David Peckham

Well, quite. Just, for God's sake, don't mention tromboning/tromboner to the staff or band if you pop in for their Sunday lunch 'Jazz & Roast' experience. And probably best not to take the family with you first time. Just in case. Jazzer, you may want to think about changing your username in the light of all this. The English language can be a nightmare sometimes. Sue, I tried to post it as link, but it wouldn't allow me to. You're on your own, but the 'About Us/Our Story' sections are genuinely uplifting and I've not been bombarded with anything. I wouldn't recommend searching for 'tromboning' though.

All your questions answered, Sue! Heavencircle.com I've haven't been quite so confused since I searched for a recipe from 'Ainsley's (Harriott) Big Cook Out' and Google returned something very different. I must have misspelled something. I think I'll give the 'Jazz and Roast' a miss, just to be on the safe side.

Well, this is a bit more interesting than 'Saturday Kitchen'. Did anyone else not know what a 'Shibari Artist' was?

Large SUVs are a tiny minority, but you seem unduly focussed on them. Particularly the stats based on US models which aren't available here. The SUVs available in the UK are not twice as likely to kill an adult or eight times as likely to kill a child. Have a look at the diagram you posted and the photos Rockets posted. Look at the difference in scale. The majority of SUVs in the UK, even the largest, would fall into the middle left category, the one where there is no increase in pedestrian injuries. The increase in car size started well before the growth in SUV sales - the Fiesta grew by up to 50% over the 47 years it was around. That wasn't driven by fashion. A major part of it was the increase in safety features, but we are getting bigger too - manufacturers reacted to this by building larger cars. It's not simply marketing and it will be exacerbated by the demand for longer ranges, and therefore bigger batteries, in EVs. I don't think anyone could rationalise accepting larger, inappropriate vehicles. I certainly can't, but clearly wealth is no guarantee of taste. I think they're crass as well, but I just don't see them as the existential threat the article at the start of the thread suggests they are.

Euro NCAP gives an overall rating (1-5 stars) but also breaks this down over four categories, one of which is VRU (Vulnerable Road User). This is pedestrians and cyclists. The Puma scored 77%, the Golf 76%. I'd say that's a broadly similar outcome. The idea that Defenders and their ilk are all over Dulwich isn't backed up by numbers. Full size SUVs are a tiny part of the market. There's, at most, 75,000 Defenders been sold in the UK since they were introduced in 2020. That's 0.25% of the total cars in the UK. One in every 400. If you're seeing them everywhere in Dulwich I'd get your eyes tested or take a little water with it next time.

Euro NCAP is voluntary, but it's still a valid point of comparison. Whether you're hit by the UK's best selling hatchback or best selling SUV, at any given speed, the outcome will be broadly the same. I've always found Golf drivers to be a slightly classier bunch than Ford drivers in general, so that may influence your choice on whom you're hit by. Apart from people driving 15-20 year old Golf GTIs. They're generally arseholes. As regards safest cars, Volvo and Subaru are always close to the top for both passengers and pedestrians. That does seem a little counterintuitive, considering both their ranges are almost exclusively SUVs and large estate cars.

But you're using statistics from US studies, which include the big Ford, Chevrolet and Ram 'trucks'. They're as overweight as Lizzo and as slab-fronted as Harry Maguire's forehead or an Easter Island statue. They're also very badly driven. PJ O'Rourke once called them: 'The world's only beer-guided motor vehicle.' Of course these behemoths are more dangerous than a standard hatchback, but they aren't available on the UK market. In general, they're not type-approved for the UK. They're irrelevant to what's happening here. The change here has been from hatchbacks to 'SUV style' vehicles built on hatchback platforms and, in general, designers have recognised how the cars will be used. When the Puma was introduced it scored 77% in the Euro NCAP VRU (Vulnerable Road User) tests, the contemporary VW Golf scored 76%. The 'SUV' is actually a tiny bit safer to be hit by if you're a pedestrian or cyclist. It's also lighter and less powerful than the Golf. It isn't four wheel drive. Frankly, I've seen teenagers with bigger and scarier trainers than the Ford Puma, but it's still considered an SUV. Land Rover has less than 2% of the car market in the UK, their largest car is their lowest volume seller here. Large SUVs are not everywhere. I don't like SUVs at all. The larger ones are ostentatious and over engineered for what they're used for and the smaller ones are basically hatchbacks in combat gear. They're crap and tasteless, they dominate the sales charts but they're not the menace many are suggesting based on conflating two sets of data.

