El Pibe

I went to a wedding there and it was really good, most of it was upstairs and finger food and shampoo on the lawn on a lovely summers day was just perfect. It's really not viable as a restaurant though is it. And the downstairs bar....that decor.....

That's just a sales pitch. They are definitely part of the problem, not the solution. We are however stuck with it thanks to the nature of the contracts it'd cost more to end them than to do anything about it. Brown has lumbered us with a generation of chucking good money at bad. Don't even try to defend it!!!

Seeing as Osborne has been flirting with the idea of even lighter regulation I suspect we'd be in exactly the same place in terms of the big bust. The public purse may have been healthier, though i also suspect that UDT might be right (even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day) in that the trade-off for that would be crumbling public infrastructure. Apart from roads, we'd have EVEN more of them!!! As indiepanda said, there's practically no daylight between the two any more.

As you can see from above, our children's shiny new schools will cost a great deal more than they should have and will be paid for, well, by them. Tough luck really. What Indiepanda was trying to tell you was that our financial institutions had no reslience because the regulatory environment encouraged them to run high risk strategies. It was an infamous memo by Blair that actually stated that he felt the current regulatory regime was strangling the city, and in this he and Brown happened to concur (a rare moment for those two!!). Thus the FSA became toothless and the banks were encouraged to sail close to the wind because risk management meant that nothing could ever fail again, honest guv (whoops). This was of course entirely predictable and predicted many, many times by many people. As stated by several contributors, noone knew quite when or why, or in fact just how bad it would be, but that it was going to happen. Contrast that with Spain's regulatory environment, much more risk averse. No Spanish banks collapsed or needed nationailsation. In fact Santander has grown into one of the biggest banks in the wolrd by buying up troubled banks on the cheap post the collapse. Smart. In this Brown and Blair were not well meaning sensible overseers who got caught out by the perfect storm, but were actually the enablers goading everyone on and were utterly hoist by their own petard. My only regret is that Blair had gone and was able to enjoy a big dose of schadenfreude as he watch Brown appreciate the full horror of how poisoned the chalice he'd been yearning for for so long, really was!!!! The electorate quite rightly ejected him from power. as an aside mortgage interest rates have been going down in the US since 2006 and base rate has been practically 0 for yonks. I thought you were laughing because of your US interest rate pegged mortgage!!! ;-P

Not to mention his PFI shame. His promise to balance the books was mostly achieved through costly PFI deals that pushed spending off balance sheet but will continue to cost the taxpayer billions of wasted pounds over the next twenty odd years thanks to some of the appalling agreements signed. Of course the change in public accounting rules towards the end of his time as Chancellor meant that these were pushed back on balance sheet and he failed in his promise despite his attempts at disingenuity. Here are some useful snippets. ?229 billion quid and ?300 plug sockets, how very prudent Gordon. http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-does-pfi-offer-the-taxpayer-value-for-money/5705 http://www.david-morrison.org.uk/pfi/pfi-wastes-money.htm

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/kerning.png

Highly entertaining game for the neutral yesterday. The Scotch people certainly have reasons to be optimistic after far too many years in the doldrums. Weird they reserved their best spell of play when they were ma/en down. Wales a little inconsistent and a little lucky, but great to watch and am inclined to agree that Wales France will decide it this year.

I think it's still a legal requirement in this country for schools to have a daily act of worship, ie prayer in assembly, though I'm not sure the falvour of said act is stipulated. I gather most schools simply ignore it though. My old school got around it by having a sort of thought-for-the-day type of thing which could be vaguely spritual but was very rarely religious in nature (unless it was the ex-nun's turn). This all seems a bit stormy teacup if you ask me as is every story of christian victim syndrome bleating that makes it to the press. It's not eactly being fed to he lions is it!!

I lived a while in Letchworth, the town where the black squirrel was introduced about a century ago (to stock Norton Common, the big park outside the centre of town). They are a pretty common sight there and a source of pride for the locals, there was even a pub named after them until recently. Apart from the colouring they are basically identical to your grey squirrel. THey have been spreading farther afield and are now a pretty common sight in the likes of Stotfold and stevenage. I'd be amazed if there were any down here, though I guess if any have made it as far as Flitwick they could have hitched a ride on a train to Denmark Hill. That'd be pretty amazing though!

Is a French six nations victory implicit in that statement?

Overpaid idiots with too much time to contemplate their own overinflated sense of self worth in acts petulantly shocker. Nothing to see here. *yaaaaaaawwwwwwnnnnnn* In other news please go down Bolton, please. Would like to see Wigan stay up though.

Top stuff. Yeah I was thinking ascending violins and odd tinkling ivories would be best. Susan Hill's Woman in Black. Can't work out whether it's hideously cliche ridden or an homage to victorian ghost stories. Either way it's spooky, foggy fun.

Will check that out sj. Alan, basically what rosie said. It's mostly about the commute. That said, music can enhance most things. The trick is for it to suffuse rather than distract. I found some obscure french electronica which is doing the trick nicely but still open to suggestions. Mind you, gusting winds, peals of thunder and distant howls of wolves would probably do the trick better.

Am tucking in to a good old fashioned ghost story. When first reading it on the train I was on shuffle and quickly realised that the likes of 'paint it black' and 'directing traffik' weren't really cutting the mustard in setting the. Mood. Have tried a couple of requiems, faure far too nice, Mozart too distracting, some post rock, which doesn't really do it. Jessica Curry works, but that soundtrack is ony about 11 minutes long. I'm running out of ideas. Any suggestions for spoooooooooky or haunting music?

