Meenzer

In hindsight the barmy thing about that is it feels like that's what finished off the Major administration, but actually you had the Tim Yeo, David Ashby and Stephen Milligan stories all within about six weeks of each other (and Lord Caithness's wife's suicide too) - more than three years before the 1997 election. At least we'll hopefully be rid of this lot sooner.

My partner was 19 when we first got together. That would have been illegal when Liam O'Brien went over the wall, to pick a historical event at random

Benjamin Zephaniah.

It'll just be trying to pretend he's in control on Rwanda. They're going to cling on to power as long as possible in the hope that things turn around for them.

The cashless society tinfoil hat brigade are very real, yes. Mind you, if Parky was still around/alive, I'm sure he'd be one of them.

When he realised it was a great way of meeting stock image patients.

Only to Premier League games, soz

It is!

Group F is nicely pedestrian, cue a couple of Penaldo hat-tricks

I agree that believing there's nothing afterwards makes it hard to avoid being a grim nihilist sometimes. I try and spin it into a more positive "none of this matters so why worry?" where I can, but that's easier said than done. More than what comes after it, I wish we as a society could engage more effectively with the end of life. My mother is currently slowly - too slowly - succumbing to the prize-winning combination of Parkinson's and dementia, and (in addition to sadness about what's happening in the here and now, obviously) it makes me worry about my own eventual decline, because I don't want to end up being a burden to anyone. I'd love to think that, by then, we'll have managed to come up with responsible and non-traumatic ways of deciding when to flip our own 'off' switch that don't have massive financial or legal implications, but it seems unlikely. The two things probably aren't unconnected, though - if there weren't as many people worried about doing the right thing to get the afterlife they imagine for themselves, we'd probably have a more grown-up relationship with death in the first place.

Anthrax's Sound Of White Noise was the last great metal album anyway.

Liverfail of New York, more like

The tonal shift between those two jokes is impressive

Imagine actually typing the words "my mother Sticky Vicky passed away today"

I'll have been past that building hundreds if not thousands of times and never realised that's what it was.

Tbh that's also quite feasible, especially with one of the main passport offices etc. being around here - there's plenty of options. Probably feels like less of a life sentence when you're not going down that route in your early 20s too

Much appreciated, thank you!

Teaching it is, then!

Actually, speaking of what a doss accounting appears to be, what's the training situation like for old farts looking for a new career direction? I'm weighing up my options for the fairly likely event of my job ceasing to exist in the not too distant future, and given that I've been translating IFRS and local GAAP financial reports for 20+ years and seem to be able to point out when the people preparing them have made obvious errors, I suppose it'd be a logical avenue to explore. Being officially mid-40s now, though, I'm concerned about old dogs/new tricks syndrome. Mind, that'd be the case for almost anything I do...

My main takeaway from that graph is that we need to be having more pandemics. Lower immigration to keep the gammons happy, plus the gammons are disproportionately more likely to die. Everyone's a winner

I suppose there's a causation vs. correlation thing insofar as those productive people under FoM were also working in an economy that could trade far more easily with the countries they came from. Today's migrants are entering a more restricted economy in the first place.