Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
I've been trying to think of some exceptions to this - some of the mills of Greater Manchester, for example, or the new flats on the old Boddingtons Brewery site in Strangeways - but these all come under 'with great skill'. Certainly looking out the window of my suburban house, I can see four different types of red brick houses, none of which, under a leaden January sky, fill the heart with song. The three white-rendered houses I can see on the other hand are quite cheery.
There are a few very handsome streets of red brick houses I can think of within 400 yards of here. But all of them are Victorian or Edwardian. Actually, I can think of a couple of very handsome red brick houses on the street opposite - but both have been consciously built to look Victorian (one of which replacing a Victorian house which fell down after an unsuccessful cellar conversion), using more-expensive-than-necessary bricks. So it can be done. But it requires some commitment to quality and in these cases an architect not ruthlessly committed to modernism.
Exactly. In our climate the best solution is: paint them white, or maybe white, pale pink, green, blue in variation, like the most cheerful towns in Ireland or nicer bits of Scotland. Even on a winter’s day those houses will slightly lift the spirit
Dull rows of redbrick simply look cheap and bleak. Unless there is that “great skill”
Roomy Edwardian semis with stained glass windows and intricate little cornices don't look cheap.
Not interested in party politics at the moment. More needs to be shaken out.
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
"Is it still the best job in politics, Andy? Andy Burnham can't treat the role of Greater Manchester mayor as a fallback option after being blocked from a return to Parliament ... The people of Greater Manchester may be justified this week in feeling Andy Burnham's mind is not quite on the day job.
Running an £80bn city-region of three million people is not something you do on the side while keeping half an eye on the top job in national politics."
We need to establish what the murder rate was when there was a pub on every corner and the working man guzzled twelve pints of beer every night.
Since late Victorian times, the numbers are up (by half - ish) but the rate is down (by a third - ish) due to the population being up by 90-95% since 1901.
These are the numbers 1898 to 1997, but need derating by population: It peaked in 2004-5, and is now back at 1970s total numbers despite the population being 25% higher.
That is amusing and very Tele. Fine to not jump on that bandwagon btw but you wouldn't want to miss it entirely so welcome aboard. No seats left now though - you'll have to stand.
ISTR one from the post-covid period about how "Working from home is a danger to house prices". (I can't remember the logic, but was pleased by the way the Tele had managed to bundle two of its hobbyhorses into one article.)
Not interested in party politics at the moment. More needs to be shaken out.
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
That is some announcement
Sorry as you have been so involved in their promotion
'Nationalist'? Is that now the Right's accepted euphemism for 'racist'?
Dunno. The article is by my stalker so on principle I don’t read beyond the headline
I don't subscribe so can't see the article either; therefore its contents will forever remain a mystery. But presumably this is a British equivalent of the 'Pepe the Frog' phenomenon, a decade on.
The Guardian or Observer, I forget which, covered this days ago.
She's a graphical fictional character originally invented for a game that was supposedly designed to help teenagers avoid becoming radicalised by Radical Right online content. I forget the details but she's been takeover by the Internet meme crowd and AI-ed and taken up by the very people the designers were trying to warn against.
In all seriousness, these figures are good news. 499 homicides, the lowest since 1977, despite a very significant rise in population since then. And the Telegraph may not have noticed that around a quarter of murders are domestic - staying at home doesn't mean safety. The ONS also note a significant reduction in knife crime, including in Khan's London. Surprising that there isn't more coverage of this good news story. Broken Britain?
Not interested in party politics at the moment. More needs to be shaken out.
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
I've been trying to think of some exceptions to this - some of the mills of Greater Manchester, for example, or the new flats on the old Boddingtons Brewery site in Strangeways - but these all come under 'with great skill'. Certainly looking out the window of my suburban house, I can see four different types of red brick houses, none of which, under a leaden January sky, fill the heart with song. The three white-rendered houses I can see on the other hand are quite cheery.
There are a few very handsome streets of red brick houses I can think of within 400 yards of here. But all of them are Victorian or Edwardian. Actually, I can think of a couple of very handsome red brick houses on the street opposite - but both have been consciously built to look Victorian (one of which replacing a Victorian house which fell down after an unsuccessful cellar conversion), using more-expensive-than-necessary bricks. So it can be done. But it requires some commitment to quality and in these cases an architect not ruthlessly committed to modernism.
