My understanding is that the fanciest washing machines are harder and more expensive to fix, but that could have been a repair guy trying to make me feel better about our less fancy one.

What a fascinating thing! Pre-1990 phone number and pre-late-80s masthead! (May still have been used later, of course.) I believe that paragraphing rule was standard for things given to newspaper typesetters; maybe your manuscript was meant to go straight through to setting...

AFAICT this is about "A-format," the size highbrow British readers associate with older Penguins. There used to be a separate wider distribution network for it in Britain too - the system that brought romance novels to newsagents - but I think it hit a wall sooner.

Yep. The Penguin shop will sell you one new for slightly over 900 quid, or the later, squarer version in one of several colours for 700 and something. I think the middle gap takes your newspaper, or did.

Apologies, condensed milk not evaporated (works even worse if you inadvertently boil a tin of sweetcorn instead, as my grandmother once did - though she switched pudding plan after opening the tin)

Making dulce de leche yourself - by cooking a tin of evaporated milk for two hours before you open it - is the great gimmick of the original banoffee recipe, though I don't think it mentions that what you've made is called dulce de leche

One odd exception here is that travel guides can become compulsive reading once they're *sufficiently* outdated. I treasure my @kirkdalebooks.bsky.social bargain-bin copy of The Lonely Planet Guide to Eastern Europe on a Shoestring (first edition, April 1989), to which that probably happened fast.

I've heard it, and it probably existed in British English once too, because it survived in printers' pronunciation of the old named type sizes. ("Long Primer" was c. 10pt, "Great Primer" c. 18pt; 9pt was Bourgeois, pronounced "Burjoyce", and 6pt "Nonpareil", said "Nomprul".)

Not much else around there iirc, which assuming no one will let you touch the agricultural land might make both that and the "build houses!" alternative trickier than the station position would suggest. (Caveat: Don't know the area really, though I have got lost in it trying to cycle to Nottingham.)

These are fascinating, thank you! It reads as if the primary enforcement mechanism — explicitly in England and implicitly in the U.S. text — was the threat of confiscating luggage, with cash up front as a fallback where that wouldn't answer.

What a strange, ominous thing! There appears to be an "option to buy" the paperback, but only after you've rented it ($54.99 for a semester). And a crossed-out "list price" another link away of $114.99, without a clear sense of what that's the list price for...

Think DA also didn't follow right turns by some of his mates during his lifetime. (I remember being delighted and then sad to find Michael Bywater's personal website, which at that time had a fair amount of "Global warming? Pah!" on it. This is vague memory rather than a proper sense of anything.)

Thank you — was guessing so, and sorry for jumping in.

If one reads it as "about 25% *each* of..." both the arithmetic and the way of breaking down the numbers make more sense. (Which isn't to say that's right, of course.)

I don't think I'm anywhere near the curves, but I read the newsletter and would be interested.

For writing this, the gods sent me a puncture, and then the loveliest interaction I've had with a shop of any kind in some time (Lindo 2 Wheels, the tiny and wildly overstuffed toy and bike shop in Sydenham)

In the good version, you're talking to someone who resents being taken from fixing a thing they love in order to sell you a thing they also love and that they expect you to besmirch and break. The bad version involves a separate salesperson who has absorbed that attitude but lacks the knowledge.

Given the apparent effect of rumours about replacing Reeves, the level of potential economic silliness required to set off a panic might not be very high...

Nothing to apologise for, replied just as you were sending this - wonderful to have enthused, and to have been thanked

That's a great one, and it's what I meant when I was taking about rewriting "Annus Mirabilis"! (Sex began "Between end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles' first LP", per the Larkin poem.)

She is a remarkable lyricist in general (I Don't Really Care For You, on the first album, has the line "Oh the Marian Keyes of it all!' *and* a verse that rewrites Larkin's "Annus Mirabilis" and gets away with it.)

The son's are exactly what you would imagine a Mr Men book would be, if you didn't have much imagination. The dad's, while awful, are weirder than that.

You may both have read this — I'm almost certain Richard has — but the LRB had a memorable Jenny Turner report from a previous Battle of Ideas: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

I should have known it would have been the Dragon! (And not assumed it was a bloke, too.)

As someone who used to live next to the Broxtowe border - the wall would presumably run through that derelict golf course up from Bramcote Lane shops - it really doesn't make sense to have boundaries that treat that bit and Beeston as Not Nottingham.

I remember @cricketerik.bsky.social, who then covered pubs in Nottingham, talking about this at the time, and quoting a landlord as saying, "It's like the government built me an extension."

The flavour of it is definitely American right-wing. Original coinage appears to be as Bush Derangement Syndrome in 2003, by Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post

The question "How would a reasonable person interpret this?" isn't so helpful when someone is speaking to a carefully assembled audience of unreasonable people...

It also refers to what appears to be a regular column in The Times: share.google/inW9XOuepHMb...

You may need a correction of your own here - the fonts strongly suggest that was from The Times