Penguin68

Am I the only one rather hoping that casual thieves of the type described aren't regular readers of the forum?

If the card was originally stolen and then discarded I guess the police might like to know as well - I'm not sure you should be cutting it up yourself, I suspect handing it in to a police station might be the best thing, or to a branch of the relevant bank.

I've been surprised in the last 4 or 5 years that the telecoms/communications industry hasn't been more on the ball offering communication alternativs (eg videoconferencing) for a chunk of business travel They have - surprisingly many business people like travelling (it's a perk of the job) - many are also uneasy about interacting through screens rather than face-to-face - the capability is there and is increasingly (a) technically of high quality and (b) comparatively inexpensive. Some companies use it extensively (and have done for years) - others eschew it. Why would telecoms companies not be selling services and bandwidth, it's what they do? Customer resistance to this has been high for personal reasons - frequent flyers complain they don't like travel, but often will baulk at the alternatives - for occasional business travellers it's often seen as both a perk and a validation that you are 'important'. Most companies are 'account managed' for their telecoms business - setting up vido-conferencing is now easy and their account managers would be only too happy to do that. A (30 second) internet search brought me to this http://business.bt.com/broadband-and-internet/internet-communication/web-conferencing/ I doubt whether any business office manager couldn't manage that as well, even if they didn't have a BT account mananger.

I have been re-paid by HMRC - they can do it by cheque or by direct debit - your choice: if you haven't made a choice, the letter could be about that. Contact your tax office by phone if you are in doubt - they can tell you what the position is. Mostly fake HMRC scamming is via the internet - a snail mail scam (with a real address to send information to, which could thus be checked) seems a novel one.

I assume that your car has remote locking - are you putting your keys in your pocket and in some way pressing the key-pad which opens the doors without realising it? - I had a car which had a sensitive (and quite powerful) remote locking device which did that if I wasn't careful. Do you have children who might be playing with your keys without realising that they may be unlocking the car? Does anyone else park a Golf nearbye which may have the same unlocking code (the number of combinations is vast, so that is highly unlikely but still within the realms of possibility)? Do you have an electrical fault which is triggering the remote unlocking? Theoretically modern in-car diagnostics might be able to pinpoint this? However, the fact that the doors are 'wide-open' and things missing does suggest a human agency - perthaps one quite proud of being able to open the car and thus leaving the doors open to 'boast' about their prowess. The fact that the car is still there suggests that the engine immobiliser is still working, even if the car locks aren't.

As James said, Thames Water may be checking for leaking pipes - at night is the best time as it is much less likely water would be being drawn off for consumption - so the sound of water flowing would mean a leak (or someone watering their lawn at night!) They check for leaks in the pipes between the mains and the house - I had one a few years back and they repaired it for free, even though the leak was under my land.

You might want to check with local surgeries to see if someone had handed it in to them (it's probably what I would do)- on the basis that they could locate the mother/ child in question.

Thus speak a Quantitative researcher...this is Qualitative, surely A 10 question, randomly directed (other than at ED Forum members) questionnaire is a very strange piece of qualitative research - normally done face-to-face, either with depth interviews and focus groups - and topic guides, normally about 30-50 minutes long (or more) for 1:2:1 interviews (perhaps 90 minutes or more for focus groups) - qualitative research uses (on occasion) stimulus material, projective techniques - believe me, if this is intended to be a qualitative study then it is way way off beam. I have been involved in the design and conduct of qualitative and quantitative studies (including a seminal semiotic study to investigate a major advertising campaign)- I agree that the questions appear so open that they could form the basis of a qualitative interview - but 'live' and directed by the researcher, who is noting nuances, hesitations, retractions - not as an internet based survey.

Paulino wrote:- I think Penguin68 was actually trying to be really helpful I was (I am not sure about the really emphasis - but thanks). Questionnaire design is a skill - Professional Market Researchers will be graduates who have then studied (probably) for the MRS Diploma and will be up to 18 months in the job before they fly solo on questionnaire drafting. If these are university students then they should have access to tutors who can give them guidance on design (without doing it for them). If not, then they need to focus on (start with) the analysis they intend to undertake, and work back from there to identify the questions they need to ask to make that analysis. What user information or understanding don't they have that they need in order to advance their (in this case) PR objective? In particular they must consider how they will use (group, work on) the information they will be sourcing, the simpler it is, the easier they will find working on it. Researchers offer respondents age-ranges to 'vote' for to make their analysis job easier - otherwise they have to code each questionnaire into an age group themselves, rather than getting the respondent to do it for them. And so on. We always advise pre-testing questionnaires, just to see what sort of answers come up, and whether they make any sense. If these students got 60-100 responses from forum-ites (not impossible) they are going to be working for a very long time to code the responses for any form of statistical analysis - a disproportionate time for most assignments.