There are no cars weighing 3 tonnes on the UK market, SUV or otherwise. The only SUVs over 2.5 tonnes start at £140k and can run to over £300k. For obvious reasons, they're really not on every corner. The 3 top selling cars in the UK last year were the Ford Puma, the Kia Sportage and the Nissan Qashqai. All fall under the SUV banner, but all weigh around 1.5 tonnes - the same as a VW Golf, the best selling standard family hatchback. There are SUVs that are inappropriate for urban streets, but the idea that there's an 'epidemic' of oversized killing machines is hysterical.

The problem with that article is that much of the safety statistics quoted are from the US, a market where the two best selling vehicles are precisely the very large 'Body on Chassis' vehicles which Penguin has mentioned - true SUVs. Those vehicles, and those like them, are not available on the UK market - we have a thing called 'taste' here. The best selling vehicle in the UK last year was the Ford Puma, a car that would fall under the broader SUV/crossover description, but actually weighs no more than a VW Golf. I don't like SUVs/crossovers - I think they're ugly & don't drive particularly well, but it's a pretty shoddy piece of journalism based on pretty ropey data and the writer's own prejudices.

To be fair, anyone wearing a hard hat & tool belt after 8 pm is either seven Stellas into a post-site session or a member of a Village People tribute band. Neither is particularly appealing. The hat/hood thing is pretty commonplace in loads of places now, not just Bromley - it's for CCTV. They've had a few problems in there in the past, you can see why they've had to make some changes. Strangely enough, curing the gents of the pong probably won't have helped. You could barely go in there without holding your breath, let alone take a great, big nasal draught of something.

The English have always been naturally self-deprecating. Having a pop at politicians of all hues is just an extension of that. It's like holding a mirror up to ourselves. We get what we voted for. Shit. Ever since Peter Cook et al lampooned MacMillan, through to Mike Yarwood, Yes Minister, Spitting Image and The Thick of It, they've felt far happier taking the piss out of politicians rather than praising them. It's funnier and, frankly, far easier. I don't expect a cabinet to accurately reflect society at large, but people are becoming less engaged with politics. 2024 was the lowest turnout in 20 years, despite there being an awful lot for people to be motivated to vote about. Maybe that can be put down to the rise of a politico class/wonkocracy who planned their career path to be being a politician at the same age most of us still thought that being an astronaut, princess or dinosaur was a perfectly reasonable career choice. I just find them uninspiring and slightly 'Stepford Wives'. It's like being governed by a gaggle of management consultants with Master's degrees in 'Public Policy'. This cabinet is pretty homogeneous in it's background, as well. Out of the 'Big Four', three went to Oxford. Three represent 'inner' London constituencies. Two are lawyers, two are 'economists'. Their total experience outside of the public sector and politics is less than 20 years. That's not a great breadth of knowledge. There's also the Minister for Business who has never actually worked in a business and a Minister for Rural Affairs who represents beautiful, bucolic Croydon. That does seem silly enough to take the piss out of.

It depends how you define 'Metropolitan Elite'. The cabinet is heavily skewed to the Oxbridge-educated, to lawyers, and particularly to those who went straight from university into think tanks or parliamentary and union researcher posts. It's a long way from being representative of the workforce in general. There's very little private sector experience, but that's probably a good thing given the misadventures of Reevesy and Haigho when they dipped their toes in it. It is an improvement on the 'Public School & PPE at Oxford' Tory cabal, but still smacks of a political class well removed from the electorate. It's got four members who are related to prominent Labour figures, past and present. It's still very much an 'Elite'. 19 out of 22 in the cabinet represent either a constuency in a Metropolitan county (England's six largest cities) or one in another large city. One is in the House of Lords. One is in Brighton & Hove. The other represents Swindon, which is about as close as you'll get to a proper city in Wiltshire - I'm disregarding Old Sarum. You're not even allowed to take your pig into a pub in Swindon, elsewhere in Wiltshire you probably won't get in without one. Believe me, I've tried. The cabinet really couldn't be more 'Metropolitan'. Even the stench of Rayner's chips & gravy isn't enough to cover the whiff of the seven-vegetable tagine suppers.

It looks particularly daft when that employer is the UK's largest insurer. I'd imagine they know a thing or two about fraud.

To be honest, I'd never noticed it until it was mentioned on here. It's really subtle, but there's a small subscript/signature in the bottom right of the added bit saying 'Be Here Now'. I've tried to Google that, but it just comes up with Oasis's overproduced, yet underwhelming, third album of the same name. I wonder whether was influenced by this: https://metro.co.uk/2024/11/11/bizarre-london-sign-directions-california-finally-corrected-15-years-21971040/

It's actually an official sign, it's just the bottom third that's been covered over by the Poundland Banksy. The font gives it away. It used to be sign-posted to Brixton, if I remember correctly.