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You will make your garden look like a home counties beer garden though - you cannot possibly need 72 busy lizzies

Likewise! What I don't understand is why one is lovely and dense and compact, while the other is rangey and ungainly. Sometimes with similar plants, it's a response to sunlight conditions (more compact in sun) but these two are near identical. Hoping that a severe prune after flowering might make the lanky one behave

✓ Range of a triple
✓ Not a triple
✓ Adjustability of square taper
✓ Boutiquey

https://freshtripe.co.uk/velo-orange-50-4-bcd-crankset-mkii/

Are these the puncture-every-two-seconds-gravel-kings or the generally-well-thought-of-gravel-kings?
https://www.panaracer.co.uk/products/panaracer-gravelking-slick-tlc-folding-tyre?variant=45911424368922

Looking for a 650b x 42 tyre, can't fit the much more common 650b x 47, and there's not a lot of choice

Simworks Homage 👌

@Oddo

Bit of a dredge but how are these tyres for you, and how wide do they measure up? If the 650b x 43 is exactly 43 including knobs, it will fit for me but if it's a bit fatter I could be wasting my money...

Letterbox at neck height!

Obviously being short isn't a crime but he really is child sized isn't he. Barely see over the counter!

I didn't know that, a shame.

I wouldn't have any hesitation about buying one anyway though. Mine has been used probably minimum 3 times a week since I bought it, in 2018, and there's no sign it's about to give up the ghost.

Instant pot is a pressure cooker par excellence and rice cooker too - the latter works just as well as other rice cookers I've used but I'm no expert.

You can get instant pot air fryer lids too that make it truly all in one, but they are hard to come by in this country

She is just mumbling and searching for an excuse as she begins to understand she's fucked up. There are no alternative stats on this

(For the purposes of this discussion let's just take it as read that it's necessary and/or good to reduce debt). The target of course is deliberately stupid - it's always at the end of a 5 year rolling period - so you never need to reduce debt at all. The only restriction it gives is that you have to make things add up in the future, but when they actually come closer you can ignore it. This is particularly good for a chancellor/PM who get praised for cancelling tax rises that they were never actually intending to implement. Fuel duty escalator for example they leave in the plans in theory, to help it add up, then suspend it every year.

It is unforgivably stupid that the CST - a role that in terms of practical impact on policy in the country is second to probably nobody but the chancellor -doesn't even understand their own deliberate trick on this.

I have a pond. I inherited it and have done nothing of particular note to it. In spring and summer it gets about 6 hours sun, in late autumn and winter nearly none.

It is too small really, and can dry out in hot periods if I don't water it. Or maybe it just has a leak. It's about half the size lengthways and half the depth of a bath.

It supports countless frogs and toads, and is full of gardeners garters and water iris, which flower every year without me needing to do anything.

It does fill up with stuff - roots, dead leaves, etc, but not algae as far as I can tell. But you don't even notice the water clarity as it's full of plants. In fact, not many people even notice that it's a pond at all.

Occasionally I add organic mosquito control as, although I have no evidence, I sometimes suspect mosquitoes breed in it.

It is brilliant and adds so much to the garden for zero effort. Get one and don't overthink it

Really glad you liked it. It is so much better than 'cabbage soup' has any right to be!

Did you manage to find authentic correct cabbage? I usually use savoy

This looks lovely but I never understand how they are used. Where do you arse/legs/back/ go, in any form that is comfy for reading? Give me an armchair over a window seat anyday

This was a mad story
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/13/murder-on-the-allotment-committee-secretary

This is a good point and also worth noting that - given the polls are where they are, the still undecided, swing voters are unusually right wing. Like, voted-Conservative-all-their-life-but-getting-fed-up types. Starmer has (CURRENTLY) got all of the normal swing voters - Labour half the time, Tories half the time - sewn up.

I am also in camp do and say whatever it takes to crush the Tories. They are a cancer and have been neglecting, stealing and poisoning everything good in the country for nearly 15 years. Before we can repair, we must make absolutely sure that they are eliminated.

Good post, interesting perspective.

On this bit

Blair believed in hard work and reward but also fairness and reducing inequality.

I absolutely trust that Keir Starmer does too.

The fiscal discipline bit is an absolutely necessary precondition for a Labour government to get elected. Tories are permitted to act madly because the default media and public view of them is 'competent albeit cruel' (obvs competency is taking a well deserved reconsideration at the moment). Labour aren't, because the default view is 'heart in the right place but not businesslike enough'.

I hope that the manifesto does have some good things to offer the country. But it can be chock full of the things that everybody would want (cf free broadband, cancel tuition fees etc) and the effect is just that it isn't trusted, and Labour don't get into Government and get a chance to deliver.

Interesting to read some contemporary reporting:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/1997/jan/21/economy.uk

Gordon Brown the self described 'Iron Chancellor'

'the burial of Labour's traditional tax and spend '

Brown setting himself 'masochistic targets' and going big on 'I will not make promises that I don't know I'll be in a position to deliver'

And even a leftwing MP saying

To say 'vote Labour and there will be no change' is hardly an election winning slogan.

Ok, but you don't think it's relevant that, far from trying to create a narrative that they were going to 'turn on the spending taps', they instead were making cast iron pledges that they wouldn't?

They did of course massively increase investment in public services, but cautiously, over time, off the back of a growing economy and improving public finances

But I did know that Blair and Brown were going to turn on the spending taps

This is nonsense. In 1997 Gordon Brown made a very well publicised pledge to stick precisely to existing Conservative spending plans for at least 2 years, alongside promising no tax rises. It was to head off the exact same public concerns about Labour that Starmer is worried about now.

Can you freecycle a bath? That seems to be the most popular way of doing a pond round here

Slight improvement albeit still far from professional

All finished now apart from fitting tweaks (saddle up some more for sure), kickstand, some cloth tape on the 'hooks' of the bars for headwind days like today, and possibly a top tube protector on the down tube - as the bars have a real tendency to flop with any weight in the basket, and the rack would smack the down tube

There should not be any more frost

Are you sure?

I find they're only really happy when the nights are 10 degrees, and certainly not before the equinox, but obviously depends where you are.

It's only really time to start the tubers off, indoors, for me

Ok fine but then you need to watch him around plants whether or not you grow foxgloves - they are not uniquely toxic