JonM

Talkin tarn looks very nice. There's quite a big hole in the north pennines/ yorkshire dales/ south lakeland in terms of parkrun coverage.

If you look at the England team today, the players mostly come from a small number of sources. 1 People who went to Private or Public schools (Zak Crawley, Jos Buttler, Ollie Robinson etc.) 2 Sons of immigrants from cricket playing countries (Haseeb Hamed, Ben Stokes etc.) 3 People who learned to play cricket abroad but who came to England to play professional cricket (Dawid Malan, Jofra Archer). 4 People who are the sons of professional cricketers (Stuart Broad, Jonny Bairstow). 5 People who came through club cricket, usually in the north (Joe Root, Jimmy Anderson, Mark Wood). There's people like Sam Cowan who fit more than one of those categories. Long term problem we have is that the numbers from categories 2,3 and 5 are falling and category 4 is a pretty small number of people.

It's the same sort of magical thinking that makes out that the England RL team will be improved by a smaller SL, or a different play-off format, or adding/removing relegation.

Leigh won the league in the 1980s. They've got several decades of waiting to catch up with Warrington I do think we've got to the point where the relentless negativity of fans on social media is putting off wealthy people from spending their money on RL clubs. You end up with the kind of people who don't care what others think as a result.

No - the remaining teams are mostly competing in Federale Poule 4 - which contains teams which formerly played in the Rhones-Alpes and Ile-du-France leagues. There were teams like Roanne (former winners of both Lord Derby Cup and Elite 1) in the Rhones-Alpes area who've disappeared at senior level in the last few years.

There was a whole league in the Rhone-Alpes, and 4-5 teams in Lyon, only a few years ago. Ile-du-France had its own league with a similar number of teams in Paris until recently, too.

I doubt anyone will have a prediction for top 3 that doesn't include both Leigh and Fev. If a bookie was offering 7/4, I'd consider that a value bet.

St Ives played some games in 2021, but didn't complete the season in the East Rugby League. Bedford Tigers ran two mens sides last year and a women's team, and hope to add a second womens team this year. Eastern Rhinos still going too. Ten teams in the East RL for 2022, with some clubs from the East playing in the southern conference too. Plenty of Essex teams - Brentwood, Southend, Canvey Island.

Chatillon are operating a joint team with Paris Charenton in Federale Poule 4, which also includes Marseille, two teams from the Vaucluse area (around Avignon), another Paris team (Corbeil) and Vaulx-en-Velin from Lyon.

The story of how it was written is interesting in itself. Very, very unusual to get a £1 million advance (and a huge print run and translation into 15+ languages before publication) for a debut novel that she'd written in her spare time over the course of more than a decade.

One of the most memorable pieces of fiction I've read in years. Nothing like her previous one, and it's the kind of book that a lot of people will hate I think.

46-6 the final score.

Not embarrassing at all. My son could do 17 minutes previously, but he's had a (not running-related) injury which stopped him doing anything for a year and is currently going round in 35-40 minutes. Plenty of people behind him still. The whole point of parkrun is you go at your own speed - plenty of people run a bit, walk a bit or just walk round.

You may well end up still paying national insurance, of course, because that's calculated on a weekly basis, not annually. Any week where you earn over £184 you will get some deduction for NI. Seeing as I'm in the 45% tax bracket, I reckon it should be me paying for the drinks

As you said in your post though, it's about tv revenue, and Bangladeshi tv doesn't provide any, which is why they get a 2 game test series once per decade or so. We go there March next year, but only for ODI & T20 games.