenti started to push back against this on environmental grounds. The backlash coincided with a more general turning away from thick high alcohol wines towards lighter more acidic ones, so now bottle weights are starting to fall again.
If wine drinkers were fussed about the environmental impact of their booze, they'd be restricting themselves to European wines, not stuff from Oz, RSA or Chile.
A lot of wine professionals make exactly this point. It’s one of the selling points of English wine.
That said, wines imported in bulk from the Southern Hemisphere on ships and then bottled in Britain have quite a limited footprint, and the climate where they come from often means higher yields for lower inputs.
I bought a bottle of £3.99 Spanish red from Tescos for some punch the other day and was astonished to find it was bottled in Spain. I would have though they'd do the same thing.
Surely admitting to buying that sort of plonk even for a punch is a sin bin offence on PB?
I bought a bottle of vinha verde from Aldi yesterday for £4.89… to extend my stay in the sin bin, I mix it with sparkling water.
Vinho Verde is lovely on a summer evening, and Mrs Foxy often spruces wine up with a little soda water. Her taste buds haven't been the same since covid.
My sobering thought for the evening.
I calculated I will need to sell my sparkling wine for at least £35 a bottle, and my still for £18, in order to break even.
Which do to think will be easier to achieve? I assume the sparkling?
As a teenager, we used to stop off at Three Choirs on the way to Wales. My grandfather was a fan of their Bacchus. Though he said it wasn't great value.
3 choirs (based, readers, in Newent) produce some of the cheapest wine in England.
They’ll never grace the upper echelons of the English fine wine hierarchy, but they’ve got the business model down pat.
And they are based in Newent.
'Jam shed' is storming the market in my local Co-op. A cross between wine and ribena - and very drinkable for it.
I assume that they are just mixing in a bit of unfermented grape juice like the Germans (I seem to remember they call it sussreserve (sp)). Don't know why more winemakers don't do it - makes special sense in latitudes like that of the UK.
Burnham went on a tirade last time I heard him speak about rioters stirring up hatred. For a brief moment I thought he meant the lot supporting those two. He didn't, of course. He doesn't mind that sort of rioter stirring up hatred.
A Venn Diagram of PB, Netweather and Rail UK Forums would show significant overlap.
I'm partially banned from the latter
You're off the rails?
WTF did you do to get banned partlally from the Rail UK Forums?
Um, I triggered a few people after suggesting the DLR is NOT a tram system, and that OO model gauge is a crappy mixture of 1:76 (body shell) and 1:87 (track gauge).
Have you done the Lille metro, one of the earliest automated systems?
No, never been to Lille. Done bits of Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva (tram), Amsterdam, Rome, and Barcelona.
Long distance journeys in Euroland: Pisa to Florence, Rome Airport to Termini, Channel Tunnel to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam, and Ostende to Brussels. Also Geneva to Montreux, and Zurich to Chur.
Lille's a good cheap trip. In extremis it can be done on the coach from Victoria. Interesting Spanish architecture - Spain owned Beglium for a while surprisingly.
Am doing the Bernina and Glacier expresses this summer, with an overnight in Chur.
Burnham went on a tirade last time I heard him speak about rioters stirring up hatred. For a brief moment I thought he meant the lot supporting those two. He didn't, of course. He doesn't mind that sort of rioter stirring up hatred.
Burnham went on a tirade last time I heard him speak about rioters stirring up hatred. For a brief moment I thought he meant the lot supporting those two. He didn't, of course. He doesn't mind that sort of rioter stirring up hatred.
"Greater Manchester's mayor Andy Burnham has criticised Reform UK MP Lee Anderson for his response to footage which appeared to show a police officer kicking and stamping on a man. Mr Anderson told the BBC the police officers involved faced a "clear risk" and should be "commended". However, Labour's Mr Burnham branded his comments "irresponsible" and said the footage was "very disturbing"."
