I can judge the character of a man by the strength of his handshake – if it’s a sweaty, limp, Civil Servant type handshake, I know I’m not going to like them, or have much in common.

Totally agree. At home we used to call it a wet fish handshake.

The social graces are considered totally irrelevant by youngsters today, along with spelling, grammar, arithmetic, elegance, and general knowledge about anything more than five years old…

……by SOME youngsters today…… Happily I know a few who have all the conventional social graces, speak grammatically correctly with a good and varied vocabulary, don’t need a calculator to add 5 and 9 and know a great deal about the history of the world they live in. They are also kind and considerate. So we should’t tar them all with the same brush.

Although it is a year out of date the tables in the attached put our prices into perspective with other nations, so that we need not feel quite so hard done by! And if we were not paying through fuel it would be taken from us in some other way.

http://www.theaa.com/onlinenews/allaboutcars/fuel/2008/may2008.pdf

I have always thought that physical contact on greeting indicated welcome and friendship. When I grew up handshaking was just the norm and as we were always a tactile family we always embraced on meeting – in fact still do with my son and his family. I don’t even think about it. I would naturally shake someone’s hand when being introduced and I have never felt the recipient felt inhibited or preferred not to in the way the shake was returned.

Abroad, where I spend much of my time now, the three-kiss embrace is the norm and sitting in a cafe watching youngsters, male and female, greet each other, round the table, seems so natural and friendly.

I don’t think I could offer “high fives” with any conviction.

I think your ideas are very well intended. However the reality is that 60 years of NATO has been a fairly successful exercise as an alliance of independent nations with generally common cause.

The individual national demands on the way they organise and run their armed services would make your ideas difficult to achieve. The minds might be willing but the body might rebel.

But in another two or three decades, who knows?

I’m enjoying these exchanges. Modern cars work well, are stuffed with safety features, economic etc, etc, but are they as much fun? Not for me, that’s for sure. There was a driving instructor, not so many years ago, who taught in an old Morris Minor just so that he could show his pupils how the basics worked and it had the added attraction of being repairable with a few bits and pieces from the shed or the kitchen. Happy days.:D

Sounds like someone has issues… :diablo:

You bet yer sweet bippy! Don’t you?:rolleyes:

It makes you wonder what else they have got wrong!!

Do you mean tidal is a better bet than hydro? I hadn’t realised it was developed that far.