Steven P

You didn't read the end of the article, the French stopped about 50% of the crossings with the about 250 million they have had in the last 10 years, predicted to give them another 400 in the next 3 years - lets see if that stops the rest before deciding if they turn a blind eye? However that is still only a small portion of immigrants to the UK we are talking about.

You could work it backwards, say retail price of £1000. Half that for the profit and costs to get it sold, half that again for the costs to process it and then take off £100 for the transport costs to wherever it is going to get to. What looks like an expensive bit of wood in a shop suddenly becomes a very cheap bit of wood lying on the garden.

1.2 million people migrated to the UK last year (508,000 emigrated). 30,000 came via small boats. If immigration is the problem, a cause of overcrowding, then perhaps we are looking in the wrong direction and should look to the million+ that are sanctioned by the government? There should never be a small boat crossing at all, the current government have created quite a thriving business out of their policies though, a real success. Cameron is saying that we cannot currently send them back to France but all that is is that the recent prime ministers don't want that as a solution, don't want to work with the EU. Give the French £400 million (like Rwanda has cost so far) and I am sure they will be amenable to some cooperation

Like all 'free' firewood (or nominal cost), how much do you value your time? Splitting a load of hardwood, or softwood is a similar amount of time, is the payback enough for you? Given a choice of a morning out with The Boys or a morning splitting logs, The Boys will win. However if I have nothing better to do (Ha!) then the load of wood is a good fall back and is 'free' to split. I'd pay £20 for it delivered if that is the offer. The other option I have for firewood is to collect from the local tree surgeons yard - petrol money is that alone.

I'd be doubting that a 350 year old tree started affecting a 125 year old building about 5 years ago and suspect something else is going on.

Likewise, I wouldn't stop on a hard shoulder if you can avoid it. Done that once and was straight out the car and 'hiding' safely. Also cycled down a 70mph dual carriageway - all legal - would never do that again either! Scary places outside the metal safety of a car.

Simple google search "Aberdeen Murder" gets a news report from 5 days ago, a stabbing no less: Though the news report doesn't specify her political bias. Just because you don't search for it on your news feed does not mean the British cannot murder, stab, or behead others. MSN WWW.MSN.COM Edited to add this link: Multiple stabbing and I don't think they accused was anything other than a Welsh girl. Teenage girl arrested after two teachers and student stabbed at Welsh secondary school UK.YAHOO.COM Students were held in lockdown in their classrooms during the ‘deeply worrying’ incident

Dig out the weed grass, not just the top part, fill up and seed again. And buy weed free turf next time?

I'm not an expert but going to add this here, maybe that will prompt someone more knowledgeable to answer? 350 year old oak tree How old is the house? When did the subsidence start occurring? For example, if the house is say 50 years old, the tree 350 years old and the subsidence was noticed 5 years ago.... I am guessing that -something- else is the root cause (if you excuse the term), you can trim the tree as much as you like, put in root barriers and so on... but from what I have read here that might not be the cure. I am suspecting that the builder - maybe at the time following the regulations they needed to - didn't build the foundations to take the trees into account. Might be you have to pay for an independent assessment, not necessarily an arborist, perhaps a structural engineer or similar for advice.

"Mighty oaks from little acorns grow".... little bit of work now pays off in the future. To add do dormant trees - if it has leaves, it is too late to move this year (without taking a great lump of soil and roots undisturbed with it).

I don't follow them but this sentence is always telling: "When Mr Murrell was arrested last year, police searched the house he shares with Ms Sturgeon in Glasgow", as opposed to "his wife, Ms Sturgeon", they are never written about as a married couple more a business arrangement.

Predicting some of the questions, what is the wall behind it - house wall or garden wall? Thinking of the future when this gets bigger, will it be a problem - maybe transplanting it somewhere more suitable?

Yes, take it back to another thread and not spamming this one whining about something not relevant here. Will respond where it is relevant.

hold on, who brought up other threads on this one? Ahh....

But you are needing to consider the competency levels of the UK to create any national infrastructure. We 'invented' the railways, can't build one now, we created Calderhall from scratch, struggling like the railways to build one (worldwide average for a nuclear plant is about 18 years from concept to production, something like that). Nothing much wrong with nuclear, but we have to build them and get them accepted by the locals where we site them

In whose back yard though? Nuclear makes sense... but.... no one wants one near their homes. (and considering our latest effort is going to take 30 years to be productive it is cutting it quite fine)

And the alternative in about 30 years time as the oil runs out? (Wikipedia has a nice chart showing the current predictions) Turn everything off maybe?

Drugs, sugar, plastic bags, tobacco, alcohol, some dogs, vaping? are all put in the governments "Too hard to deal with it in this parliament, lets ban it" bucket. Take a longer term approach and education, good habits, social acceptance and so on you don't need to ban nearly as much. But... that means you have to fix the early years education system, the primary school years education system, the secondary education system to fit that in, provide or encourage alternatives, and then wait 20 or 30 years for those children to become adults, and then parents to pass all that on to the next generation and change society. So it goes into the too hard bucket, no political gain in a 30 year program to do good, ban it all. So not sure a ban is a good thing, educate and let us work it out. As for drugs - I could support some sort of legalisation to remove them from criminality, but am not sure this would work - we have had years of no education just blanket "Zammo says don't", if they legalised a lot of drugs I could see the UK going on a massive bender for a couple of years. The alternatives to tobacco and alcohol (that we would do instead) are not good sources of tax income - take away the 22 billion or so from Tobacco and Alcohol duty (plus a couple of billion on sugar taxes) and we are looking at 25 billion in fuel duties going when we all get electric cars.... I might also wonder if the chancellor is as keen as the prime ministers say they are to ban everything./

Going back a couple of posts, as Tesco says "Every Little Helps". Some countries have a lot of rivers, hydro power, some have a lot of sun, some a lot of wind (we are quite windy), got to make the most of what we have. Interconnectors are useful - we can take Norwegian Hydro in the UK, California takes Canadian hydro electric (also in the UK a connection to France and the rest of Europe so could be tied into their nuclear power as well). Interconnector to Ireland allows that to pass through. Since Europe is so large this helps balance power so we don't all need spare generators spinning taking power and can be more efficient. I've seen the one about a swimming pool on top of a data centre which costs the council nothing to heat (and saves the data centre money with better cooling) - like I said, every little helps!

Curious here - how many deer would typically be in 25,000 acres, 6 farms?

If it was mine... Does the lady have children / likely to have children / young grand children who would appreciate a flat outdoor space to run around in? If not then I'd go with the other answer and have some stepped level changes through the garden to add interest to it. Looks like the 3rd fence panel down is a high spot so lower that a bit and use the soil to build up as necessary... but if you are doing all of that then yes, get rid of the stumps

I was going to add that some specialised fibre optics also have a LV pwer cable in them or are routed along side one. If you have the budget to do the training then it will add a confidence to the customer

Vaguely that rings a bell, and young ferns are OK for sheep too - vague memory.

That's a lido then - posh outdoor swimming pools all the rage now