Whitey Grandad

It depends on the contract between you and the hire company. You did not sign the hire agreement, you could argue that you were only paying for the hire element and were not acting as guarantor for any other elements of the hire agreement. Contact the credit card company and explain that there has been an unauthorised charge to your card. Don't do it again.

We shall never know. He's gone so deal with it and let's move on. I will say that the football last Saturday was better than any I saw last season.

Jimmy Dean

Any of the big museums, Science, Natural History, Victoria and Albert are all close together in South Ken. Tower of London? The London Museum? You may find someone that does guided walking tours.

We had lectures and practicals in the mornings and only a couple of tutorials in the afternoons. I played football twice a week in the afternoons but we did have three hours of lectures on Saturday. Natural Scientists and medicine had a lot more practicals after lich, I seem to recall. This was 'engineering' in 1968.

It's probably a medical procedure to make sure that they can fit in the rescue capsule.

Amen to that.

"Tread softly and carry a big stick". Theodore Roosevelt.

OOH, the mind boggles. One could get desperate after a couple of weeks of going without.

I go along with Micky. Suggest a donation to charity. I believe the americans say 'pay it forward'.

If, as we are told, graduates earn more then they will pay more in taxes throughout their lifetime. This is just another LibDem hate measure.

I'm with you Geneva. Let's just rase taxes on all the Scots.

We are Zulu time - GMT. India is Echo-Foxtrot time. Iran is 3.5 hours ahead and there are a lot of other anomalies concerning daylight-saving time (stupid name). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_around_the_world In Arizona the Navajo reservation observes DST but the rest of the state does not. In the middle of the reservation is the Hopi reservation, which follows the state. But... 'However, until very recently, Indiana was a state apart. Not only does the state cut across two time zones, some counties chose to observe DST while others chose not to which, in effect, meant that Indiana had three different "time zones". Since 2006, the entire state of Indiana now observes DST, although 18 counties remain on Central Time and the other 74 are on Eastern Time'

What poor tax would that be?

Summit fever gets some of them. There was one guy who got to the summit late in the day and telephoned his wife from there. He was too late to get back down. This is interesting about K2: http://www.mensjournal.com/k2 Apparently it's worse than Everest. As of October 2008 "3,679 climbers have summited Everest, while 210 have died. For all the righteous critiques of Everest and its commercial cattle drive, that mountain is actually getting safer. Only two climbers were lost in the 2008 season. The odds on K2 are much worse: Just 299 people have reached the top, and 77 have perished".

Just one word of warning. We were in Bermuda in September talking on the beach to an american couple. She had won $3000 dollars in Vegas on her last pull on a slot machine. She had to pay tax on her winnings of 30%.

I was there for a few days in the early 80s for a TV studio equipment exhibition but it's all been pulled down and rebuilt since then. We did do a day trip to the Grand Canyon though. Two of us got up at 4:00, taxi to the airport to pick up a hire car, 6 hours driving to the south rim, 4 hours there, then 6 hours back to Vegas for about 11:00 pm. We had time for lunch and to walk down the Bright Angel Trail for 60 minutes, then back up for 85 minutes, just to give us some sense of the place. Well worth the effort but it is about 360 miles each way. All this after going to bed at 2:00 am after a company dinner. My wife was pretty p!ssed when I called her after midnight to tell her where I'd been. She was in the garden cutting the grass.

The bigger polls are just as pointless. All those not affected or unlikely to be affected by the removal of child benefit are going to think it's a wonderful idea.

I would too.

The Star Wars figures mught still be worth something. I've got a selection of early microprocessor integrated circuits from the early seventies. I haven't collected them, I used them professionally at the time and I just haven't thrown them away. Now I see that there are people who collect them and the whole lot are probably worth a few thousand dollars. The dilemma is, do I sell them now or wait another 10 years or so?

Do you work in an old people's home, by any chance?

I thought of that but there's a snag. All the water in Switzerland will drain down into the Mediterranean.

That's a possibility, of course, but if the new proposals are as badly thought out as this one there will be ructions.

That would have ben the sensible move. I can't help feeling that there's a lot more pain to come in a couple of weeks time, though.

How about the £8billion overseas aid money, some of which goes to China?