uncleglen

I know someone who did an access course for uni and needed to resit maths at the same time. She was 40 and she got a B! More mature people have made a decision to do these things and are usually very good with self-discipline. You would need to have a timetable and make sure to study when you are not too tired. Good luck!

I think that Louisa's sentence 'The police and emergency services are damned if they do and damned if they don't' just about sums up the attitudes of people in this country. The police are dealing with scum and the victims of crime all day every day- must be miserable and not a job I would like to do these days, mainly because of the negative accusatory attitude they have to put up with from some of the general public on top of all the criminals. The lefties are making a very good job of undermining law and order in the UK.

Apart from the tube in Central London, the rest of the transport system is very sparsely occupied during the day.

She didn't actually leave the job which was part-time, but what happened was a Spanish man got a job there and the manager gave the girl's part-time job to his wife. When I was a student I had a job in a restaurant bar and the kitchen staff were mostly Italian- the manager employed them because the chef was Italian and could not speak English so it was easier to employ Italians to work with him.

Public transport is under used and it is not surprising. I gave up my car for a couple of years and the cost of travelling around on trains with the children cost a lot of money and 'wasted' a lot of time- it worked out cheaper to get a small car and, since the railways we used at weekends frequently had bus replacements having a car was a necessity as there is only a finite amount of leisure time.

Who on Earth was doing all the low-skilled work (fruit picking, shop work, cleaning etc) before the influx of foreigners- we were. In Brighton for example, a friend's daughter had worked in a hotel in her school vacations and at weekends for 2 years. She liked the work and decided to go into hospitality after leaving school. She went to the hotel at one point to be informed that she no longer had any work there and found that almost the whole place was staffed with foreigners. I wonder if they were being paid the going rate? As far as skills are concerned, it was a lot 'easier' for the previous government to allow an influx of already trained building workers to come in than to train our youngsters and create enough apprenticeships- and they also had an eye on the potential votes of the future I'll wager.

Some of us will have crashed 10-15 to a room on a very temporary basis when young and travelling around but when bringing up children it is hardly ideal. A developer wanted to convert a house next to me into 3 rabbit hutches but eventually settled for 2 flats with 2 separate mains water supplies and the water has to be pumped at a certain pressure to each flat

SJ - people who use a house just as a sleeping place will easily live 15 to a 3 bedroomed house- I saw it with my own eyes in East London and the Midlands in the 1970s. A relative is an estate agent in East London and couples rent a house, and after a few months turn up to buy a property as they have all been working and raise the deposit quickly.

Young workers who are mobile are disadvantaged because they have no skills due to short-sighted Labour politics- wanting everyone to go to university. Older workers have children in school, a partner who also works and elderly parents to look after and so are less mobile. Meanwhile young Europeans come to the UK and in construction for example, 15 men will rent a 3 bedroom house! The youth unemployment in Spain is currently running at 57%.

When we had a burst water main a few years ago and the area around CP road had no mains supply for about 3 days, we got chatting to the engineers coming to measure the head of pressure at intervals. He said that the increase in properties that are either being built or turned into flats and require their own mains supply meant that the pumping pressure has to be increased. What with the area being hilly as well-this just added to the pumping pressure problem. The underground pipes- some will be the old Victorian ones I daresay- then give way. They are replacing the pipes but it is a slow job and by the time it is finished hopefully it will not be obsolete. Anyway I am now firmly convinced that every problem of infrastructure and front line services, in London especially, is down to overpopulation and that the situation is going to deteriorate and our quality of life is going to suffer. Every year we have to pay the EU a fine because we have not fulfilled its unrealistic air pollution standards- mainly due to population and car numbers increasing. The situation is deplorable and is all a result of politicians chasing votes and short-sighted planning (due to the 5 year election cycle. A builder on a phone in programme today was saying that he works with a lot of East Europeans who rent 3 bedroom houses and then 15 of them will live in it!

I'm not playing top trumps- as a driver I frequently encounter stupid cyclists who weave in and out of traffic so you lose them from your mirrors, jump the red light just as you are moving off from your green light, ride 2 abreast. I do my best to 'treat them like a small car' as it says in the Highway code or somewhere, but they don't exactly behave like one. All this twaddle just reinforces my view that there is hardly any such thing as an 'accident' it's mostly human error and totally avoidable on all sides.

Travel costs are totally unacceptable- especially since at rush 'hour' one invariably has to stand. And at weekends when you want to enjoy yourself and get out and about, half the trains are not running so you drive since it is your leisure time. The infrastructure cannot adequately support the population on any level and for any front line service and it is all a result of seriously short-sighted politics.

Some of my family and their friends are having considerable success using e-cigarettes (some for over a year). While this does not wean them off nicotine they have no tar and they only give off water vapour instead of nasty smoke. So help yourselves smokers and use an e-cigarette if you have no intention of giving up- it will help you and you can 'smoke' them inside or outside.

5 years ago my sister stepped out of her place of work one day and was immediately hit by a cyclist on the pavement. She fell awkwardly and her foot is still not right today. The cyclist did not even stop....

Listen matey (don't wish to be rude because your 'normal' stuff is so good), this is the East Dulwich Forum- not the Wimbledon Common Forum!

L.A. Woman- The Doors

I wish they would c*ap in their owner's bed! If they were efficient at killing just rats and mice I would love them.

Psychologists are employed to tailor advertisements to a target audience- it's one thing to see your family etc. smoking and drinking then you can have a meaningful discussion about it- hopefully- but teenagers are impressionable and image conscious and maybe showing these adverts in the cinema at 15 rated films has contributed to an increase in under age boozing.

In New York cats were (are?) not allowed to wander the streets so people had indoor cats. They sometimes had to be de-clawed as some of them were known to attack anything that moved e.g. maintenance men climbing ladders. This is the nature of cats- cold-blooded (metaphorically speaking) killers.

Naaaa- boring and miserable- heard it all before- you asked.

Sitting outside! What a nightmare- all you get is lung-fulls of smoke. Inside is the new outside for non-smokers. They banned smoking outside in New York- bring it on!

Bird on a Wire- Leonard Cohen

This 'institutional racism' within the State is rubbish imo- they had to find it was true because there was no alternative.

Hair spray- their wings stick together and the drop............

They are fruit flies and they breed quickly.