GordonS

The video shows him steering with his elbows while peeling the banana, it's pretty bad. He launches the skin out the window which is a hanging offence in my book.

Still amazing he wasn't killed though, considering he took his seatbelt off. He put it on when he pulled up behind a police car at a roundabout, then took it off again as soon as it was out of sight. He was using a spare seatbelt clip in the slot to stop the alarm from binging. He'll be driving again in only five years.

I was precisely as stupid as you, but I got lucky - and I kept my eye on the rain radar right up until I left. Not a drop fell on Moffat during the game I went to, but I had to get off the road for 15 minutes near Bathgate because of heavier rain than I've ever seen in Scotland. Upper Annandale 1-1 Lochar Thistle, very basic ground but not a bad place to watch some football on a warm evening. The early stages of the match were very congested and every second touch was a tackle. But it improved as it went on and you got to see some of the talent on both sides. Lochar equalised from a penalty that looked very dubious to me, though 1-1 was a fair result.

That's not how life works. Here's an example - I didn't know that schools give individual music lessons, and for free. I knew one person who got music lessons when I was at school, in trumbone, and I assumed that was some special, paid-for thing. She was from a family I thought of as rich but now realise would be regarded as lower middle class. It never occurred to me that there could be things like that for people like us and nobody told us about it. My kids only got music lessons because my wife got them when she was growing up. It would never even have occurred to me. If you lived in a low income migrant community, came from a country they didn't have swimming pools, had never set foot in a swimming pool in your life and didn't know people who had, how likely is it you would send your kids to swimming lessons? For the most part we all do what we see other people like us doing.

Don't Caley Braves SOS play their home games at Strathclyde Park? They're at home to Creetown tonight.

I don't know if it's changed much or if what I saw was representative but when I was there a fair number of folk supported Aberdeen - I knew more that supported the Dons than Celtic. Most of the guys interested in football would look out for Fort William's scores or were roughly aware of how they were doing, but none of them would ever have considered going to a game, regardless of their big team.

Thanks. I saw that Linlithgow Rose had supplied him with numbers publicly, so that saves me thinking about it. He's only doing LL and EoS, hopefully someone is thinking about other regions. I wonder why any club would have a problem with it. Maybe they don't and he's just showing more respect than is necessary in this case, which is fair enough.

Been thinking about this. I'm sure a social researcher could get their PhD studying the differences between Fort William and Aviemore. The only things I can think of are that Aviemore was a relatively prosperous little town before the age of tourism whereas Fort William was pretty poor; Fort William is/was industrial with the smelter and the paper mill, Aviemore wasn't; Aviemore is on the A9 and rail corridor to Inverness; Aviemore had a lot of investment in the 60s that still helps today, such as having the Macdonald and a Hilton; and I suspect more of Fort William's hospitality workers are locals, meaning there's less cash in the area long term. I don't know how much of that holds water, it's all hunches. Aviemore doesn't have a senior or junior team, of course, nor does it have a shinty or rugby club.

I can't be doing with this playground-level shite.

Yes. I've not seen coverage of it in Scotland but it's been well researched in the US and covered lately in the UK. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/apr/04/i-was-the-only-black-kid-in-the-pool-why-swimming-is-so-white https://voice4change-england.com/swimming-for-all-poolside-or-at-the-beach-ethnic-minorities-face-barriers/

I didn't know what you meant there and had to google it. Ah. I must have missed that programme. I had thought it might be something to do with omnitwat Tim Lovejoy - as expertly sent up on Charlie Brooker's show:

It's quite satisfying to be red dotted on an innocuous post by people you've long had on ignore. Gives a little reassurance that you made a good call.

Without knowing how it happened that's incredibly harsh. From what I've read a child inadvertently stepped over the edge and the others died trying to save them. They'll have seen lots of other people in the water and it was a completely calm day. It's easy for us to sit and judge when we already had some awareness of the dangers, but some people have genuinely never come across the information needed to appreciate the level of risk. Were our parents idiots for letting us sit between the front seats of the car, without seat belts on? Because when I was young everyone did that.

100% this. I can only think that those arguing against this kind of thing are doing so to maintain their unrelated overarching ideologies.

The problem with "it's parents' job" is this: What if the parents never learned to swim? What if the parents come from a community in which nobody swims? Fk them kids? If we only did things that worked on bukcie'd up 17 yr olds we'd never do anything. That's not exactly a great way of addressing public policy. I specifically said, " the signs will do nothing for the daft kids but it might save some more sensible people."