Exactly. In our climate the best solution is: paint them white, or maybe white, pale pink, green, blue in variation, like the most cheerful towns in Ireland or nicer bits of Scotland. Even on a winter’s day those houses will slightly lift the spirit
Dull rows of redbrick simply look cheap and bleak. Unless there is that “great skill”
Roomy Edwardian semis with stained glass windows and intricate little cornices don't look cheap.
I wouldn’t argue with that. I grew up in a house a little similar to that. And it never felt pokey or dark inside, like so many tiny small-windowed modern houses
I am not averse to all redbrick buildings. It is just difficult to make them look good in the sodden grey British climate, indeed it is one of the worst materials for our climate. I noticed on a recent trip to Iceland (a rich country able to afford good materials, let it be noted) that they are building really nice houses in a modernist style but using a lot of glass, granite, lava stone. Modernism can be great if it is done well and with care
Above all, make sure the windows are as big as possible, and the ceilings as high as possible, and put detailing around doors windows cornices. That’s it. That makes lovely houses. This is not quantum rocket science
Not interested in party politics at the moment. More needs to be shaken out.
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
Not interested in party politics at the moment. More needs to be shaken out.
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
That is some announcement
Sorry as you have been so involved in their promotion
Seconded.
But what is a Robototron ?
(It sounds distinctly like a 1950s toaster with rounded corners.)
Not interested in party politics at the moment. More needs to be shaken out.
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
Will they have Genuine People Personalities?
Sure! A choice of GPP! Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels etc
Not interested in party politics at the moment. More needs to be shaken out.
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
Goddamnit, I wanted a Cybertruck, it was perfect for me.
Not interested in party politics at the moment. More needs to be shaken out.
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
Goddamnit, I wanted a Cybertruck, it was perfect for me.
You can't drive them in the UK (or Europe?).
Do you really want to go to the States to be able to drive it?
Fascinating analysis by @robfordmancs on Substack includes final footnote revealing he & former academic partner Matt Goodwin did "2011 report and presentation to Tameside Council on the far right in their area and how to combat it". Goodwin now Reform by-election candidate.
Not interested in party politics at the moment. More needs to be shaken out.
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
Goddamnit, I wanted a Cybertruck, it was perfect for me.
You can't drive them in the UK (or Europe?).
Do you really want to go to the States to be able to drive it?
I would have been able to drive it in the UK, I would have found a loophole.
Not interested in party politics at the moment. More needs to be shaken out.
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
Goddamnit, I wanted a Cybertruck, it was perfect for me.
You can't drive them in the UK (or Europe?).
Do you really want to go to the States to be able to drive it?
I would have been able to drive it in the UK, I would have found a loophole.
You would just need a large country estate to hoon around.
All the worst people support Manchester United, evidence number 6,240,555
Breaking news from the Forbidden City: President Xi Jinping talks football with Keir Starmer and says he supports Man Utd but also takes an interest in three other teams: Arsenal, Man City and Crystal Palace. In fact he calls them “Palace”. Starmer gobsmacked. @CPFC
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
I've been trying to think of some exceptions to this - some of the mills of Greater Manchester, for example, or the new flats on the old Boddingtons Brewery site in Strangeways - but these all come under 'with great skill'. Certainly looking out the window of my suburban house, I can see four different types of red brick houses, none of which, under a leaden January sky, fill the heart with song. The three white-rendered houses I can see on the other hand are quite cheery.
There are a few very handsome streets of red brick houses I can think of within 400 yards of here. But all of them are Victorian or Edwardian. Actually, I can think of a couple of very handsome red brick houses on the street opposite - but both have been consciously built to look Victorian (one of which replacing a Victorian house which fell down after an unsuccessful cellar conversion), using more-expensive-than-necessary bricks. So it can be done. But it requires some commitment to quality and in these cases an architect not ruthlessly committed to modernism.
Exactly. In our climate the best solution is: paint them white, or maybe white, pale pink, green, blue in variation, like the most cheerful towns in Ireland or nicer bits of Scotland. Even on a winter’s day those houses will slightly lift the spirit
Dull rows of redbrick simply look cheap and bleak. Unless there is that “great skill”
Roomy Edwardian semis with stained glass windows and intricate little cornices don't look cheap.
