A bit more about north Devon gipsies then. They don't live in caravans, they live in houses, they're not on the dole.

They work doing barn conversions, run farms, run scrap metal businesses, build roads and tarmac driveways that melt in the sun; they'll steal anything that isn't screwed down and love to fight at weddings.

I love the comments about the plausibility of my posts on the topic, perhaps we should be strapped to lie detectors while posting in cyber space.

If we had lie detectors and breathalysers there would be a lot less traffic.

lol HBG...only at the weeknds though hey

I wouldn't disagree with any of the above, it was just the cheque book bit that took me by surprise.

Guess they must have been damned good forgeries.

Fin de Semana? I'm afraid it's true. We could all handle seven days a week in our twenties, six days a week in our thirties, five days in our forties and then the hair turns grey and another two decades later we start to wobble.

The pensions don't compensate for the losses, and we start looking at the blue pill adverts. We need blood tests to tell us we're getting old; my Spanish quack banned me from eggs and cheese, alcohol and fags, and recommended long walks.

Christ, I walk miles every day already, does he want me to start to start jogging again? I lie to him anyway, I admit to a bottle of Rioja at weekends, but I sometimes have two, and I'm still lying . . .

you mean you fail to tell him that the offy is 3 miles away, hence the walking...

My Docs long past caring about me.

I just keep taking my meds .............. occasionally swilled down with the odd shot of brandy.

There's no sensible answer to it. It reminds me of the song about not wanting to get old, something about 'my generation' where the guy used to smash up his guitar. That was my time too, I never wanted to get old.

I'm not that old now, just steadying up a bit. I've swopped the whisky and vodka for the wine, and I'm trying to convince myself it tastes better, but it's a lie, it takes like shite, no matter how expensive it is.

The saying I've used most in my life is 'a pint of lager and a packet of crisps please'.

I miss it.

HBG, please don't take offense, (I'm sure it will give you a chuckle), but I was reading an article today and thought of you...

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/...cle1350408.ece

well Stu, so far as I know (and it hasn't been commented on BE), no one has put the brain of a reptile into the head of a human.
but a reptile, like most wild animals, kills for food IIRC man is the only one that kills for pleasure or revenge or any other emotion - although all will kill out of fear.
as such "monsters" only live in our dreams/nightmares.
those who do such things probably have screw loose, or as someone once said - they have a miswired brain, they have difficulty in understanding right from wrong. So theory says that is may be possible to spot it before they do any harm. But any action taken against them would again be fraught with Human Rights problems.

Human Rights should be (as originally intended) to be a basic standard of living within the community. To expand it to give additional rights is wrong.
As is the continual tweaking of prisoners rights, giving them rights to vote (NO) rights to TV (NO) etc etc.
And if a prisoner has shown remorse reducing the sentence (NO)
They have been removed from the community to safeguard the majority from the few, failure to do so as in this case http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...rdy-trial.html
has now left people wondering how he got off the first time.

`

No offence whatsoever, and the Sunday Times is now subscription free!

I hate to point it out, but the European Court of Human Rights has nothing to do with the EU.

It appears to be run in a very similar biased and arse licking manner as the EU from what I gather.

For instance the Russians only agreed to become members and were readily accepted on condition that their own judges should take part in any judgements affecting their own country.

Now what could be fairer and more unbiased than that I ask you ?

Off course the situation in Russia is so perfect I'm sure they don't need them anyway.

And I'm not sure the likes of judges from Macedonia, Azerbaijan, Albania el al are necessarily the best people to be dictating to us about Human Rights. Having watched some film of the way their people, their kids are treated in mental institutions, chained up and treated worse than animals, I'd say some of these are the last people to be sitting in judgement on Human Rights.

Whereas in the Uk we limit ourselves to ripping unborn children from the wombs of mentally ill foreign women, putting the babies into care and sending the women home without them.

I love the drama, "ripping" it out! The child was removed by caesarean from a woman that had suffered a mental breakdown and was taken to a psychiatric hospital and sectioned under the Mental Health Act "in her best interests". Now rightly or wrongly, medical staff that were better informed than you about her exact state of health at the time (she had a history of mental illness) decided to remove the baby. That was hardly a decision that was taken lightly, and I'm sure she'll be handsomely rewarded if it was judged to be wrong.