A weirdo with a cache of weapons living in isolation in a remote farm house… and he didn’t have a cockpit collection?

This is an archaeological issue really, and not just one that starts and ends with aircraft. My only real issue is with those that remove aircraft parts purely for their own enjoyment. Many posts on the Peak Wreck Hunters blog indicate that bigger and more noteworthy parts have vanished from even fairly remote crash sites. These guys will probably class themselves as historic aircraft enthusiasts but clearly don’t have an issue with pilfering materials from sites, thus ruining it for the rest of us.

The flooding we are seeing is the result of poor land management, in part. Sadly and predictably the angry right have already decided that any flooding event is solely the result of the lack of dredging of rivers. It is well understood that forestry and mixed grassland is a good barrier for runoff. If you remove these, which has happened extensively across the UK, then there is little to attenuate the water from heavy rainfall, and it ends up surging into rivers. Upland sheep farming, which is a disastrous waste of money in the North of England anyway, will have contributed significantly to the flooding we are now seeing. Short-sighted planning and development that sites buildings on low-lying areas are also to blame. Finally, man’s arrogant belief that you can permanently canalise water ways and build hard infrastructure up to the waters’ edge is also to blame. The over reliance on old drainage methods and infrastructure doesn’t help either.

Dredging rivers only serves to make rivers navigable for larger vessels. As a means of flood prevention it won’t help that much, as you simply change the profile of the river and create a little bit more space for water. Dredged rivers with a U profile tend to fill up rather like a bucket, and when the water exceeds the capacity of this channel it then floods the place dramatically and suddenly. This is why these rivers tend to ‘burst their banks’ rather than simply expand and slowly flood a restricted area. Modern flood defenses tend to mix hard infrastructure, such as physical gates and barriers, with soft infrastructure, such as retention ponds, planted verges and ditches and the creation of two-stage river profiles. in the case of the latter, a second area of land immediately adjacent to the river is planted with a mixture of species and, in the event of rising river levels, absorbs water and provides a second area for flood water retention.

I’m surprised that the forum sweary filter allowed c**t to pass through. Apparently the word was commonly used around the 13th century, mostly in the anatomical sense. A lot of Britain’s towns would have had a Grope C**t or Gropec**t lane, where one would go to seek out prostitutes. It is only during the interim period that the word has become somewhat taboo. It is viewed as an especially distasteful word in the US, where it is seen as having deeply misogynistic connotations. Oddly enough, compared to some words for female genitalia, which equate them more as ‘penis sheathes’ than anything else, c**t is potentially one of the less sexist words you could use. Part of me does think a word is simply a word; a jumble of letters or a noise you make by manipulating the lips, tongue and teeth. At the same time I cannot exactly change public opinion by bandying the word around on an Internet forum and hoping for the best. I find it interesting that a word can change severity over time.

Chinese ‘students’ who don’t feel they should queue. Back home everyone knows daddy owns the village, and they are used to us peasants making way. Cambridge is full of them!

We have them in Edinburgh too! 😀 The problem is not just with the lack of queuing either. Whenever I’m near the Uni (which is most of the Southern half of Edinburgh) I find gaggles of female Chinese students giddily holding onto each other. Often they will walk in front of you and then stop on a dime, or walk on a trajectory that slowly brings them into your direct path. All very frustrating. I’ve seen it suggested that years of feudalism effectively wiped out the middle and upper classes in China, so that all that is left is the money’d peasants that got lucky. I don’t know if there is any truth to any of that.

Meddle…..Pretty broadminded, me…..have to be, I work with the general public. I can understand if not agree with a lot of what you say but did you really have to use that word at the end of your first paragraph. Not great.

I’ve edited the post for your benefit. :eagerness:

You are suggesting they are anthropologists trying to ingratiate themselves to the dangerously emotionally unstable native folk up here? Sure enough I did kick a few of them in and steal their watches, all in the name of authenticity…

An independent Scotland would have had no influence whatsoever on the market value of North Sea oil. It would have had to have accepted the lowest value offered, and somehow the SNP would probably still find a way to blame it on the Tories. Speaking of the SNP, I saw Nippy Sturgeon argue the other day that the lack of maintenance of the current Forth road bridge is fine, because they had the amazing foresight to commission a new bridge five years ago. Swines!