I wouldn’t argue with that. I grew up in a house a little similar to that. And it never felt pokey or dark inside, like so many tiny small-windowed modern houses
I am not averse to all redbrick buildings. It is just difficult to make them look good in the sodden grey British climate, indeed it is one of the worst materials for our climate. I noticed on a recent trip to Iceland (a rich country able to afford good materials, let it be noted) that they are building really nice houses in a modernist style but using a lot of glass, granite, lava stone. Modernism can be great if it is done well and with care
Above all, make sure the windows are as big as possible, and the ceilings as high as possible, and put detailing around doors windows cornices. That’s it. That makes lovely houses. This is not quantum rocket science
Personal taste figures heavily though. Eg I like modernist houses but plenty of people shudder at them, literally shudder. They find them soulless. Can't imagine themselves getting nice and cosy in there. But the fact is you can if the interior is designed to break up the space into distinct areas. Eg you can still have a 'snug' with a couple of old battered chairs and a non-giant tv.
Not interested in party politics at the moment. More needs to be shaken out.
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
Goddamnit, I wanted a Cybertruck, it was perfect for me.
You can't drive them in the UK (or Europe?).
Do you really want to go to the States to be able to drive it?
I would have been able to drive it in the UK, I would have found a loophole.
Good luck, Mr Lawyer Man...
"you cannot legally buy or register a Tesla Cybertruck for UK roads because its design, particularly the sharp angles and upright front, fails strict European and UK pedestrian safety regulations, making it illegal to drive and leading to seizures of illegally imported models.
While some individuals have imported them (often on foreign plates) and faced seizure, Tesla has not made it road-legal for the UK or Europe due to significant redesigns needed to meet standards, and official sales are not planned.
Why it's illegal in the UK: Pedestrian Safety: The Cybertruck's angular, hard front doesn't meet regulations designed to protect pedestrians in a collision, requiring softer, less upright designs, says Carwow and This is Money.
Lighting & Size: The full-width light bar and overall large size also conflict with UK lighting and road dimension rules, notes Forbes. Type Approval: Tesla hasn't invested in the costly process of re-engineering the vehicle to pass UK/EU type approval, according to Carwow.
What this means for buyers: No Official Sales: You cannot order one from Tesla in the UK, report Carwow and This is Money.
Import Risks: Attempting to import one privately often results in it being seized by police, as happened in Greater Manchester in early 2025, according to the BBC and The Independent.
In short, the Cybertruck is currently a no-go for UK roads."
All the worst people support Manchester United, evidence number 6,240,555
Breaking news from the Forbidden City: President Xi Jinping talks football with Keir Starmer and says he supports Man Utd but also takes an interest in three other teams: Arsenal, Man City and Crystal Palace. In fact he calls them “Palace”. Starmer gobsmacked. @CPFC
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
I’ve probably become more reactionary in my artistic taste over the years, but I’ve found a recent appreciation; of the Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw who was a master of cobbles & pavements reflecting light in twilight. Below is Leeds though he painted all over the place, including Glasgow.
One of my favourite painters.
Me too. I have 9 of his works (just prints I'm afraid) and also a modern copy of another one/
Not interested in party politics at the moment. More needs to be shaken out.
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
That is some announcement
Sorry as you have been so involved in their promotion
The Model X has been replaced (pretty much) by the Model Y.
Model S sales have been eaten by Model 3.
The X was unreliable and would need to be completely redone, to continue.
A refresh on the S would need to be similarly radical - plus it is now competing against genuine luxury EVs.
The Cybertruck is a bust.
So that portion of the announcement actually makes some sense - getting rid of obsolete models and a failure.
Fascinating analysis by @robfordmancs on Substack includes final footnote revealing he & former academic partner Matt Goodwin did "2011 report and presentation to Tameside Council on the far right in their area and how to combat it". Goodwin now Reform by-election candidate.
In 2011, we'd recently elected a government on a promise to cut immigration to the tens of thousands. Perhaps if they'd kept their promise then he wouldn't be standing for Reform now.
All the worst people support Manchester United, evidence number 6,240,555
Breaking news from the Forbidden City: President Xi Jinping talks football with Keir Starmer and says he supports Man Utd but also takes an interest in three other teams: Arsenal, Man City and Crystal Palace. In fact he calls them “Palace”. Starmer gobsmacked. @CPFC
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
I'm not sure anything looks nice on a dark wet British winter's day, to be honest. Hence me being extremely over January already, and yet somehow it continues for its ninth or tenth week.
