peds

Delicious too, apparently. 50 of them would make a great snack.

Those look brilliant. We've just moved into a property out in the middle of nowhere and have rats up in the attic, but it's proving impossible to block off the entrance points because the property next door is derelict, and we can't use poison because we are smelly hippies. That might have to be an early Christmas present to myself.

An entre-pruneur, if you will.

I read somewhere that it’s an Italian manufacturer, but it doesn’t really matter where it’s from... it was good and cheap!

A lad on my course failed his CS38 because of that, "metal-on-metal"... although to be fair, he failed for several other things as well. He put his spikes on the wrong feet at first. Personally, as a rock climber, I see metal-on-metal all the time and didn't see what the problem is... not that I questioned the assessor about it. If two biners are likely to twist enough for shearing forces to come into play, sure, but I don't see how that is possible when joining two climbers together.

Hey, whatever floats your boat dude, I'm not one to judge. I appreciate where you are coming from with viewing it as a learning process, I have very little experience with small engines (or big ones, come to that), so I definitely see the appeal of getting intimate with a kit build. A few months ago I bought a shitty 100 euro Florabest 50cc chainsaw from Lidl, I'm going to destroy it and put it back together a few times. I'm hoping that it'll help me learn a bit more about how saws in general are put together, and what I can do when they get fucked up. At least with your Chinese kit, I assume they sent some instructions with it... I don't have that luxury!

To be fair though, sitting alone in a dark room rubbing your fingertips across a cheese grater beats watching Strictly Come Dancing.

Well, me for a start... on days with shitty weather I'll take one for tea, and one for soup... I used to try mixing them in one bigger flask, but it just wasn't working.

With the current fashion for zero waste and minimising your use of plastics, thanks to their high content of saponins horse chestnuts are seeing a resurgence in use as various cleaning products, mostly laundry detergent, but also as body soap. Been used in the British Isles and across northern Europe for thousands of years.

It is entirely possible to own more than one flask. One for tea, one for coffee, one for soup.

One of the most famous figures during the golden age of mountaineering here in Chamonix, France, has a drink named after him, "Mummery's Blood", which is equal parts hot Bovril and navy rum, with lashings of powdered black pepper. It was designed to keep people alive whilst they spent frozen nights trapped in a blizzard on towering alpine peaks, days after they'd already eaten the rest of their provisions.

It's simpler these days though, all you have to do is post or email the wrong form. I didn't have to visit a single building when I was wrestling the system a few years ago. Where were you based RH?

How long are you in France for? It's a bit of a nightmare swimming through the whole process of being self employed, especially if your French language skills aren't the best, as the documents and information you need are only available in French (they definitely aren't available in Welsh or Swahili or Tyke or anything, like in the UK). There's a wealth of information online though, and especially in areas with a lot of anglophonic people, you might find someone willing to help with the brunt of the official side of things for a small fee. I just about stumbled through it myself with limited French language skills, but I wish I'd invested a little in someone willing to help, as it would have made the whole process easier. A heads up: tick the wrong box on the wrong form, or ignore one specific form you get sent out of a huge pile of them that you CAN safely ignore (because they are just scam artists trying to suck money from you), and you might wind up with no health insurance, which may or may not turn out to be a big deal later on down the road. Once you are in the system though it's fairly simple, you can just log in to your account on the website and declare your earnings, and it'll calculate your contributions and tax there and then. Most potential employers these days will not even look at you if you aren't auto ent, there's very little work to be done in the black unless you know the right people. A lot of the time employers prefer that you are self employed instead of on contract, because the contributions paid by employers are absolutely huge here. Have a google for "auto entrepeneur advice English" and trawl through what you can find, it's pretty slow going but the more knowledge you can soak up the better. EDIT Oh, and just to add, you don't need a visa right now, and you haven't since we joined the EU. With Brexit looming however, it's going to get a whole lot more difficult very soon, and no-one has any idea what's going to be necessary in the very near future. So, you know, thanks to everyone who voted for that. Big help.

Don’t bother, they are a great source of vitamin B12.

