mockney piers

Alan, it's called a McDonald's drive through.

I have to say I dismissed DH as a troll quite quickly, but a swift peruse of posting history looks otherwise normal, meaning this is either one of many accounts created as sleepers by a sophisticated troller, or s/he actually gets that irate by parent-child spaces, the odd buggy or cranky child in a cafe. And worryingly I now think it's the latter, otherwise rational and loses all perspective and civility and slips into trollish behaviour for this one topic. My advice would be to look past the children. Most parents are quite polite as are most people. All walks of life can be dismissive, selfish or oblivious to others. At a pinch parents might be more likely to be so, distracted as they are in attempts to make sure their children haven't run under a passing car, but then this should surely call for empathy not rage. I bend over backwards to be courteous to people, especially when with buggie or child, well aware as I am of the prevalence of opinions like Damian's, and am amzed at the lack of any acknowledgement i get from people, with or without buggies, but I guess that's just living in a big city full of rude people. It has a billion pros but m,ore than a ferw cons. I suggest candles, soft music and a bath damian. And breaaaathe....

That's just it though. Our population hasn't grown significantly in that time. Our prosperity has. Perhaps it's affluence that erodes community; all that pull togetherness fucks off the moment you're alright jack.

"Frankly, I am shocked that you have managed to get my [p]osition so hopelessly wrong." Is that a whooshing sound I can hear?

ok back to the issues ISSUE: parent and child spaces exist in sainsbury's MOST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD: Oh yes, I see, it has extra space at the side, I can understand why that would be useful, and there are only 10 of them so it's not as if it really puts anyone out is it. PARENTS: Oh how lovely, I wish someone had thought of that before REASONABLE DISSENTERS: either a) ok, I get it but they could have put them further away, why should i have to walk further because I don't have a child or b) well, they could at least make them available to everyone after 7, or both APOPLETICS: That's infringing my human rights that is, blah blah blah ad nauseum, and apparently ad infinitum. err that's it, but hey, on to page 10.

It sounds like there's the miasma of a genuine point in there though buggered if I can work out what, he lost me at illuminati....

oh yes, silly me, i read that more as an address like 'London, England'. I think Dunblane would be a more accurate reflection of the possibilities mind you! I say that in the full knowledge that nothing I can say could actually get Damian more mad than the sight of a double buggie, a parent and child emerging from a car in a parent and child space, or the sound of childrens' laughter, already does.

I thought that was more ancient Judea; Rwanda was more massacre of the Tutsis.

Just trying to get to the root cause of your apoplexia, It can't be the parental sense of entitlement, because all I've seen is a few parents grateful for a service offered. Judging by the above posts I detect is a deep well of resentment that anyone who has sullied this world with yet more children actually dares to take them out into the public domain, poisoning the environment of the childless*. Interestingly are you equally put out by young lovers walking hand in hand on pavements or is it just the buggies? *although I notice the self employed worker feels a sense of entitlement to the wifi essentially provided as a marketing exercise. I'm pretty sure broadband and a router are taxable expenses you know

No*. *now that's a short analysis

I used those click-its, did absolutely nothing for me. I found the best way to stop bites itching is to drink four or five large gin & tonics. You feel nothing and it also acts as phrophylaxis for malaria! double winner!!

soooo.....it boils down to you hate children then. Oh bless, and your one time urban london paradise has become suburban nappy valley hell....my heart quite literally bleeds liberally for your pain.

Damian, you've never worked for any notorious US security contractors have you? Just asking....

"Community has been crushed by the size of cities where most people don't know their neighbour's name." I don't think this is necessarily the case, people knew their neighbours 60 years ago when London was bigger than it is now. I think community has been eroded because of the availability of credit. We can now move when once we couldn't. The communities died when everybody upped sticks and buggered off to Stevenage or Southend and were replaced by a transient stream of people. Ironically, when you consider many accuse immigration and multicutlturalism or eroding communities, that's actually where you'll find the strongest communities. Places like East Dulwich are just way stops for many, blow-in, live here for ten years, move to some home counties suburb where you'll barely know anyone outside of your childrens' friends circle despite a population of only 15,000!!

ha ha, fair enough. Mind you wasn't walt disney a bit of a weirdo thinking about it? Didn't he have his head cryogenically frozen? Thinking about it, rumours are that Britney Spears already has, the weird dancing was down to the fact that she's actually been dead, taxidermically preserved, and moved using animatronic technology!