I was out at a nice restaurant tonight, and found myself angry. Next to us, a Japanese family was seated about 20 minutes after we arrived. Their two sons, aged roughly 8 and 12, spent the whole meal listening to something with headphones. At times they were watching videos on small laptops as well. The mother pulled out a home video camera and proceeded to film not only her two disinterested sons but her disinterested husband, who was looking at Facebook on his iPhone. She then wandered around the entire restaurant filming all and sundry. When she sat down her husband took up the camera and did the same, standing uncomfortably close to our table. Their two sons continued to watch DVDs through their main course. They ignored staff or were curt with them and didn’t appear to know how cutlery worked. In short, they didn’t know how to behave in this setting at all.

This reminds me of when I was a student and a few of us were sitting drinking in the beer garden of the Pear Tree pub in Edinburgh. We were there during the day, and a short while into our session a group of Japanese tourists arrived. In broken English, they asked if they could ‘borrow’ our pints. We didn’t really understand, but made sure that they didn’t want to drink them! They didn’t; simply they stood in front of the pub’s logo whilst holding our pints, whilst one of us took photos usin their cameras and phones. I suppose they showed the folks back home that they had been to a charming Scottish pub, but without actually having to drink or put money in the till. Again, the behavior was odd, but the motives behind it confused me even more.

This sort of facile, spurious and disingenuous attitude riles me. I’m willing to accept that it is a culture clash or something, but it seems so outwardly fake. Were they trying to con their friends in Japan into thinking they had a roaring session in a Scottish pub? Was the mother and father filming their bored and unreachable sons to show what a great time they had in Scotland? The message seems to be that you broadly did something, such as eat in a nice restaurant or enjoy a pint of Deuchars, but there is no base truth to anything that you do. I’m reminded of the Japanese tourists in the Van Gogh gallery in Amsterdam who simply stared at each painting for a couple of seconds then ticked off a title on a small list in a notebook. Where is the deeper understanding or inner contemplation there? Where is the warmth? If you use such a basic framework of evaluating your enjoyment of something, do you ultimately achieve satisfaction anyway? Is this how it works in Japan? Does it matter that you held a stranger’s pint in front of a sign you probably couldn’t read? I’m confused!

Its an unfortunate subject and one which the media circus will certainly make a meal of

Absolutely agree. If nothing else it shines a large spotlight on a relatively small group of individuals. Only distantly related; one of my other hobbies is playing bass guitar. Recently I saw a post on a bass guitar forum noting that there is a decline in the number of bands playing live, a decline in the number of opportunities for bands to play live and an increasing number of older chaps playing bass, with fewer younger people filling the void. I think the notion has been that there will always be rock bands, because there were a lot of them in the ’70s and ’80s. Likewise, playing the bass guitar was seen as something that people will always do. The problem is that increasingly people aren’t going out to see and support local bands and increasingly don’t see the point or purpose of learning the bass guitar! The market now is leaning in favour of lighter instruments and lighter amplifiers to accommodate those guys that ruined their backs lugging heavy equipment into pubs and up three flights of stairs into rehearsal spaces in the ’70s and ’80s. There are still plenty of us playing bass guitar, and still plenty of us playing in bands, but the general consensus is that it is now a more niche pastime than before.

Perhaps a tortured analogy, but my point is pretty simple. It seems a fairly core belief that since the WW2, and perhaps peaking in the Cold War era, boys are fascinated with loud, fast aircraft, technology and machinery in general. Teenage boys would want a motorbike or car to work on, and they would know every component in the car, having pulled it to pieces every weekend to replace and repair it. Increasingly this isn’t so, and those that spend their weekends restoring aircraft, running aviation museums, running stalls at airshows and piloting historic aircraft (and discussing the things online) look increasingly elderly. Perhaps because of the UK’s shift away from manufacturing towards the economic sector, people seem to have a less hands-on approach to machinery and technology. If it breaks you dispose of it now, rather than have it in bits on the kitchen table. Schoolboys probably don’t make as many Airfix kits any more, or can differentiate between the RAF fast jets that streak past the classroom windows. They probably don’t draw Eurofighters on the backs of their jotters either. In the current climate it wouldn’t take much to halt the historic fast jet movement for good, as I don’t feel you necessarily have the public in your favour, as they might have been a few decades ago.