My girlfriend threatened to leave me because of my obsession with Clint Eastwood. "Go ahead" I said "make my day!"

The only rowdiness I can remember around the CPT was when the coke snorting elvis who lived opposite, who used to open his windows, strut around naked and play psychobilly music at full blast before seemingly passing out. Surreally entertaining. Thankfully those flats have been done up and he is no more.

point taken, but it's still got a pretty big population given the size and for a beauracracy to work well that means the whole thing has to be dedicated to rubber stamping the murderous policies of a regime who has invaded and subjagated you. That means widespread collaboration rahter than the cosy picture of resistance films like Orange Soldier like to portray. To be fair it was probably such a successful film because they embraced the fantasy with such gusto due to the deep sense of shame at the war years. You can borrow http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ajax-Dutch-War-Football-Europe/dp/0752842749 that more than touches upon the topic in many places, quite a cool book. I've nothing against the Dutch, lived there for a year, nor am I a fan of Mussolini's. I am rather partial to PDC despite his rather odd opinions though.

I was always going to do pedantry lets face it, but Mussolini was no nazi. He was a fascist of course and far from my cup of tea, and though he liked cracking heads and pursuing very ill thought out colonial policies (jeez, who doesn't these days) he shouldn't be smeared with the actions of the darker fascist types the other side of the alps. Interestingly if you look at the proportion of european jewish populations sent to their deaths by country, Italy is actually the lowest (16%) because it was the least puppetty. In fact it only got bad there in the north when Mussolini was deposed and the germans installed martial law, without that its at about 3%. For the worst countries outside Poland(91%) where the camps were and the SS could do what they liked, look no further than those lovely cuddly collaborating Dutch (71%) the baltic states and greece! (86%) Any way I digress, as you were.

Orrrrr maybe its because everyone in the country wants free health care and is prepared to pay for it, and anything other than tinkering at the edges in a bid to drive down costs is political suicide at the ballot box. Tend to agree that organisations can only take so much radical reform without the glue beginning to give, and I'm pretty sure that's where we're at right now. There is no doubt that things can be done better but we'd probably be better off getting disinterested experts to give the recommendations rather than politicians, and it'd be great if they could be incorporated over a period of time irrespective of the colour of ties of the government. For starters we could look at taking advantage of the economies of scale in purchasing the NHS could leverage, where currently things are so bad that there isn't even a strategy within an average PCT. I did a project for NPEP (NHS Purchasing Electronic Psomething) that was looking at increasing pan institutional communication with a bid to doing this sort of thing and it was blocked at every turn before being dismantled as a 'costly' quango by the tories. A conservative estimate at cost savings would be about 15 billion a year. Amazing that noone is doing anything about it.

I think you've missed my point entirely. Never mind, it was a pretty garbled sentence.

I actually agree with you RD, sometimes two hundred folk and a dog down the Hill isn't enough ;) I rather think it supports my argument rather than detract from it. An awful lot of would be Bristol Rovers, Cambridge United, Leicester City types garbed in Chelsea/man U/man city tops (I wonder what ever happened to that surfeit of Newcastle tops doing the rounds 15 years ago) who should be down their respective grounds, doing the whole club versus country discussion. Do me a favour is all I can say. Glo-ry-Hun-ters ;)

I'm not sure what you're asking/saying There seem to be two issues here: 1.Is contraception right or wrong? 2. Is Obama's attempt to have uniform provision of health care, regardless of the proclivities of the provider fair? And perhaps implicitly, 3.is Obama waging a war on the Catholic Church? 1. Fill yer boots if that's how you feel as long as it the church doesn't start lobbying the state to act accordingly. 2. I'm not sure about this one, but if health care provision is standardised i can see why there shouldn't be exceptions, perhaps there can be a compromise where non catholic workers actually do the doling out of the condoms/pill etc. 3. I see no evidence of one. I thought those seminaries famously instilled a discipline of thought, or iis that just the jesuitical ones ;-)

I'd say that's back to front. I've often said I love england for offering the supporters of the top clubs the opportunity to feel like what it's like to be a normal club supporter. Always the hope, rarely the results, which mke the good times all the sweeter. I think in the past hey understood that in their bones because they actually had ups and downs. Nowadays a down is not getting past the group stage of the Champions league; they're simply not normal anymore in this money soaked world of only the big fishes matter. I don't think it's club before country anymore for those supporters, I think they reject country these days because they're so spoilt they can't hack supporting perennial losers anymore. Glory hunters the lot of them. Bah!!

CPT, I meant PCT, freudian slip perhaps

I think I said before that sensible performance measurement is, well, sensible. It's when punitive targets are introduced that things become iffy. I have no doubt that a focus on waiting lists (made for political reasons) have reduced standards of care which are much harder to measure because these are perceptional (bar how many of them died). Mind you if the election promise had been: "I'll shorten waiting lists 50% in three years... *every numnut at conference obsequiously cheers* ...and I'll ensure that you'll be chucked out of your bed a the first opportunity. *yeaahh....eerr....* ...face to face time with the doctor will be reduced if you're lucky enough that they bother to talk to you *what hte...* ...and the nurse will simply see you as a number to achieve in the beds turned per hour stat she has to deliver to her manager so that the CPT's overall beclothing maintenance target will be achieved * huh , that's not right* ...so you'll probably have a crappy time once you make it to hospital" by then I reckon that applause may have petered out somewhat. But then Blair never was one for telling the truth was he.