I don't want to sound sexist and I think that female officers can play an import part of overall policing operation (woman are much better in general at things like conflict resolution), but I do wonder about sending a 5ft tall / 8st woman along with a second woman with the mission of arresting two male preps who have be reportedly had a very violent altercation in Starbucks.
It doesn't, but I presume the spin will be that Labour have solved small boats, less use of hotels, smaller backlog, as the ones coming in with have already been granted their asylum claim. However, I am not convinced that will be what ends up happening, the ones sent back can again find work in the black market in Europe, get the money for another go but this time disappear straight into the black market economy in the UK.
We really need to crack down hard on black market employment. The fact everybody knows Deliveroo / Uber Eats accounts are being rented and the solution is super easy is crazy. Those companies should be getting their arse smacked by the government. It is obviously harder when they disappear into smaller employer.
Re Starmer & Macron’s boat people strategy, what are France going to do with the returnees? And why don’t French police just stop the boats leaving France rather than letting them make the journey, arrive here only for us to send them back?
They'll move them to camps very close to the Belgian border. And hope they head North.
I think this is one area of his premiership that Starmer is doing ok at. It just be really hard to stomach having to do it, but playing nice with Trump is unfortunately the only way to get anything done, and it is stupid for the UK to cut it nose off to spite its face when it comes to the massive US economy.
I think this is one area of his premiership that Starmer is doing ok at. It just be really hard to stomach having to do it, but playing nice with Trump is unfortunately the only way to get anything done, and it is stupid for the UK to cut it nose off to spite its face when it comes to the massive US economy.
Do we know if Trump's Scottish interests are still profitable?
I think this is one area of his premiership that Starmer is doing ok at. It just be really hard to stomach having to do it, but playing nice with Trump is unfortunately the only way to get anything done, and it is stupid for the UK to cut it nose off to spite its face when it comes to the massive US economy.
Do we know if Trump's Scottish interests are still profitable?
Given how well him and his sons are doing out of all sorts of "interesting" deals I don't think he is sort of a bob or two.
We are doing it wrong..America added 56 GW all of last year, most from solar... China added 93 GW in a month. Just for comparison, the last American nuclear power plant was completed in 2024. It took 11 years to build and cost $35 billion to generate ~1 GW of power.
Comments
I daresay Starmer believes he is acting in British interests wrt Chagos. I'd disagree with him, but lots of people were annoyed when we 'let' various countries leave our imperial embrace. That is viewed rather differently now by most people.
(Again, before anyone starts screeching, I think the Chagos Islands deal is a bad one for several reasons. But it is arguable, e.g. because of the ICJ ruling against us. I certainly don't think it's 'traitorous'. Starmer isn't a traitor; he hasn't even said he likes Deltics...)
Leonard: We had a vote. Three of us voted for airplane. Sheldon voted for train, so we're taking the train.
Sheldon: Don't say it like that, Leonard. Say it like, "We're taking the train"
What @stodge is doing, which is absolutely the norm in weather forum world (especially in winter when snow is in the offing), is looking beyond the current and even the next heatwave and focusing on what the longer term patterns are showing, and those are more mixed.
But the raw output of even the coolish operational run of this evening’s GFS model (widely used mainly because its free to view output is more generous than the parsimonious but significantly more accurate European model) gives max temperatures of 31, 33, 32, 31, 30, 26, 28, 32, 31, 32, 35, 29, 25, 25, 25, 26, 26
So it’s that last 5 days of 25/26 that is the coolish end of month we’re discussing.
I calculated I will need to sell my sparkling wine for at least £35 a bottle, and my still for £18, in order to break even.
No forecast is much use beyond 10 days, certainly 14
And the next 14 in london look superb. Pretty much unbroken sunshine
I may have to revise my opinion that London weather has turned to shite. Instead it seems to get stuck in grooves much more than in the past
That can be terrible. Months of cool rain as in 2023. Or months of sun
Yes, I just don’t like the taste of alcohol without a mixer of some kind. Bar staff, sometimes get snotty about it, I can’t understand the problem
Indeed I quite like some chilled reds loaded with ice
Now let us pray
Our Penwarden in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your uniflow be done,
on earth as in Preston.
