Cheshire Setter

It's a bit strange you should only get all this now. Down in South Cheshire and the Midlands the last of last week's snow has finally been rained away. Yesterday evening was positively balmy at 8 degrees.

I found the best possible thing you can do for weight loss and health is to have kids. Nothing in life is more important than being the best parent you can possibly be... and that means educating your kids well, setting an example and showing them how to be fit and healthy. Worked for me - I wasn’t massively overweight in my younger years but I was very unfit and unhealthy. That doesn’t mean I’m perfect now but I do try and set an example to my kids by taking them for exercise and eating healthily, which is good for both me and them. And the best thing about doing it for your kids is there are absolutely no excuses for failure! ==== Also (and this may be a bit controversial) the missus has me eating a vegan diet for 6 days a week. Admittedly this wasn’t driven by concern for global warming (although I try to do my bit). However, it has made a difference to my health and well-being, despite being a sceptic. I still eat meat and dairy one at least one day a week which makes it more of a treat! So I’m not a very good vegan

Cheers. I don’t know how you found that but that’s a load of new (old) artists to check out! All I need is a cassette player!

When I was a teenager in the 90s I spent a year living in a place called Moss Side in Manchester. It had a bad reputation for crime, but there was a great pirate radio station called Frontline FM that played mostly reggae music. However, every Wednesday morning (I think) there was a guy who would play contemporary African music. I taped his show one morning and kept the tape for years, eventually buying the albums of all the singers on that morning’s show. On a day like today, when the sun is shining but it’s cold outside, it’s great to sit by the window and bake in the sun rays listening to what I think is the ultimate chillout track for summer. Try it, might not be to everyone’s taste but for me there’s nothing better to take me to a warm place:

Dude, that’s pretty pedantic, but disciplined... Some people lose 3 lbs just from a visit to the bathroom every morning

For those with Amazon Prime I'd recommend taking a look at the dark comedy 'Patriot'. It's about a US intelligence agent working under non-official cover overseas for his Dad, who is the Director of Intelligence. The protagonist is a little bit of an anti-hero who perseveres with his thankless job, and writes folk songs about what he's been through. Very, very original.

Errrm.... wasn't Richard Attenborough a director, NOT a naturalist? I'm 100% certain Lee Harvey Oswald didn't assassinate anybody

Do you know what? I’d totally forgotten about Watkins. How is George Williams looking? Any sound bites?

...and was even available in my local supermarket when we lived in Dubai! At a slightly elevated price of course ?

I love Haggis. I think the poor reputation it gets is down to people trying it for the first time and being served a poorly made one, which probably puts them off for life as the flavour sticks around for a while. There’s an cool little place in Edinburgh, called Maxie’s. If you leave the castle on the main strip and take your first right back on yourself down the hill, it’s on the left side. They do a nice mix of dishes with haggis, or just the standard neeps tatties thing for the tourists, but most importantly they have a decent range of whiskies to wash it down.

Ah, so I didn’t do anything evil by eating bear then? Worried it may have been on the endangered list or something. I wouldn’t normally eat that sort of stuff but it seemed the safest bet out of all the items on the menu! Another story on the morality of food choices: I once ended up being taken into a little basement restaurant in Guangzhou, China by two scruffy ‘people’s power plant’ workers who couldn’t speak English (long story). There was a dirty old card with black and white photos but no writing - which I assume was the menu although I didn’t recognise the items as food - and I just pointed to a few things randomly... I have no idea what I ate, apart from a few items like snake and chickens feet... the most worrying thing was a broth with little furry paw things in it ? Having said all that, the two guys paid for it all which shocked me as they were very poor and you don’t expect hospitality in China. I think they were just impressed that a westerner could pick peanuts up using chopsticks!

Great thread. Only just discovered it... Don't think I've tried Caribou yet but I once ate Bear and Elk Pelmeni on Xmas Day in Moscow (it's early Jan over there not 25 Dec). I'm not sure whether it's okay to eat bear (Elk probably fine) but it didn't seem to really stand out as having a lot of flavour.

TRL gets more like RLFANS every day. It’s like Benjamin Button.

Back in the day, the club’s website had its own forum. I think it was from about 1999 to the mid-2000s. There was an infamous poster who went under the handle of ‘Wire2004’ who used to get ripped for some crazy views. I wonder what happened to him? Some posters like me ended up on RLFANS and I didn’t even discover this forum until a few years ago.

I have total sympathy for you on the first occasion this happened, but you obviously haven't learned if you keep going back! ?