Two reasons probably: 1. the population's getting older, and 2. surgeons are much better at treating stab wounds.
Nah - all violence is down significantly, and hospital admissions data supports that too. Maybe something to do with lead, or air pollution?
(We need to stop with demographic angle on everything - it's significant over a 50 year timescale but does not explain medium term trends much at all. Over the last 15 years the median age has increased by about 1).
Two reasons probably: 1. the population's getting older, and 2. surgeons are much better at treating stab wounds.
Nah - all violence is down significantly, and hospital admissions data supports that too. Maybe something to do with lead, or air pollution?
(We need to stop with demographic angle on everything - it's significant over a 50 year timescale but does not explain medium term trends much at all. Over the last 15 years the median age has increased by about 1).
Culture? Violence behaviour being ostracised in wider areas of the population?
All the worst people support Manchester United, evidence number 6,240,555
Breaking news from the Forbidden City: President Xi Jinping talks football with Keir Starmer and says he supports Man Utd but also takes an interest in three other teams: Arsenal, Man City and Crystal Palace. In fact he calls them “Palace”. Starmer gobsmacked. @CPFC
Asking people queuing for lottery tickets is going to understate the Greens, I'd have thought.
In village culture here, and maybe most places, the unofficial admission price to anything 'free' in village hall type venues is to buy a raffle ticket for £1 (minimum). In consequence you sometimes have to bring home some unwanted piece of well intentioned stuff. This week it was an unidentifiable plant of some sort. Intuition or guesswork suggests to me that polling this group of gamblers would reach a large number unreached by any other sort of lottery.
I love those kind of raffles. Used to attend Cancer Research events as a friend was on the committee. The raffle prizes were mostly terrible and plentiful. Towards the end the cry would go out "Put it back in..." as no-one wanted the 'prize'. I swear some things went round for years.
I turn up, buy raffle tickets, don't ask my name to be recorded and leave before the draw. My wife is slower than me so sometimes, like this week, has to come home encumbered.
Stephen Fry told a story about carrying 'fake' tickets in your pocket to avoid having to buy some. It probably originated elsewhere.
I heard Gyles Brandreth tell that story about John Major doing that.
One suspects its an old chestnut
Can't see how it would work... you'd have top have every colour available just in case for the standard lottery using cloakroom tickets. Easier to just say 'I've already got some', it's not as if anyone is going to ask to check them.
Allegedly you have a few different colours (and raffle strips are very generic).
But yes I suspect its not something anyone actually does.
BTW - how is the house - can you send your link to build hub again? I've run out of grand designs/George Clarke programs and need my property porn!
The guys lugging the marble top reminds me when we had the top delivered for our kitchen island. Two parts, each required 8 guys busting a gut to shift them.
The island is so large that if Trump hears about it, he'll want to put the American flag on it...
Is that @Benpointer’s new house?! I rather like it. Certainly a hundred times nicer than the average, windowless, Barratt home red brick rabbit hutch
We should build more wooden houses. Red brick, unless used with great skill, is intrinsically ugly and bleak, especially in the British climate
Really? I've always thought of red brick as a very warm and sympathetic kind of material, human in scale and reassuringly earthy as well as a nod to Victorian industrial structures, Elizabethan Manor houses and the like. To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials, in fact. It opens up the possibility of some nice patterns too, although perhaps less so nowadays when you have a single row of bricks and a breeze block inner skin. We replicated the Flemish bond of the existing house when we built our kitchen extension and used second hand London stock bricks and it looks beautiful. Our brickie was exceptionally skilled though. And London bricks are more yellow than red I suppose.
'To my mind the red brick is the most British of construction materials'
English (with a soupçon of Welsh and Northern Irish) really. Sandstone is the essence of Scottish construction, with a bit of granite thrown in for us teuchters. I remember in the febrile run up to 2014 some idiot rightwing hack was claiming Scotch expertise by reminiscing about being brought up in red brick Glasgow tenements. After a bit of guffawing she was quickly put right.
True and I should have known better having grown up in a sandstone Scottish house, although the stone was facing IIRC, with a layer of red brick behind it. Part of our garden wall was red brick too, and there were certainly brick houses in the area although often painted or rendered or rough cast. I spent part of my childhood in a red brick Victorian terraced house in NE England, went to an aggressively red brick college, lived in a red brick apartment in the US and currently live in a London brick house so I am attached to it as a building material! And I wouldn't say that rain-soaked dark sandstone under a grey Fife sky was a sight to gladden the heart.
