Starmer said he had ‘full confidence’ in McSweeney a couple of days back. That phrase always used to be the knell of doom. Nice to see that some things remain constant in the current political world.

These days just surveying for the national bat and dormouse monitoring programmes, but I have done quite a range of other things in the past including: starting and running a Green Drinks group, pagan prison chaplain for the Pagan Fed, direct action with Greenpeace, local wildlife group committee member, starting and running a toad patrol group, helping at an old folks day centre, running a tea stall and car-parking at a few green festivals, crash and bash conservation work with various groups etc.

I wonder if Irish/Scottish/Gaelic speakers can pick out anything

Those are from the Q-celtic branch. Cornish, Breton and Welsh are P-celtic. They are pretty different.

Thanks. I was just going to add one myself.

I’d imagine that whereas you can guess at confusing cursive letters in words from the others around them, you can’t do that with digits.

The year has never been the problem.

Now, if there are plans to rename the months Thirtyseconduary, Fortyfirstember and so on, we might be getting somewhere.

• Losing a fight in the sandpit
• Crying because there were no more trains in the trainset for me to have one. But then being given another whole set to play with
• Farting extremely loudly in the middle of storytime
• Miss not being able to tell me what dates Robin Hood lived in
• Having a lesson on how to use a dictionary - which surprised me, since I already could, and didn’t realise that anyone couldn’t.

Neither am I but my friend circle uses this, having heard it, not because it is German but because it is inherently silly, and we are silly. I would expect that the same may apply here.

Ends. ‘Alles hat ein Ende nur die Wurst hat zwei’. A popular German phrase.

A lot of brands do use bags containing plastic - which probably isn’t great in terms of you actually ingesting microplastic as you drink, let alone composting - but some do not. The trick is to find the brands that don’t and use them. They fully compost.

I see that Jason Haigh-Ellery is involved, which - given his involvement with Big Finish - does give me some hope for the quality if it does go ahead, but that is a very big IF.

Mixed feelings on this one with Waitrose in particular as a target. Whilst not exactly a workers cooperative, it is employee owned: staff have non-transferable shares. Thefts will hit employees directly as a result.

Clearly this is not going to be any kind of significant dent in the overall profits of the company - it is very much about the publicity - but, even so, couldn’t they have chosen one with a more standard corporate model?

Some decades back I described myself in a social organisation’s yearbook as “Degenerate freeloader and card-carrying pope” - which should indicate my influences at the time.

I no longer carry a pope card.

The last three have been s/h when I have bought them and then I have hung on to them for around 5 years each myself.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is often considered to be a prime example, I think.

What are known as moose in the Americas are known as elk in the UK. What are known as elk in the Americas are known as deer in the UK.

All the usual domestic stuff that everyone has mentioned, but also the books that we are each reading, the films and TV that we watch together, and ideas from the assorted podcasts and videos that we each watch/listen to separately.

Unless there is something that dominates anyway, we usually make a point to share something that we have each learned and something that made each of laugh that day over dinner.

Remember them: yes.

Feel anything: it is usually a particular event or something that causes me to bring them to mind, so any feelings will be more tied to the event that caused the memory than the place itself - and that could be good, bad or just unusual. I don’t think that I have ever had reason to look at street views of any of them.

Sentimental: not in general. They all had good points and not so good. I enjoyed living in them most of the time, but I enjoy where I am now too.

The closest to sentimental would be when I spent a night at one of the old places some years later. I used to live on site for work, but my role changed. No-one lives there now. It is used for meetings and storage etc, but someone will occasionally sleep-over for one reason or another, as I did on this occasion. That evening I felt like a ghost haunting my own past.

My wife has knitted me several pairs of socks over the years. I am pretty certain that she has given me at least a couple at Xmas. I still have them all and wear them at weekends.

However, other than that, I don’t think that I have given or received anything that is not consumable - food, drink, toiletries, candles, outings etc - for a very long time.

Dark Mustard