peds

By your numbers there, and my napkin maths, we are 3.5 times dirtier than your average Chinese person. But yeah, stop buying stuff from China. Also, stop flying, don't set fire to things you don't need to, stop using weedkiller, cut out as much meat and dairy from your diet as you can stand, stop dredging the ocean, eat more farmed mussels and oysters, try and avoid plastic as much as possible, stop voting for people actively clamouring for the destruction of the planet, protect what little wilderness we have left and try to rewild as much as you can... ...you know, all the stuff the scientists have been advising for the last 40 years or so. Cheers.

Only 2 here, not loads, but we keep banging on about it because unless we change the way we use our planet, our children are going to starve to death. Sorry to sound like a broken record, but yeah. Buy local, don't fly, don't buy stuff from China, etc.

I don't think you should be allowed a stove or fireplace in any kind of urban area. If you're out in the sticks, hundreds of metres from your neighbours, burn away. I feel sorry for people living in the closest urban centre to me, where burning coal, peat, and wet wood is still the done thing. Air quality is terrible. This isn't the 1700s, we've moved on. I'll be fitting a stove this summer hopefully, of course.

Following surgery on the right middle finger, any unexpected contact or a sudden knock was hugely painful for about 14, 15 months after. I'm at 21 months now, and it's a lot better. Aggressive massage in hot water with an arnica cream afterwards as often as you can, and continue to be patient.

A bit like the royal ring piece...

Crikey, Nostradamus knocked it out of the park there.

Quite correct: all evidence has been swept under the rug and deleted from the thread.

Hasn't stopped anyone before...

Ah, I think you'll find, actually, that jokes concerning the mortality of the Royal Family are not well received in the jokes thread. Fingers start wagging. Maybe it'll be different this time around though, on account of King Sausage being an absolute twazzock.

Prolly a fackin' sleeper agent innit.

I know! It's a world apart. I wouldn’t like to carry my tree harness up 1500m of ascent in the Alps though. Might try a day of tree work in my skinny skimo (ski mountaineering) harness one day, see how bruised my hips can get.

Some of you need to spend a day dangling around in a nice skinny mountaineering harness. You don't know you're born.

The Judean People's Front?!

Yo, give us an underside shot too. I need to make one for our bath. What finish? Back on topic, sort of, has anyone ever made a bird house from rot pockets in wood? I've got a growing pile of bits of wood with nice pockets, of various sizes, I'm going to hollow them out a bit and stick a roof on, make sure there's drainage and all that. Small one here for illustration.

Life, uhh... finds a way. Want an easy life and a low-maintenence garden? Work with nature, instead of against it.

There's loads of different makes and grades of membrane, there's a really cheap and shitty one that's just like a really thin roofing felt, two months on the ground and you put your foot through it with every step. But because it's the cheapest available at the garden centre and comes in the smallest length of roll, it's what every bodge job homeowner likes to bury under that apricot tree from Lidl that they plan to freeze to death. With the woven ones, it absolutely has to be Mypex brand, I used an off-brand alternative recently and it was thinner, poked holes in it too easily, started unweaving at every cut edge almost instantly... at least Mypex is durable and holds itself together well. Which at least is better if you have to pull it out of the ground in twenty years time to repair some bellend's landscaping choices.

Absof*ckenlutely. Total disaster leaving mypex and gravel all over the place, unless you RELIGIOUSLY clear every speck of organic material from every inch of it before it gets the chance to decompose into a lovely rich seed propagation bed, perfectly drained with the gravel layer. People expect it to be the end of their weeding woes, failing to remember that new weed seeds appear not just every year, but several times each year. It never works out how people want without constant maintenance. When it gets bad enough, some landscapers just put a whole new carpet of mypex down on top of the previous disaster and re-gravel it, instead of taking up the old layer and switching to a better long-term solution, creating a horrific lasagne of compounded problems for future generations to deal with. Under hedges and around trees: 2 or 3 layers of brown cardboard covered with bark or woodchip. Maybe a bit of sheep fleece if you are into that aesthetic.

Nationality be damned, British born and bred here, though I describe myself as European, not British. I wouldn’t take up anyone's arms as a result of conscription, least of all King Sausage Fingers the Third and his non-extended family of elaborately-chinned circus freaks. If the cause for war was justified I'd happily volunteer, but purely out of principle I'd be among the white feather brigade if His Royal Charliness was ever tempted to make yet another gargantuan effort to move his drinks cabinet six inches closer to Berlin. And yes, I'd still happily use the NHS.

I've had worse views too.

Eh... being under nominal control of the British crown for a few hundred years doesn't make it British... Ireland has never been British, and there's a good few people out there who'd be pretty upset to hear the situation dumbed down to that kind of soundbite. That's probably for a different thread though. Weren't we talking about measles?

Oui chef

As a leftie, both politically and dexterously, I always try to shoehorn my own sinister agenda in wherever possible. Leftiness has been repeatedly observed in squirrels (handedness, of course... we all know that squirrels are famously fascistic in their political views), who reliably use one hand for picking up nuts and the other to manipulate it, every time. I wonder what percentage split of the population would be. So that's an interesting question about the flint tools, at what point in our history did the 50/50 split start to unbalance... was there any significant degree of physical persecution to the extent that the lefty gene became more rare, or was it mostly just social pressures that swayed the scale. It's only in the last few decades that leftiness has become tolerated in schools, I'm sure some of the more distinguished members of the congregation will have memories of their left hand being tied behind their back at school, or maybe even a lick of the cane... Being left-handed, I found it tricky enough to get to grips with using a chainsaw at first. Solved that problem by just putting the chain on backwards. 👍

I get what you're saying, but if my life schedule doesn't allow for that kind of coordination, it's not going to buy a rollaway awning for the campervan and a load of decking timber. I enjoy the flexibility of being a 1-man-band, and not having to worry about anyone else. As it happens, it was 7 days of simple and fun climbing (5 on sycamore, 2 on a bunch of spruce at the other end of the garden), 2 days of graft with a tracked chipper, and 2 days of pottering about in the sunshine, sheet mulching apple trees and stacking firewood. Had to pause for 2 days thanks to Storms Isha and Jocelyn, I've done planting for forestry in an orange weather warning before, but I didn't fancy climbing in it. So 2 up, 2 down; 3 days for 4 guys; around 12 days in total. Maybe I'll stick around for another day pruning blackcurrant bushes to add one more to my 11. Sure, it takes longer, but I wouldn't call it inefficient.

There have always been people on the spectrum, there have always been bendy genders (of most observed species), there have always been albinos, there have always been lefties; all in roughly the same proportion of the population since humans became humans. Allergies, though. Loads more of those around.

Adorable!