Which raises the question: what architecture does look good in the wet? Personally, I always admire architectural renders which show the building on a rainy day. Anything can look good in the sun; it takes skill to look good in the rain. For me it is about how reflective the surface is: the new glass skyscrapers at the bottom of Deansgate look fantastic in the rain because they reflect the sky and the light, rather than absorb it. But glass isn't really practical in suburban housing. The point is, though: shiny.
As a city, York looks fantastic in the rain because of the way the stone of the pavements reflects the light.
Aberdeen (granite) does not look good in the rain. Bath (sandstone) looks OK. It would be interesting to hear what others think about other towns.
Whitewashed Devonshire cob and thatch looks fine. As does genuine Tudor half timbered black and white. Basically: white rendering of some kind, because grey wintry Britain needs light and white
Within the realms of the possible, why did we abandon stucco? Is it really that pricey? The Nash Terraces looks glorious in any weather, possibly at their best on a bright winter day
If we can’t do any of that, just dump red brick and use London stockbrick everywhere, with white trimmings for cornices, porches, pediments. Ie Poundbury
King Charles III was right all along
I think for the really wet places some colour goes a long way if there's no interesting structure.
I never understand the need for grey pebbledash / harling. Paint it in primary colours or something uplifting! Look at towns in the north of Scandinavia or Greenland. Maybe it is the grey car effect - neutral colours for neutral buyers.
The Glasgow sandstone is fine on its own, though. Mrs Flatlander had to survey a couple of the Locharbriggs Sandstone quarries in Dumfries and the colours stand out really well on a wet day.
I believe some was transported as far as New York (including for the Statue of Liberty).
If you don’t remember Glasgow sandstone in the 1970s when it was coated in black soot, you wouldn’t believe the difference since most buildings have been cleaned. However, when Farage reintroduces coal fires …..
In all seriousness, these figures are good news. 499 homicides, the lowest since 1977, despite a very significant rise in population since then. And the Telegraph may not have noticed that around a quarter of murders are domestic - staying at home doesn't mean safety. The ONS also note a significant reduction in knife crime, including in Khan's London. Surprising that there isn't more coverage of this good news story. Broken Britain?
Not interested in party politics at the moment. More needs to be shaken out.
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
Is that a true-truth? I'm not a big fan of Elon (I know: surprise!) but even by his standard this is f*****g stupid. Tesla is a hundred-billion dollar company. Are the board so in thrall to Elon that they are willing to destroy the company for one man's stupidity?
'Nationalist'? Is that now the Right's accepted euphemism for 'racist'?
Dunno. The article is by my stalker so on principle I don’t read beyond the headline
I don't subscribe so can't see the article either; therefore its contents will forever remain a mystery. But presumably this is a British equivalent of the 'Pepe the Frog' phenomenon, a decade on.
The Guardian or Observer, I forget which, covered this days ago.
She's a graphical fictional character originally invented for a game that was supposedly designed to help teenagers avoid becoming radicalised by Radical Right online content. I forget the details but she's been takeover by the Internet meme crowd and AI-ed and taken up by the very people the designers were trying to warn against.
Comments
Big News! At yesterday's earnings call Tesla announced their plans to stop building cars. Model S and X and Cybertruck are all dead with their production lines repurposed for robots and taxis. No further cars will be built which you can drive. So once the Model 3 and Y get old, that's the end.
Madness standing on the shoulders of madness on stilts. Oh, the Robototron production line is to build 1m units next year. As there is no global market for these, expect them to be bought by the US government and used for herd culling of the population.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/news-opinion/still-best-job-politics-andy-33306059?fbclid=IwY2xjawPoWkdleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe6vpCsVDsXUDnlR6F-1M05DqE-uwfuJCq1vPEiitalLALK5IzjP2DFPX_EQ0_aem_HAEMtSv4IkDnJj4JEWUKPw
"Is it still the best job in politics, Andy?
Andy Burnham can't treat the role of Greater Manchester mayor as a fallback option after being blocked from a return to Parliament
...
The people of Greater Manchester may be justified this week in feeling Andy Burnham's mind is not quite on the day job.
Running an £80bn city-region of three million people is not something you do on the side while keeping half an eye on the top job in national politics."