It's a bit more cut-and-dry than that, really... if the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands had gone unchecked, then the thousands of inhabitants of the islands of almost exclusively-British descent faced imprisonment, torture, and "disappearance", in just the same way that tens of thousands of people on the Argentinian mainland had already suffered. If that isn't a good enough reason to go to war, then I don't know what is. For your second point... same story with every conflict these days, the death toll from bullets and bombs pales in insignifiance compared to the deaths by suicide years and decades after the fact. It's a shitty situation that's cropped up after ever war in the last hundred years, and one that every government chooses not to learn from. A pretty great book about the Falklands War is Razor's Edge: The Unnofficial History of the Falklands War by Hugh Bicheno, an intelligence officer with British intelligence services who spent a lot of time in South America, including five years in Argentina in the run-up to the conflict. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Razors-Edge-Unofficial-History-Falklands/dp/0753821869

Quite right, yes, but looking at any conflict through the privileged lens of history rather than the rose-tinted glasses worn by either side at the time often provides a clearer picture. Even taking into account the shitty things done by the Allies (fire bombing entire cities off the map, occasions of summary executions of prisoners of war, widespread incidents of rape and torture, the usual behaviour of every single army in every single war ever fought), and, if we can distance the western theatre of WW2 from the grisly landscape of the eastern front, where our trusted ally Russia was gleefully massacring millions of people with as much enthusiasm as Germany's Waffen-SS was, Hitler was simply miles ahead of the game in terms of being a truly evil human being. Regardless of popular sentiment at the time, years after the fact sometimes it is as plain as day who has the moral high ground in any given conflict. Sometimes, however, it's as clear as mud, and there are only shitty people on both sides of a conflict.

I’m not really sure you understand the reasons behind the First World War and who was fighting who. We’ve had all sorts of conflicts in our country’s history, many of them completely justified, but WW1 does not rank among them. It was an entirely avoidable war which should never have started, and should the same circumstances present themselves again today, absolutely anyone with a few spare ounces of grey matter would count themselves as a conscientious objector. Unlike, say, World War Two or the Falklands War, where despite a bit of undeniable bad behaviour from everyone involved, there were fairly clear-cut good guys and bad guys, in World War One there was no side with the moral high ground, and you cannot possibly take issue with the people not wanting any part of such nonsense as the aristocratic dick-measuring contests between a bunch of inbred royals. I’d object the fuck out of WW1 if I were there, conscientiously and loudly.

Yo, I’ve never owned spikes, so bollocks to my opinion. But what a lot of people use for crampons (which I do own) for ice climbing and mountaineering, which have far more pointy bits than tree climbing spikes, is a cut strip of denim from an old pair of jeans. Just put them together, business-ends-facing, and wrap the denim around neatly. I’ll be doing this when I’ve invested in a pair of spikes, unless someone offers up a better idea in this thread.

Ah come on now, would you rather someone - a new hire, let’s say - use the chain brake* too much or too little? (Just want to mention that spellcheck wants to correct “chainbrake” with no space in the middle into “chai break.” I’m not going to argue with it!)

I cut down a tree just by looking at it once. It’s true... I saw it with my own eyes.

Looks like he needs four or five more saws, then he could get them all stuck one by one and free them all at the end instead. He'd save loads of time. Yo, can I ask a question? Next video linked on the guy's youtube page, Husky 576XP Destruction (Mega Fail), the cut he's making from around 2 minutes in... what is this cut called, and what does it do? When would you use it? (Edit: Ahhh, never mind, the video answers my question, ignore me. He does some digging around in the jungle for a bit of treasure. Okay, new question... should you really be leaving your nice expensive toys under all that greenery? You might never find it again...)

Yep, that's the one. As part of our preparations to move, I have to close my mobile phone account. They want me to send them a letter saying so. A letter? How quaint!

Ah now, the French are a great bunch of lads. It’s the Parisiennes who are a shower of bastards.

Forget Instagram, it’s saturated. Every man and his dog have a profile these days, and it’s almost impossible to stand out unless you are doing something remarkable. Snapchat and those weird live-streaming sites are where the kids are these days.