Latest Moan From You and Me 2025

There was a time, I believe, in the UK when to be called city you had to have a Cathedral, maybe true, I'm not sure anymore.

I assume a town has a town council, villages usually have parish councils?

Never lived in a village so dont know but I can remember a time when all of them had the Village Idiot.
Probably just as well I live in a town.

 

That's the joys of living in the countryside, dont knock it.

 

I'm still alive and kicking in our village. At least I have a sense of humour, the other village idiot is a miserable sod, pain in the backside to be precise.

 

Luckley were are to small to be called a Village, we are classed as a settlement and yes i'm the settlement's idiot because i'm a thick qit, we come under a village parish council which is near by but they never do anything for us as they like to spend they money in their village

 

In our Parish council we have councillors from each of the four villages, so no favouritism. Each village had a bench fitted and a planter, not all the same design. In three of the villages we still have the old telephone booths, which we are looking at getting defibrillators fitted in all three, but probably not all the same time, unless we get them at a discounted price. The village that will get the first defibrillators is the village with the biggest population, it also has the oldest due to the vast majority living on the park home site being over 65.

 

If I have to hear Sheridan Smith in her new series (I fought the law) say

“double jeopardy law”

one more time in a accent I don’t even recognise I will lose the plot


Spruce

 

Sorry to reply late @pete but have been busy with house guests and then some urgent projects with a deadline.

Investment to me means upgrading public transport such as trains and buses; improving schools buildings and teaching provision from nursery age to A levels or their equivalent; providing housing and adequate health services from GPs to community nurses, physios etc and encouraging proper job creation - not just zero hours stuff.

British house builders and councils do seem short on ideas. I don't believe it's necessary to build new housing or factories or offices on green belt land. Much can be learned from how Germany is turning former industrial land into parks, gardens, activity centres and housing. The French are investing in intergenerational housing for young singles, families and older people built around a communal shared space.

I have friends in West Ealing whose Victorian terraced house is half the size of ours and has a garden smaller than our terrace and it's worth over a million pounds now that the Elizabeth line has opened. Noise and pollution all night from nearby Northfields Road and sirens a-go-go too. parking is limited and it's just outside the clean air zone which means no more raids on Ealing shopping centre by car.

We don't have streetlights - prefer to see the stars at night - or pavements either and I've never seen a public phone box. The nearest bus stop is 4kms away. Except for the eejit next door, all our neighbours are friendly and help each other out.

 

She is high on my list of "unwatchable actors".

 

Going down the same road as Sarah Lancashire

 

The Glasgow area and Loch Lomond are closer to the west coast than the east @ViewAhead. We don't get midges on the east coast until close to the far north.

 

I'm pleased to hear their invasion is not total, @Sheal. Maybe scientists could develop some sort of midge contraceptive to reduce the populations!

 

Adult midges are food for birds, especially swallows @ViewAhead and their larvae feed fish, dragonflies, water beetles.......

Wipe out the midges and you'd wipe out much more. Just use insect repellent or stay away.

 

Re midges - I'm very lucky that they don't bother me, no matter how bad they are. Having lived all my life in the west, they're just a standard feature, anywhere there's water and trees etc. They aren't just 'further north' either. It's only the females that bite.
I know I've recounted in the past the story of the woman in the car park for accessing Bidean nam Bian, [or the Lost Valley which is what most of the tourists were there for ] where she sat outside a campervan making sandwiches or something, complete with hat and midge net. Why she didn't go inside, I'll never understand. I remember when doing part of the W. Highland Way, it had been very wet, with some local flooding etc, and part of that stretch is woodland. There was a pair of German lads completely overwhelmed with them. Don't know if they kept going, but they weren't even half way at that point! It was early October too, so not height of summer, but it doesn't mean they aren't still around.
I watched a tv prog the other day, which I'd found by accident and recorded. It was the usual sort of current rubbish on tv - 5 people, who don't know each other, go on a different walk [they take turns to decide on what it'll be] and then mark it out of 10. The winner gets £500 or something. This was all on Skye, and the last bloke's walk was great, but they had an invasion of midges near the end. Ironically, none of them coped well - despite living there.