If you are students then I suggest that you ask someone from your department about research design - almost all your questions are open-ended, which will make analysis a very time consuming part of your study, and your layout is unhelpful - you keep asking for things in 3s but only giving a single line to input an answer. It would be better to list as many likely options as you can, so pre-coding responses, with 'other' left for those you haven't thought of. Some preliminary qualitative research could have given you a steer here. Your questions are ambiguous - 'what part of Dulwich do you live in' could be answered by an area (Goose Green); a post code (SE22) a description, (West Dulwich)- how are you going to analyse this? Sometimes it is worth 'forcing' answers into a format that you can use most effectively. You appear to be looking for quantitative results, but it is not clear to me what cross-tabulations you plan. You ask for age and occupation, but not sex - are you assuming that there will be no differentiated responses between men and women? Your Q10 actually asks multiple questions - how on earth will you interpret these? (NB I teach marketing at University level, so I am reasonably aware of what I speak).

I can confirm that Tony Dowsett is entirely kosher - he has been cleaning my windows regularly for the last 20 years - always asks for money after he has cleaned, not in advance, and does a good job.

but never seen a crow eat a pigeon Crows (well carrion crows) eat dead meat - hence their name - I suppose if they have been the cause of that meat being dead they wouldn't not eat it (they don't, obviously, operate on our rules about road-kill). A crow which despatched and ate a pigeon already injured comes as no surprise, but crows don't normally hunt large birds themselves. I have often seen crows picking at the carcases of foxes etc. by the wayside - obviously they haven't killed these, although I doubt if they are too picky about waiting for the fox to be declared dead before tucking in.

They would only do that where we live IF they thought Lib Dems bigger threat. Threat to what? If they see Lib Dems as capturing the swing vote then Lib Dems are the bigger threat, even where they wouldn't win the seat. Assume (I know these figures are wrong) 10% Lib Dem, 47% Tory, 43% Labour - Labour needs the swing Lib Dem votes to beat the Tories - but Lib Dems aren't, in themselves, a threat to Labour (Labour won't lose to them), but they would lose to the Tories without 'convinced' Lib Dems actually voting for them to keep the Tories out. PLEASE NOTE - FIGURES FOR ILLUSTRATION ONLY!!

But the Lib Dem in national polls being 50% higher than 2005 elections The fact that the Lib Dems have improved since 2005 nationally is irrelevant - the issue is with this constituency, with its re-drawn boundaries. On the (reasonable) assumption that the Lib Dem vote is up, the concern must be whether that reflects a shift of former Labour or former Conservative voters (as well as an influx of former Lib Dem voters now within the redrawn boundary). If the movement is from Labour to Lib Dem then the Labour view is correct - to keep the seat they need those Lib Dem sympathisers to return. However Conservatives moving to Lib Dem would be moving even further if they were to vote Labour - they would have to be harbouring a huge grudge against their former party if they were prepared to move that far. And previous Lib Dem voters now included in the constutuency following boundary changes are likely to wish to remain with their party - the more Lib Dems gain in the national vote, even where that doesn't reflect seats gained, the more their moral argument for a change in the voting system is strengthened. I would note that in 1997 Blair entered Government promising electoral change, a promise reneged on by Brown who resisted it in cabinet. And now they are promising electoral change again. 'Vote Clegg, get Brown, don't get electoral reform' would match the track record here. But 'want Clegg, vote Brown' seems like lunacy.

seems strange that it's ringed. I wonder if it's an escapee from some kind of aviary Possibly it comes from a 'petting' zoo - there's one in Battersea Park (well, there used to be) - that might explain why it's so tame.

In my experience a new pond can take up to a couple of years to 'balance' fully, depending on what you have in it and how large it is - reasonably soon with luck you should have frogs/ toads/ newts - later on this summer damsel flies (smaller versions of dragon flies) should visit - but the initial cloudiness should clear, as stated above, in a few weeks. My pond only has oxygenators - but I do top it up with fresh water quite regularly - you can get an additive which neutralises the chemicals put into tap water by Thames to keep it clean - which you will need if you have fish. Sadly, when birds start to use it they will bring in with them blanket weed - which you will need to fight against; I have found both the chenicals and the barley stalks which are recommended don't work, and I just have to keep twisting it out when it gets too intrusive.

Once a day Concord used to fly over our house - I really miss that, it was such a beautiful plane. Aircraft noise really isn't a problem in ED (although police helicopters make my windows throb and rattle when they endlessly circle)

Was she a punk? How could you tell? In general punks would be immediately noticeable by the hair (day-glo dyed, mohican or otherwise spiky), by their clothes and by piercings. For some reason I cannot recall whether her hair was dyed or not (it wasn't a mohican or spiky, but punk ladies often didn't go that far) and I was distracted from concentrating on her head - reference to her clothes was clearly otiose and if she had piercings, at the distance I was, they were not very noticeable. She certainly went with the zeitgeist but may not have been strictly a follower of punk herself. Chelsea then was also known for generally 'arty' types - so she could have been dancing to a different tune. I stayed a distant (and one-time) admirer only.