Mind you, we had an opportunity to set the ball rolling on political reform (or minor tinkering) and the nation pooh poohed it, so no wonder my radical solutions are scoffed at.

It doesn't surprise me at all that they did. There is a massive conceptual disconnect between our occasional tick at the ballot box and the nature of our politics. I think this disconnect widens exponentially the farther you get from the local to the central, hence we might think we have a huge say about the residents association, some sort of say in whterh the bin men or speed humps in our ward are prioritised, and I think that noone believes they have any say about westminster, harldy surprising when party machines make the grassroots feel like that, leave alone your average relatively apolitical voter. I've mused over how we can change this in the past but had all my proposals pooh-poohed.

Much as I love the original, I'll happily sign an ePetition to implore John Carpenter NOT to reremake it as Escape From New Malden

walt disney? I assumed walter mitty the daydreamer and fantasist. Walt disney as in cartoon fantasy then, cool. "Perhaps he was confused, and is a guard at Bluewater" very likely!!! :)

Agreed Huguenot, our political labels definitely need some sprucing as the definitions across the pond are quite different. I'm not averse to US cultural influences, I think our language is enriched by it, but their politics are wholly screwed, the greater we can keep those influences at arms length the better, and having a firm understanding of the semantics of the labels we bandy about i think is actually pretty important in stopping the viral spread of their ideas. The US thinks of red and blue as right and left respectively but there is absolutely not a hint of the left in mainstream politics, it more centre and centre right (which is getting rightier all the time). The traditional UK term liberal definitely needs parsing from us libertarian, as they are only distant cousins of each other with very little grey in your average venn diagram. New Labour is a tricky one, being a broad church. Weirdly despite Blairs' reformist, modernist, centre friendly presentation I think it very much gave in to socialism's state centric tendencies. It was usually referred to as nanny state, but they might as well have called it stalinist (which is what happened the moment Brown took over, even though there was no shift in philosophy, it's just he and his Campbell replacement had none of those presentation skills)

Either he was american trying to wind up the pinko limies or he was british and overusing americanisms to wind up liberal/far-left fellow brits. Use of libertards wouldn't generally occur to your average brit as it just not in our lexicon and hence wouldn't get wound up by it, which makes me suspect the former. I suppose, given his 'walt' (from walter mitty is that right?) status, maybe he hangs around US boards full of wingnuts and picked it up there. Either way he just wasn't very good at trolling, he revealed his hand too early every time and went straight for the insults which just make EDFers shrug rather than get upset. Quids style he should have just stuck to blaming the guardian and he'd have got much greater mileage out of us. It was the XE Services insistence that was the giveaway for me, it's just too obvious and unlikely as bait.

"ED Area" East Dakota?

Morality was definitely part of the implication of my original question though hadn't really been picked up on until now. Thanks for the Rummy quote though, always a pleasure. I quite agree Loz, I guess just in the light of other people's tragedies (I used to be ok with my own demise, though would like to delay it as long as I can now with dependants) I was having a good old ponder. And Jeremy, I think you misunderstand me. I'm not some creationist here, you can take it as a given that I think evolution is an existing phenomenon, I'm having a pop at the semantics of the language used. What gets me is that, just as creationists coopt the language of science to gain legitimacy in the modern word, ironically scientific rationalists seem to struggle to describe their world view without resorting to the language of the spiritual. As above , definitions of evolution are littered with the term 'purpose', 'matter', 'imperative' etc. Dna itself cannot have a purpose (except in the purely utilitarian sense of the word) and cares not whether or not it replicates. But as a paradigm for continuance in one form or another it's clearly a successful one, but then no more so than, say stars who replicate themselves, are born, die and pass on their dna to make increasingly complex versions of themselves, yet noone accuses them of fulfilling a purpose or having an imperative. Anyway, I'm rambling. In the cold light of a monday morning at the office I can of course see that there is definitely no meaning in anything, especially bad coffee and uncomfortable swivel chairs!!

World Wide Words point out that 'irregardless' is becoming a defacto word as it's a century old and has wide usage, despite strong opposition. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-irr1.htm

And I'm absolutely with you on the good fare, family, friendship and....booze... (damn, alliteration failure) thing.