Give us today our startup.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.
Lead us not to internal combustion turbines
but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power,
and the crankshaft cycle are yours
now and for ever.
Amen.
Five minutes to go
4:3
Edit/FT score
A stroke of diplomatic genius. It’s English sparkling, but Macron can’t dismiss it or damn it with faint praise, because it’s the work of a French champagne house, Taittinger. And by all accounts (I’ve not yet tasted it despite the estate being about 5 miles from my vineyard) it’s superlative fizz.
Trouble is, its equivalently priced
It is fake bourgeois snobbery to eschew it
As a teenager, we used to stop off at Three Choirs on the way to Wales. My grandfather was a fan of their Bacchus. Though he said it wasn't great value.
Red wine with lemonade is more common, and both are highly civilised on hot summer days. Frankly, it's going to be one of the smaller adaptations we will need to make if the British climate carries on like this.
In fact, I think I will make one now.
Survivors and bereaved families of the Grenfell Tower fire have accused the government of “incompetence or outright indifference” after it paused investigations into possible public contract bans for firms criticised in connection with the 2017 blaze that killed 72 people.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/10/ministers-accused-of-betrayal-after-pausing-grenfell-contractor-investigations
Harris 45% Vance 42%
Hypothetical
Trump 46% Harris 43%
Obama 49% Trump 42%
https://overtoninsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/July-2025-Poll.pdf
The band’s management has told photo agencies and publishers that they own the rights to shots taken at the concerts for just a year, and then they will lose ownership of the images for any future use.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jul/10/photo-agencies-to-boycott-oasis-tour-rights-restrictions
Speaking at this week’s leaders summit for the Caribbean Community (Caricom), a bloc of 20 member and associate member states, Holness said Jamaica had secured “broad support” from the region for its petition to the king, the island’s head of state.
The petition asks Charles to use his authority to request legal advice from the judicial committee of the London-based privy council, the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries, on whether the forced transport of Africans to Jamaica was lawful, if it constituted a crime against humanity, and whether Britain was under obligation to provide a remedy to Jamaica for slavery and its enduring consequences.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/10/caribbean-leaders-back-jamaica-petition-to-king-for-slavery-reparations
And that’s being kind to them
They’ll never grace the upper echelons of the English fine wine hierarchy, but they’ve got the business model down pat.
And they are based in Newent.
One of the warmest microclimates in the West of England.
I assume that they are just mixing in a bit of unfermented grape juice like the Germans (I seem to remember they call it sussreserve (sp)). Don't know why more winemakers don't do it - makes special sense in latitudes like that of the UK.
Plus ca change.
The RNLI Lizard Lifeboat Station has a funicular railway for transporting goods (except fuel) down to the lifeboat and as Mrs Eek was recovering from her broken ankle we got to ride it back up the hill
My ex couldn't get enough of it.
I don't have a sweet tooth, but great for those who do.
https://x.com/LFenring78/status/1943352206163402888
Should we start applying a 'niceness' or clean living test to individuals when awarding benefits?
PS I still can't see why your wife took the car if it was so shite.
Long distance journeys in Euroland: Pisa to Florence, Rome Airport to Termini, Channel Tunnel to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam, and Ostende to Brussels. Also Geneva to Montreux, and Zurich to Chur.
"The Mobility Allowance – now called the mobility component of PIP, formerly Disability Living Allowance – introduced by the government in 1976 was formulated to give people help regardless of ability to drive. It also signalled the government's commitment to giving disabled people choice in the form of a cash allowance, rather than imposing certain types of vehicles on them. The War Pensioners' Mobility Supplement pre-dates the Mobility Allowance by a number of years. However, when the government subsequently introduced the Mobility Allowance they set it at a lower weekly rate than the prevailing War Pensioners Mobility Supplement. This difference continues as both are increased annually by the same metric.
