Nice people thread part 5 - nicely does it

lostinrates

Our road is being patched and my house is shaking. I was hoping i could get them to roll the old chippings on my shoddy drive but they have already sold them.:(. They all rolled up and parked on my drive happily though. Grrrr. Shows how much differenc pe my new fence and baby hedge in the middle of the drive has really made. . I was feeling really good about that too. . Of course i told them i don 't mind them parking there. No point in being difficult for the sake if it.

chewmylegoff

zagubov wrote: »

I walk the dog down a lane of wooden cottages all smaller than our old house. Lovely to look at, but no room to swing a cat. I think many of our neighbouring countries sell houses by the square metre rather than by the room.

As David Starkey is on telly right now I've realised that he can't be a major poster on the forum at this minute, despite the fact that most posters on other threads don't seem to ever have had a thought that wasn't worth saying out loud or posting.;)

David starkey is a right knob on question time. I hate it when people won't let others finish what they are saying. He's just dismissive of any counter argument without providing any reasoning.

His views probably wouldn't come across quite so badly if instead of butting in with ludicrous statements, he spent some time being quiet and thinking about what he is about to say.

lostinrates

chewmylegoff wrote: »

David starkey is a right knob on question time. I hate it when people won't let epithets finish what they are saying. He's just dismissive of any counter argument without providing any reasoning.

His views probably wouldn't come across quite so badly if instead of butting in with ludicrous statements, he spent some time being quiet and thinking about what he is about to say.

Starkey seems to be getting 'worse' with age. I find it hilarious when he is putiing people to rights about their opinions and delivery. He did that jamie oliver school thing and there was one point where he clearly felt in the right (and was i think , cannot remember) but behaved as nothing better than a bully to a child. He often defeats his own arguments, not because they are worng but because instead of his dilvery making his thoughts unarguable weapons, his behavious makes them poorly wieghts areows, that fly in opposite directions.....

Shame when such thinkers and pele prepared to say the unpopular are also throughroughly soaked in their own bile juices.

PasturesNew

I've never heard of David Starkey and wouldn't watch something like Question Time on the telly because most people's discussions/arguments are either of no interest to me, or they've clearly not go t a clue.

The person I can't BEAR to even watch is that Diane Abbott.... she has THE most peculiar and bizarre mannerisms and THE most fake/affected voice... and a peculiar and bizarre way of nodding her head in a strange patronising way. Bizarre woman, strange voice.... !!!!!! is that all about?

vivatifosi

I know who David Starkey is Pastures. He's a brainy historian who writes books about Britain that nobody wants to borrow. That's opposed to Stephen Hawking, who is a brainy scientist who writes books about the Universe that everyone wants to borrow but nobody actually reads. And Jeremy Clarkson, a not so brainy motormouth who writes books that many want to burn rather than borrow. All of them can be found in local libraries and periodically on the BBC.

I agree with you re Diane Abbot btw.

silvercar

Question for NP. What is the furthest flight you would take for a long weekend away?

lostinrates

silvercar wrote: »

Question for NP. What is the furthest flight you would take for a long weekend away?

Fil used to do london/ny every weekend.

In world where i didnOthave critters and dod have good health i would consider that, or morocco. I would prefer ashort lux stay to a longer one less lux i think.

vivatifosi

silvercar wrote: »

Question for NP. What is the furthest flight you would take for a long weekend away?

Probably the USA. We've been to Boston, New York, Orlando and Los Angeles for long weekends. LA is a bit of a killer for that amount of time though so I think that the east coast works better. We're currently looking at Washington for a long weekend.

In the other direction a lot of people go to the Middle East, one day I'll get round to visiting Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi but haven't been yet.

Although its a longer flight, I know people who have been to S Africa for a long weekend and loved it. It isn't as difficult as it sounds as there isn't much if any change in time zones.

My long weekends tend to be 4 days though NY I went for 3. It isn't so much the length of flight that's the issue but the amount of hours you need to change in both directions in a short period of time. 5 is about all I can cope with. Our favourite weekend away destination is Barcelona, I try and get there a couple of times a year.

PasturesNew

silvercar wrote: »

Question for NP. What is the furthest flight you would take for a long weekend away?

I've almost never been on a plane. 30 minutes tops has to be the answer.... any further and I might be somewhere furren where I wouldn't know what I was doing.

LydiaJ

chewmylegoff wrote: »

I thought catchment areas were being scrapped? I'm sure there was some chat about it under the last govt? Did the policy to scrap catchment areas get scrapped, or am I just talking nonsense?

Yes, they got scrapped. There's no longer a national network of defined catchment areas, and living in a particular place doesn't give you an automatic right to go to a particular school. Every school can create its own admissions criteria, within certain rules.

For anyone who's interested and doesn't already know, here's how it works:

They're not allowed to discriminate on the basis of where you put them in your list of preferences, and the criteria have to be simple enough for everyone to understand. They can't select for ability (unless they're grammar schools in a county that still has them), although specialist academies can give 10% of places on the basis of aptitude for their specialism (and then argue till the cows come home about whether their testing arrangements are properly designed to identify intrinsic aptitude rather than current achievement). Schools can also have "fair banding" arrangements so they test all the children on some measure of ability or intelligence and then admit the same number of kids from each band of, for example, 20% of the kids. Faith schools can have faith criteria, and most schools give priority to siblings. There are also special cases that get priority: always children in care, but often children of armed forces personel returning to the UK from abroad, or something like that. But there aren't very many of them, so I'll ignore them from here on.

In practice, this means that the applicants for each school are put into categories. They could be really simple:
1) Siblings
2) Everyone else
or very complicated:
1) Catholics with siblings at the school
2) Catholics without siblings but who belong to St X's church
3) Other Catholics in the diocese of Y
4) Catholics from further afield
5) Anyone else with siblings at the school
6) Members of other churches
7) Everyone else
(I made that one up, but I've seen similar things.)

The school then has a fixed number of places. They give places to everyone in the first few categories until they get to a category where they haven't got enough places for everyone. Usually, those children are put in order of distance from the school, and the nearest ones get places until all the places have been used up. For a school with simple "siblings, then everyone else" criteria, this creates a de facto catchment area that is circular, centred on the school, and varies in size each year depending on how many children apply and how many have siblings.

So when I said we were "a long way inside the catchment area", that was a simplification of "a lot closer to the school than that circle has ever been in the history of the current admissions criteria". So we're not surprised that he got in.