I do recall when I lived in Chelsea in the seventies seeing a youngish woman stark naked except for sturdy boots walking calmy into a launderette with a bag of washing at 9.00 am on a Sunday morning. It was summer (and quite a hot one) and it was the height of the punk era, and she didn't seem in any way distressed, rather extremely laid-back. But it was a surprise. Public nudity wasn't entirely uncommon back then, but not normally at 9.00 am on Sundays. And that was several years before the iconic 'fit lad takes off jeans to wash them in a launderette' ad. I went out to buy a newspaper on Sunday for several months after that full of (dashed) hopes.

Figures for Southwark don't match those posted by James Barber above I'm just guessing, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Southwark council figures don't come from the Council tax listing showing properties on reduced council tax because empty - obviously building may also be empty but not claiming the reduced tax - i.e. sold but not yet moved into; waiting for refurbishment, registered as second homes (different discount scheme) etc. etc. There are two types of 'empty' - one is that the house if furnished but no one is living there, the second is that it is entiterely empty of everything. My guess is that it is this group that Southwark is reporting, with the 'empty but furnished' group excluded (or perhaps vice versa) - quite easy to get different figures by using different definitions of 'empty'.

I had a lot of this over a couple of months some time back - particularly bags of chips/ Kentuck fried chicken boxes etc. However the positioning of some of the bags (under a parked car) suggested it might be foxes bringing booty in from off the street and eating it somewhere secluded. I doubt whether they've been bringing in bags of needles though; generally I find the foxes shoot-up in Dulwich Park.

So penguin68 what you are saying is in the interest of the safety and wellbeing of our neighbours we need to start an ED brewery? Well, that would clearly be the public spirited thing to do, very much down the lines of the Conservative self-help line about societal response (and for that reason alone probably not attractive to some forum-ites!)>:D<

I am just curious at the inconsistent nature of the flooding as I can understand the water table levels changing during wet weather but in dry weather could it really have a sudden rise? It depends what is going on around you - the water table in London overall is rising as industry (e.g. brewing, but not just that) is much reduced and that used to be a major water user. If someone else has stopped, or started, pumping water close to you, that would effect you - as would a general water leak from a main which gets into 'your' bit of the water table. There are underground streams that run in the 'valley' between Underhill and Wood Vale (there's a well/ spring in one of the gardens in that valley) and these are fed by water coming down the hills. Building work (i.e. excavation) could effect the local water table - and that could be happening some distance from you. Someone else taking protective action as has been suggested to you could be diverting water that they would have had towards you (i.e. it has to go somewhere else). Rainfall is by no means the only influence on local water table level changes, and (apart from flash flooding) its effect is not normally immediate. But this is quite a boggy area (probably because of underlying London Clay). If you look at the Langston Rise end of Camberwell Old Cemetary you will often see standing water - and that's on the top of a hill!.

Could these chaps be council inspectors A group of 4 people in Southwark Council Hi Vis jackets with clipboards are (or were 20 minutes ago) in Underhill Road calling on houses and asking (perfectly reasonable) questions about recycling - i.e. 'is everything working OK?'; 'Do you have dividers for your box?';'Do you know about rewards schemes'; 'Do you know about penalties?' - maybe there is some sort of recycling blitz on - maybe James could advise?

2...i say call a pikey a pikey - Just so we all know what we are talking about.... "Pikey is a pejorative slang term used mainly in the United Kingdom to refer to Irish Travellers, gypsies or people of low social class. Pikey is also sometimes called a piker in the United States. The term pikey as a pejorative appears to be a very old English word, remaining near unchanged, probably in common use during William Shakespeare's lifetime. The text Gypsy Politics and Social Change notes Boorde's 1547 reference: Egipcions be swarte and doth go disgsy'd in theyr apparel, contrary to other nacyons: they be lyght fyngered, and use pyking. Gypsies are swarthy and go disguised in their apparel, contrary to other nations: they are light-fingered and use piking. The term is strongly associated with itinerant life and constant travel: pikey is directly derived from pike which, circa 1520, meant to "go away from, to go on" and related to the words turnpike (toll-road) and pike-man (toll-collector). Pikey's most common contemporary use is not as a term for the Gypsy ethnic group, but as a catch-all phrase to refer to people, of any ethnic group, who travel around with no fixed abode." - source Wikepedia (not normally a great source, but looks good for this). Hence if you refer to 'pikeys' you should be referring to someone who is (a) a traveller and (b) of no fixed abode - possibly though not necessarily of Irish origin. It's an offensive term (always) and generally innaccurate when you are simply making a class (and not a lifestyle/ origin) comment.