I think this absolutely brilliant piece might contain one of my favourite ever burns: "In any event, I presume what Altman actually did was hire a nanny."

Nothing screams "thing I have to do" when on holiday than "this city has a funicular"

Academics agree: ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/ne...

The National Parking Platform (NPP) Paying for parking across the UK is getting easier. The National Parking Platform makes it simple for drivers to use their preferred app in more places. Whether they value flexibility or simplicity, t...

It’s true! It’s only live in a few areas so far, but hopefully will be more widely available soon. www.npp.org.uk#about

You’ll be able to pick one app and have it work in all local council run car parks, and the hope is that it becomes a defacto standard for private ones as well.

Yes, absolutely

This email could have been a conversation in leather armchairs in front of a roaring fire

My Dad tells a story of a colleague with a scar on his wrist from where his metal watch strap went between a car’s battery and chassis.

I did a job where we installed a 48V battery bank made of 2V batteries, each of which held (iirc) 500Ah. I was extremely anal about keeping everything metal away from them whilst we wired them up.

Insulated torque wrenches are a good thing to know about.

I have done quite a bit of work with batteries in my time, and have had a few near misses. Even if you keep the voltage down, a short circuit (e.g from a dropped tool) will result in Bad Things. Insulated tools are essential, and ideally each module should have its own contactor and fuse.

Working in a university brings this home. My website is old enough to be studying for a PhD.

I once went to a village in Cambridgeshire with some fellow activists to see if cycling provision could be improved. Seeing us standing around a clipboard drawing on a map, a local resident greeted us with "oh god, what are they going to do now?!"

As you say, people dislike even the idea of change.

I thought of him, but a PM called English would not be seen as a unifying figure here in Wales!

Pete Buttigieg over here taking notes and changing his name to Pete America 😂

Needs a pilots licence so he can be Captain Pete America!

Great news from Budapest, but nobody seems to have clocked that Péter Magyar's name means "Peter Hungarian". If this was a film, the scriptwriter would have been told it was too on-the-nose for a man-of-the-people politician. It's like a British Prime Minister called Peter British.

Thanks! I'll have a read!

Oh absolutely, and still is. (Tbf, they are different origins although hilariously I found that Mothering Sunday was revived in the UK in the 1940s/50s because American servicemen brought over the idea of Mother’s Day!)

Talk to East Asian people and they look down on them as poor-people food to be eaten only when there’s no rice. Some genius managed to sell them in the West as premium and exciting. It’s as if we were selling turnips to Taiwan as some superior vegetable

Also on the banned list: Fathers’ Day. (“Not a church festival, just an American commercial idea, and anyway every day is Fathers’ Day”, was my Mum’s line)

My parents were strict about TV: no Saturday morning kids TV ever (I still have never seen Airwolf!), and no channel-hopping to see what’s on. We also weren’t allowed to watch Grange Hill or other similar shows depicting kids our age.

Also, no Halloween, because it was anti-Christian and American.

Pension Credit Pension Credit is extra money for pensioners to bring your weekly income up to a minimum amount - what you'll get, apply, eligibility.

Just looked - a nasty little loophole means that pension contributions made through salary sacrifice (which saves tax) are nonrefundable - eugh.

I do think you might qualify for pension credit though: www.gov.uk/pension-cred...

The two year rule on pensions really sucks. I left the BBC and their excellent pension scheme within that two year window and I just got a cheque with my contributions, minus tax.

Me too!

Ouch. The state pension definitely works against people who don’t get the full 30 qualifying years. But there’s also the issue of employer’s pensions: my parents’ generations mostly had defined benefit pensions whereas from the 90s onwards those don’t exist outside the public sector

Definitely! Stephen Bush wrote about this in the FT very recently. Retirees with money and time are keeping the UK going

That seems ill-judged. I was thinking a step below this in terms of work - stuff that would typically be funded from ongoing spend rather than capital works making significant changes.

(I have a whole other thing about market towns and parking for another time)

I can certainly believe it. For your typical local voter they want the council to empty the bins, repair the roads and keep the place clean and tidy. All the other stuff the councils do is hidden to them.

Sorry! Bluesky's search facility seems to make searching for this stuff really hard.

Mine too!