Reynard

Congrats. When do you take possession of your new property?

The first hurdle is finding a burd. That's you ruled out already. Unlucky.

The trickiest bit for some is pulling a burd in the first place.

I certainly asked my faither in law. He is a massively formal sort of person anyway and I know it would have hurt him if I hadn't. It wasn't a big deal at the time and its not a big deal in 2012 either. Not every family is the same but I think if you know or get to know them well enough you'll be able to judge what may or may not be expected of you in certain circumstances. I don't really have any relationship at all with my father in law. The only time I have ever been alone with him was at an evening with Fred Dibnah at Troon town Hall and it was fairly awkward all round. He has f**k all chat and he doesnt welcome pish talk in general so that was me fucked. I was able to chat about flanges, cams pistons and rivets no bother though thankfully. But never again. Well it would be impossible to repeat that evening anyway as Dibnah snuffed it.

Well, fight him for it then.

Dargo would still do a turn if he can stay fit. How likely is that though? If he can strign together enough games then he will definitley still be able to contribute in the first division, he is decent quality.

For f**k sake!

No it isn't. Girvan is saved by having a nice beach and seafront and a decent wee golf course.

That wouldnt be a great surprise to me.

There is a fairly big classic car show there every year. I sometimes go to it with the faither in law. We are in a field somewhere and only drive through the place but it just seems like a fairly decent wee village to me. Never noticed it as being particularly run down or anything, but then I,m comparing it to some of the Ayrshire villages I suppose.

My uncle and aunt stay there, they have a cracking house looking out over the clyde to some of the best views in the country. Greenock has its problems but there really arent that many places that don't. I stay in Ayr, it has plenty of money floating around but it also has its shithole areas just like most towns. The drive up the coast to Greenock is tremendous on a good day and they have certainly made an effort to tart Greenock up in recent times, I can remember what it was like after the shipbuilding had more or less fucked off and it was a bit gloomy to say the least, its not so bad now. A lot of folk only visit places when they go to the fitba and in general the grounds are in the crappy areas of most towns. I have cousins over in Kilcreggan and I fucking love getting the wee ferry over there for the day after a drive up the coast. Magic.

Cheers. Hopefully our politicians will not be too ideologically attached to their green agenda and we can get the stuff out and start generating cheaper electricity as a result. We all benefit from that at the very least, never mind the extra jobs that would come from howking out the coal again.

Wheres that pic taken from? Is it the old sandstone quarry at Mauchline? My house is built from that stuff.

I'm just going by what I was told obviously. They apparently wasted plenty of drilling equipment trying to get through the stuff back in the day. Sinking the pit in the wrong place didn't help either I suppose. As you will know, there's plenty of fuel down there to last us a long long time anyway. Getting it out economically is the issue and the market value of whats down there will be the reasons we go back for it. It will be a huge asset for us again in due course. He started off working at Pennyvenie ,ended up a shot firer as he was small and could crawl up to the coalface and get away quickly and then got trained up as a geologist ,which was a mine between New Cumnock and Dalmellington and there was a village up there supported by the mine. When it shut the folk moved to Cumnock , New Cumnock and Dalmellington itself and the miners were bussed to whatever pit they had found work at. It was a fair sized village seemingly and theres no trace of it at all now. I know f**k all about the geology of the area other than I know the Mauchline basin was sandstone. I do a bit of work for Lord Strathclyde at his place just outside Mauchline and he has a pretty spectacular sandstone gorge where the river Ayr runs through. Dont think many folk get to see that because the river Ayr walk by passes his land in case he shoots them.

I'm tall as well, big levers make chins tougher but you just need to build it up bit by bit and tough it out. I started off doing a set of 8 then wait a minute or two then 7 rest the 6 then five. Daily until I could crank them out easily. Then just add more and vary the hand positions and keep your form right. One of the best body weight exercises ever I reckon and lots of people shy away from them because they are hard. Definitely worth persevering with and I see a huge difference after sticking with them. I stopped doing them for about a year as I had a bit of tendonitis in my elbow and I was still playing a lot of squash and wanted to keep that going. When I went back and started doing chins and pull ups again the DOMS the following couple of days were utterly horrific! Shoulders, arms, back and abs were all on fire

My old bosses faither was a geologist with the NCB he was well aware of what was down there, how easy or not it was to get it out and the quality of it. He worked at Killoch/Barony until it shut and he was one of the ones telling the NCB they had sunk Killoch in the wrong place, they effectively cut themselves off from a mass of coal thanks to a huge sandstone plug in the Mauchline basin. Snadstone under pressure is one of the toughest rocks to drill through apparently. They wasted millions of poinds worth of equipment trying to get through the stuff to reach the coal and eventually they joined the two pits underground. The coal down there is apprently the cleanest burning , highest grade stuff its possible to get but until it becomes economically viable again then it will stay down there. They are doing plenty of opencast work in Ayrshire just now but they are literally scratching the surface and are taking the poorer quality easy to get stuff first. Coal is becoming viable again thanks to the green policies which are pricing other fuels out the market. Its almost inevitable that coal will be a huge player again. Scotland and the UK in general is fortunate that it still has so much stuff down there to use. The coalfields shut largely due to economic viability as well as the union pish that was going on, and they will open again when it becomes economically viable. As I said, coal is now becoming viable again, Europe’s consumption of coal grew by 3.3 percent in 2011. The increase was directly due to the glut of European Trading Scheme (ETS) emission allowances which made coal the most profitable electric power fuel. The US consumption of coal has dropped thanks to finding shale gas, they are selling their surplus coal to Europe! Coal production has increased by 6% worldwide in 2011 and that beats the just over 4% growth over the past decade. We need to get the shovels out I reckon!

Anywhere there has been some sort of industry requiring bodies to operate factories or whatever will have the same problem when production ceases. These places sprung up off the back of people needing to live near where they worked, when the work stopped they remained. It might actually be worth our while howking coal again as coal use has increased massively in the EU in the past couple of years and they are importing a lot of it from the US where their use of coal has fallen sharply since they discovered shale gas. As shale gas is a big no no in these parts then coal will become viable again as gas and oil gets dearer and dearer. Theres enough coal in the Ayrshire coalfield alone to last another 300 years. Whether the greenies would let us use it or not or whether the HSE would let us dig it out is another story of course.

The problem with the shithole mining villages is that they didn't bulldoze them along with the mines and pits when they closed. That was always what used to happen. There are several places in Ayrshire where there used to be villages that sprung up around where the work was and then closed when the work stopped. The pwoers that be, in their wisdom, planted loads of council estates in these wee villages to accommodate mine workers in the belief that howking coal would never stop. Now they are left with huge swathes of housing stock they cant afford to look after, thousands of people that drank theirgenerous redundancy packages in the first six months and refuse to go and look for work assuming that the work will fall into their lap.

No

Would never apply to them. Catheters and pish bags mean they never really have to worry unless the cup runneth over, which is unlikely as they tend to be very organised and stuck in their ways.

The wife did some pan fried gnocchi and pesto last night. There was other stuff too but I just thought Id mention that the gnocchi was outstanding, much better than the usual boiled up like pasta routine.

I told Div I'd happily take on anyone that reckons it is sectarian if they want to take me to court. He is too feart to take a stand over it. All I got was a warning for using it. I think thats lame and instead of being anti sectarian its actually anti freedom of speech.

Nil by mouth decided it was sectarian. But it isn't. They are wanks