It soon became clear that, despite good intentions, the Mobility Allowance was not large enough to buy and run even the smallest car. The then Secretary of State for Health and Social Services invited the late Lord Goodman and (now Lord) Jeffrey Sterling to consider how disabled people could use this allowance to affordably obtain a vehicle.
Thus, Motability was born in 1977 to enable disabled people to afford a good-quality car from any participating manufacturer, fully insured, serviced, and with breakdown assistance. Motability was set up as a charity so it could also raise funds and make grants, in order to provide customers with a complete mobility package even if their allowance would not cover the type of car and adaptations that they needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motability
So, the 3-wheelers were replaced by a Mobility Allowance; the Motability charity sprung up afterwards.
Am doing the Bernina and Glacier expresses this summer, with an overnight in Chur.
https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/news/statement-from-the-mayor-of-greater-manchester-on-the-incident-at-manchester-airport/
Mr Anderson told the BBC the police officers involved faced a "clear risk" and should be "commended".
However, Labour's Mr Burnham branded his comments "irresponsible" and said the footage was "very disturbing"."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjk3ppjjlpmo
➡️ RFM: 52.7% (New)
🌹 LAB: 15.7% (-27.8)
🌳 CON: 14.5% (-42.0)
🙋 Ind: 7.2% (New)
🔶 LDM: 6.5% (New)
🌍 GRN: 3.4% (New)
Reform GAIN from Conservative.
Changes w/ 2023.
Throston (Hartlepool) Council By-Election Result:
➡️ RFM: 48.7% (-9.6)
🌹 LAB: 38.8% (+7.0)
🌍 GRN: 5.1% (New)
🌳 CON: 4.8% (-5.1)
🔶 LDM: 2.6% (New)
Reform GAIN from Labour*
Changes w/ 2025 By-Election.
*Multi-Member ward.
We really need to crack down hard on black market employment. The fact everybody knows Deliveroo / Uber Eats accounts are being rented and the solution is super easy is crazy. Those companies should be getting their arse smacked by the government. It is obviously harder when they disappear into smaller employer.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/10/keir-starmer-accepts-invitation-to-visit-donald-trump-in-scotland
I think this is one area of his premiership that Starmer is doing ok at. It just be really hard to stomach having to do it, but playing nice with Trump is unfortunately the only way to get anything done, and it is stupid for the UK to cut it nose off to spite its face when it comes to the massive US economy.
Hartlepool / Throston
RefUK 48.65%
Lab 38.84%
Green 5.07%
Con 4.82%
LD 2.62%
Bassetlaw, Ranskill
RefUK 52.69%
Lab 15.66%
Con 14.52%
Ind 7.18%
LD 6.53%
Green 3.43%
Anyone with more than a pound in their pocket is racing to the airport apparently.
Several hundred bureaus will be merged or eliminated after supreme court sided with Trump administration
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/10/state-department-layoffs-rif-trump
🏘️ IIN: 48.1% (New)
➡️ RFM: 22.9 (New)
🌳 CON: 15.6% (-4.7)
🔶 LDM: 5.4% (New)
🏘️ VEC: 4.7% (New)
🌹 LAB: 3.4% (-8.9)
No Ind (-67.4) as previous.
Island Independent Network GAIN from Independent.
Northway (Tewkesbury) Council By-Election Result:
➡️ RFM: 41.4% (New)
🔶 LDM: 30.9% (+7.0)
🌳 CON: 12.8% (-11.6)
🌍 GRN: 10.1% (New)
🌹 LAB: 4.9% (-15.8)
No Ind (-30.9) as previous.
Reform GAIN from Independent.
Changes w/ 2023.
RefUK 374
LD 279
Con 116
Grn 91
Lab 44
RefUK 41.37%
LD 30.86%
Con 12.83%
Grn 10.07%
Lab 4.87%
RefUK gain from Ind
https://x.com/rookisaacman/status/1943437330473243018
Good job there isn't is new tech that eats loads of power in order to operate.