These are the numbers 1898 to 1997, but need derating by population:
It peaked in 2004-5, and is now back at 1970s total numbers despite the population being 25% higher.
A very interesting historical piece:
https://www.murdermap.co.uk/statistics/homicide-england-wales-statistics-historical/
Sorry as you have been so involved in their promotion
The ONS also note a significant reduction in knife crime, including in Khan's London.
Surprising that there isn't more coverage of this good news story. Broken Britain?
He certainly will have puts doubts in Manchester about his role as mayor, and I expect he will seek to become an MP before the next mayoral contest
FYI: While at university Matt Goodwin was famous for losing money in poker games as a result of making very risky all-in bets.
I am not averse to all redbrick buildings. It is just difficult to make them look good in the sodden grey British climate, indeed it is one of the worst materials for our climate. I noticed on a recent trip to Iceland (a rich country able to afford good materials, let it be noted) that they are building really nice houses in a modernist style but using a lot of glass, granite, lava stone. Modernism can be great if it is done well and with care
Above all, make sure the windows are as big as possible, and the ceilings as high as possible, and put detailing around doors windows cornices. That’s it. That makes lovely houses. This is not quantum rocket science
Somebody compared this poll as ‘The Lib Dem bar chart of opinion polls’.
Brutal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgrvNHjKkY
But what is a Robototron ?
(It sounds distinctly like a 1950s toaster with rounded corners.)
Do you really want to go to the States to be able to drive it?
Fascinating analysis by @robfordmancs on Substack includes final footnote revealing he & former academic partner Matt Goodwin did "2011 report and presentation to Tameside Council on the far right in their area and how to combat it". Goodwin now Reform by-election candidate.
https://x.com/MichaelLCrick/status/2016881202943148331?s=20
Breaking news from the Forbidden City: President Xi Jinping talks football with Keir Starmer and says he supports Man Utd but also takes an interest in three other teams: Arsenal, Man City and Crystal Palace. In fact he calls them “Palace”. Starmer gobsmacked. @CPFC
https://x.com/georgewparker/status/2016812522049794411?s=61&t=c6bcp0cjChLfQN5Tc8A_6g
"you cannot legally buy or register a Tesla Cybertruck for UK roads because its design, particularly the sharp angles and upright front, fails strict European and UK pedestrian safety regulations, making it illegal to drive and leading to seizures of illegally imported models.
While some individuals have imported them (often on foreign plates) and faced seizure, Tesla has not made it road-legal for the UK or Europe due to significant redesigns needed to meet standards, and official sales are not planned.
Why it's illegal in the UK:
Pedestrian Safety: The Cybertruck's angular, hard front doesn't meet regulations designed to protect pedestrians in a collision, requiring softer, less upright designs, says Carwow and This is Money.
Lighting & Size: The full-width light bar and overall large size also conflict with UK lighting and road dimension rules, notes Forbes.
Type Approval: Tesla hasn't invested in the costly process of re-engineering the vehicle to pass UK/EU type approval, according to Carwow.
What this means for buyers:
No Official Sales: You cannot order one from Tesla in the UK, report Carwow and This is Money.
Import Risks: Attempting to import one privately often results in it being seized by police, as happened in Greater Manchester in early 2025, according to the BBC and The Independent.
In short, the Cybertruck is currently a no-go for UK roads."
Model S sales have been eaten by Model 3.
The X was unreliable and would need to be completely redone, to continue.
A refresh on the S would need to be similarly radical - plus it is now competing against genuine luxury EVs.
The Cybertruck is a bust.
So that portion of the announcement actually makes some sense - getting rid of obsolete models and a failure.
" The naughtiest thing I ever did was execute 100,000 people in a field of wheat".
"Find Out Now
@FindoutnowUK
Find Out Now voting intention:
🟦 Reform UK: 29% (-3)
🟢 Greens: 19% (+2)
🔴 Labour: 17% (+3)
🔵 Conservatives: 17% (-1)
🟠 Lib Dems: 11% (-)
Changes from 21st January
[Find Out Now, 28th January, N=3,282]"
https://x.com/FindoutnowUK/status/2016898793766060450
(We need to stop with demographic angle on everything - it's significant over a 50 year timescale but does not explain medium term trends much at all. Over the last 15 years the median age has increased by about 1).
NEW THREAD
“I’m Leonna. I’m English and a LOVE England.”