– i mean come on (2 sips of water and 1 use of the loo in a 10 hour shift is bludy rediculous)

I’m sure I worked for that company during uni holidays!!! Oh no, can’t have been, I was only allowed one sip of water!

Trust me it wears off.

I passed first time after 20 lessons in a 206 Diesel. Hard to stall her. Silver it was.

My claim to fame is that I am offically the last person to pass their test in 2003 in the UK as they bug*ered the appointment system when switching over to computerised for NI and double booked everyone. So on the 30th of December at 6pm (all national centres closed at 5pm) i took my test and passed 😀

Oh yeah 16 days later i wrote my honda jazz off…

Chances are there were tests on the 31st, so sorry to say it but you probably weren’t. My test was on the 31st December 1997, the guy who did my test informed me that because the 31st isn’t a bank holiday then they have to work it. My test was at the other end of the day though, 9.30 on New Years Eve, so I wasn’t the last to pass int he country, but not too far off I’m sure.

I read The Beach along time ago and thought it was great, it was one of the only bokos I ahve gone ack to everytime I had a spare moment. Apparently it’s not so good if you’ve seen the film, which ruined it a bit, and if you do read the bok apparently do not see the film (I have steered clear because I enjoyed the book so much).

As a result of reading the above I thought I’d try Alex Garland’s other book, The Tesseract (which I beleive has just been released as a film), which I also loved.

If you want an interesting book about aviation then I quite like ‘The Tombstone Imperitive’, can’t remember the author. The warning with this book though is to take quite a lot of sections with a pinch of salt.

Squating is actually a legitmate problem in Africa. Why cant anyone look at the larger picture and always just focus on imediate circumstances?

I may not be African, and I may have only spent a couple of months there (including working in various communities), but the wider picture is that squatting exists for a reason, regardless of the fact it is a problem, it is derived through poverty. Mugabe is not replacing these people’s homes to overcome the problem of squatting, he is just getting rid of the homes and ‘sod the consequences for these people’!

Most of these people have no chocie but to live in squats, they don’t have the money or resources for anything else. They are attracted towards cities such as Harare in order to search for a better life, based on the propect of work…….very similar really to the events in Europe over several hundred years!!

The wider picture is that something has to be done to help the african nations and their people (accepting that corruption of their governments is a major problem). The answer is not to demolish their homes, just because they are unsightly or for any other reason for that matter.

Furthermore we must remember that there are plenty of big posh houses also being bulldozed…..but then maybe you view any house as a legitimate problem in Africa mixtec?

Has nobody else coped onto the fact that there is always runours about airlines starting new flight to MAN. CX,NW and Backpackers express were all to launc service from MAN at least thats what the rumours said.

I agree with Grey Area. I wont belive it until it happens.

Well, I for one, know that it is NOT an absolute fantasy!

It’s only your deserved punishment for driving an automatic. If you can’t shift gears, you shouldn’t drive.

Well for the UK that is nonsense because almost everybody learns to drive in a manual car, there are very few driving instructors that use auto cars (not like the USA where I belive almost everybody drives an auto from the word go). In my case I now have 2 auto cars, a Land Rover and VW Golf. In both cases I can quite happily drive a manual if I want (ie, have done so on all my previous cars for the past 7 years since passing my test, also managed the other day when I drove a courtesy car from Land Rover). According to your theory Arthur..why would I want an automatic? Well:

1. The automatic gearbox in my land rover gives my horse a smoother ride in the horse trailer.
2. Having spent a lot of time in traffic on the M6, M4 and M25 over the past few years I know that the only car I would really like to drive on a congested motorway is an auto…there is no fiddling upto 2nd gear, then back to 1st as you crawl…have you ever had that annoying feeling when sat in traffic of having to constantly be just on and off your clutch? Clutch control is fine, but it gets tedious and makes your legs hurt after an hour or more! There is NO such problem with an auto!
3. The cruise control in my car works better with an auto gearbox and doesn’t come with the restrictions of cruise control associated with manual gearboxes.

So absolute rubbish, it is highly unlikely I will ever go back to a manual car…driving an auto is far superior.