Living in London all my life, we grew up in a car-less household and my dad would do nearly all of the food shopping for our family of 6 himself (7 for a while when my uncle lived with us while he was studying), carrying it all home on the bus. I am still car-free and can get my shopping home using the bus or my bike on the way home from work. If you can’t do that in your city, then that’s the fault of your city’s planners. It’s a failure of providing good public transport.

If you were fleeing war or persecution, would you not prefer to go to a country where you could speak the language and/or had family? Being able to speak the language would also mean you can start working as soon as your claim is processed. Yes, if I was fleeing war, I would want to go to the first safe place. But after safety, the next thing is being able to actually get on with your life and provide for yourself and family.

For instance I can’t speak Turkish, I find it a very hard language to learn. So if I could choose between settling there and going somewhere like France, Portugal or Spain where I have some proficiency in the languages, I would try to get there, because I’d be able to get into work a lot quicker and become part of a community if my application got approved. And even more so if I knew people there. It’s not a case of being greedy or picky, these people are still humans who need to get on with their lives.

But how is any of this the fault of immigrants? My dad wants to kick me out. If I tell the council I’m being made homeless, I will get sent to a hostel in Luton. According to my tory-loving colleague, this is the fault of asylum seekers.

The actual truth is this is the fault of Thatcher and successive governments selling off council homes. Rich foreign scalpers buy up property and sit on it until it makes them money. There are thousands of empty residential properties gathering dust so they can build up in value for these wealthy scalpers. Flats where £200k can buy you a 25% share of a studio is what’s shown as affordable housing in London. Housing has become a commodity for the rich to trade and profit off, rather than a human need. I’m working class, on a little above minimum wage and soon losing my job again (because of the council, not immigrants. First job I lost was because of Philip Green and his wife being greedy pigs).

Tell me how immigrants are making my life worse, but the wealthy get a pass. Immigrants are keeping a lot of businesses going (just see the Brexit farm debacle).

So you can look for the easy scapegoat if you want, or you can actually look at what’s causing these issues. As People vs Elon showed in their poster, they tell you to blame immigrants so you don’t blame billionaires.

Please do explain for us unenlightened plebs.

Now go look up how she even got British citizenship in the first place, and what she says about asylum seekers and immigrants. Hypocrite of the lowest order.

All I got yesterday was “severe delays on the Victoria line”

In my experience cycling in London, it wouldn’t be a bike lane without some doofus walking on it 😅

I was hoping for a gnome wonderland but it’s just a campsite with garden gnomes :(

You could get a fun park in on the same day though.

Don’t be too hard on yourself, mate.

It was awful. They ditched the Japanese team, who seemed to be the ones that made the original so good. The first series was great, it’s still my favourite show. I was so excited to get series 2, but I never even finished it. Not even interested in getting series 3. It had none of the charm of the original. They chose adult voice actors for the kids and you can tell, whereas the original made a point of having kids voice the kids. I was surprised Chalopin had anything to do with it, because it felt like they’d handed the project over completely to someone else.

My nephews and niece loved the original, it still holds up. I say this as a mega MCoG fangirl, if you were fond of the original, keep your memories of it and stick to rewatching that. The sequel is completely lacking in what made the original so special. Just my opinion.

I’m a Brit of Indian origin, and the way we make tea is like this.

Fill your mug/cup with water/milk in whatever proportion you like. Pour into a saucepan. Add your teabag/tea leaves and any sugar. Heat and stir until you get the desired strength.

I never could like the western way of making tea. It doesn’t taste right to me.

In my family, when we were kids, breakfast traditionally consisted of toast dunked in Indian style tea (still my breakfast now). We also had our own version of eggy fried bread sometimes at tea time, that we’d also dunk in tea. I’m scared I’m going to be called a deviant now 😅

Assuming they’re just regular schrader valves, you don’t need a special tool. You can even just use a pencil or ballpoint if you just want to let out the air. It’s less risky for you than taking out the valve.

I read on another thread the reason is the companies leasing the rolling stock are charging ridiculously high amounts, so the operators are running on tight margins.

For peak, I get it. But the off peak trains I was on were nowhere near capacity. So lower fares may have encouraged more people to use the train than the coach, which takes longer but is significantly cheaper.

Let’s hope nationalisation brings ticket prices down. I was happy to see the South Western is the first to be taken back.

Edit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ceqg73znzzeo

The government cannot guarantee train tickets will get cheaper under renationalisation, as South Western Railway (SWR) was brought into public ownership on Sunday.

Oh well.

He’d just use stabilisers, and call them some silly name like freedom supports or some other such nonsense. See? It has four wheels! Like a car, the best car, no one has a car like this. My doctor says I have a great sense of balance, the biggest balance, nice bank balance, nice bike balance.

It cost me about £60 for one return rail ticket last week 😭 that’s not including the tube fare to get to the station.

I was in Dorset yesterday and the difference between drivers there and here in London is big. Here they’re happy to risk anyone’s life to shave a few seconds off their journey. In Bournemouth, they were stopping at green lights to let us cross, even when there were no other cars behind them. I was keeping an eye out for cyclists too and the drivers were giving them room and stopping to let them turn, etc.

I can access catbox from the UK, no VPN. But videos hosted on it often won’t show up on Connect(although they did until recently), so I have to view them via browser. I can see your images just fine.