Domitianus

Monica. I heard your hubby looked as fresh as a daisy until he married you. >:D

Believe me Karter, I am sorely tempted, but I suspect I would be in the slammer of ED police station within minutes, accused of gross indecency, public exposure or whatever. Prolly also be listed on the Sex Offenders Register. If I was a breast-feeding mother, of course, I would just be doing what comes naturally and the plod would run a PC mile before even thinking to pass as much as a discrete comment.

My great-aunt Gladys stayed in the Cactus Room in 1957- said it was most uncomfortable!

Ok, how bout this then, Vik? I am standing in the queue in the butchers and I need a pee. It is therefore 'the time' for me to answer the call of nature. I remove a plastic bottle from my bag, take out my penis and urinate in the bottle - cleanly, safely depositing a sterile waste product in an appropriate recepticle. 'The place' is appropriate as I feel perfectly comfortable doing it. Is that acceptable? How long do you think it would be before I was ejected from the shop and very probably arrested for simply choosing my time and place to carry out a perfectly natural function? Not long, I would imagine. Indeed, people are routinely lifted by the police for simply peeing behind a garage or against some bushes after a night out. Why is one natural act acceptable and the other apparently criminal? I agree completely with Cowbearuk. It is apparent from what has been reported that this incident caused considerable embarrassment to the staff in William Rose and other customers present. I am equally confident that there is no reason why the mother in question should not have been able to find a more discrete location to feed her child. Vik's comments "Get over it, avert your eyes, shop elsewhere etc etc......" are probably the lamest response imaginable. Of course, Cowbearuk, the fact that we don't automatically bend the knee to the right of a mother to do whatever she likes with her child under the guise of some imaginary carte blanche for nursing mothers probably makes us sexist, misogynistic, retrograde dinosaurs, doesn't it?

I declaim all responsibility. To my mind women in skimpy bikinis is a matter of great relevance to all residents of ED :))

Thanks Jan. Of course all this doesn't mean he ain't a nice guy at heart but consensus opinion seems to be that he doesn't convey that impression.....and his acting sure stinks!

She still has a turkey neck though!

and all the totty have to wear skimpy bikinis!

About his acting skills...yes! That was based exclusively upon what I had seen on the box. I must say that the degree of my aversion was prolly also influenced by the completely unjustified extent to which he was hyped up a few years back. Equally, I should say, there are others who share my opinion of the demeanour he appears to exude when walking around the streets of ED.

I have seen him walk past with a "Everybody look at me because I'm famous" type of expression on his smug gob.

Does that mean that Ulster accents are associated in people's minds with dissociated personalities, superhuman strength and murderous tendencies? I do hope so. Might explain why people give me a wide berth.

May I make a small amendment to my previous posting. I heartily agree with the sexy and seductive character of an Ulster accent.

Never ceases to amaze me the fact that people think that because an actor "pretends to be" (critical point) various interesting and exciting people, they are actually, in reality, themselves interesting and exciting. I sympathise therefore Mockney with your wife's apparent inability to separate the man from the role. Reason I say this is that I have met a number of actors/actresses in real life and invariably they have been utterly dull and uninteresting, yet convinced that they deserved to be the centre of attention on the grounds that they are good at pretending otherwise.

Baby storage sounds tops. Just drug them up for the necessary period of tme, tube-feed them with an automated system and find some way of dealing with the waste products. It could eventually become a vast toddler warehouse resembling the Matrix! Best of all - noise-free!

I think we should just have an empty shop. That way people could pass by and just marvel at the emptiness. Each individual could ascribe to the emptiness their own meaning. eg: "Is the emptiness within this shop a symbolic expression of the emptiness in my soul that is evidence by the fact that the greatest passion in my life is an over-arching obsession with house prices?" "Does his empty shop represent the emptiness and lack of purpose I feel deep within and which I try to camouflage by bragging publicly of my material possessions and favourite brand of champagne?"

But a decent actor can at least give a credible performance even if the role is rubbish. I just don't think he does. Havent seen Bloody Sunday but everything else I have seen him in made me cringe. I was always constantly aware that he was an actor carrying out a performance and doing it rather badly in my view. Oh well!

Pork barrel politics??? I think in the case of Tessa Jowell the correct expression would be Turkey Neck politics. Miaoww!

FUNERAL PARLOURS!!! Good thinking. I think we need another one of those.

I regret that it has now been a while since I saw James Nesbitt - reason being I would like the opportunity to tell him how absolutely c**p he was in that recent Dr Jekyll nonsense! Forget all this stuff about him being an a***hole - in my view he is an utterly hopeless actor. I have never seen him give a performance that has been anything more than wooden, cliched and, frankly, slightly embarrassing. He is like the big-headed bloke who was always in the school play who over-acted for England and actually thought he was a great thespian. I would love to go to the butchers, buy a great big ham and hang it around James's neck, saying "Here is your soulmate!"

I think we need another music shop. After all, we only have two in ED at the mment and thee is clearly an insatiable desire for tin-whistles, viola strings and metronomes.

Maybe the police were there to investigate who knocked down the fence?

I meant 'comments' - not 'concepts' in above post. You may be glad to hear, however, that my underwear and I are now re-united and I even tipped the old dear the princely sum of one English pound to start her retirement on a note of devil-may-care affluence.

I agree that the folk who run the laundry are great and deserve their retirement. My concepts are out of desparation rather than accusation. I have just received a phone call from them asking me to pop round and picks up my stuff. >:D

So Dave, we are talking prolly about an overall tax rate of 15%, averaged out over a substantial income, almost certainly not avoidance of same level of tax at lower levels. And I think such hedge fund managers (always the popular choice when taking a pop at cpatalists) are fully entitled to do whatever they are able to avoid punitive taxation. After all, the government is happy to attempt to tax them at much higher levels once they stray (through their own hard work) into the higher tax bands. They are also probably hit with up to 40% CGT on a substantial part of their income. The upshot is, someone paying 15% of a million pound income is still paying VASTLY more into the system than his/her cleaner paying base rate on smaller income. Also prolly taking much less out of the system as such wealthy individuals are more likely to pay for private health care, education etc. Paying more and getting less doesn't sound a very good deal to me and I wish anyone who can find a way out of this fundamentally unjust system the very best. It is unfortunate that these attempts to levy punitively high taxes against the more successful are the very things that drive talent out of the country. A close friend of mine, having been harrassed beyond belief by the Inland Revenue (completely unjustifiably in the view of ALL of his tax advisers who have been shocked at the conduct of the IR) has now left UK and is domiciled in continental Europe. One of his tax advisers (highly experienced who thought he had seen it all) is now so disillusioned by the Treasury and IR's tax activities that he himself is thinking of leaving the UK in disgust. Perhaps a study of the concept of the Laffer Curve (?) might indicate that lower tax levies actually generate more revenues in the long term.

I am most definitely interested! Keep me posted. There has been some discussion on this forum before about local chess opportunities (the lack of) so I am sure there is a degree of interest out there. Keep the faith.