S-Westerly

Quite like thin pancakes but my favourites are the thick fluffy American style ones.

That's exactly what happens. Some do alright but many don't. Their society is utterly different to ours in that the young feel they MUST support the old or the wider family. Many of my guys send all their money home to pay for only their kids but their parents or cousins. That said many of them, especially the officers, who live outside Manila have big houses and often businesses as well (being run by family of course) and even the ones in manila will employ a maid or other menial. Indians are even more so.

Possibly but that may depend on your personal political persuasion.

I've noticed that among the younger generations there's a tendency to rent stuff rather than buy. Some of that maybe due to financial pressure especially housing but also with cars, bikes and other stuff. Whereas my wife and I bought cars outright all the younger ones in the family have some kind of pcp deal and change their cars much more often.

I believe you can insure the excess for a reasonable fee. Seem to remember seeing something about it on Bennett's website?

Remember that for a lot of third world seamen until things go badly wrong it's a very well paying job. In a decent company the average Filipino seaman earns more than a doctor back home. That said most of them use their hard earned money to educate the hell out of their children so they can get decent jobs elsewhere- US, UK, Europe, Australia being favourite. For those like me it was a great job until the internet and computers arrived. In my early days I worked for some real cowboy outfits but the money was great, the job was fun and the bullshit minimal. Since then its become shite as know nothing managers ashore try and micromanage every aspect of the job. As soon as I can afford to retire I'll be off.

FoC though has changed over the years. My current ship is Bermuda flag which is basically a UK FoC. The old bad boys of Liberia and Panama are pretty respectable. The current crop of chancers are often small island nations such as St. Kitts or Barbuda or places like Georgia or Mongolia. Its been like this forever though. In WW2 if your ship was torpedoed and sunk your pay stopped from that day. If you were rescued you got a survivors payment which was enough to kit you out to go back. If you died your family got sod all until the death was confirmed. Not even a telegram from the King. There's a reason merchant seamen are some of the most cynical bast*rds you can meet.

There is a global standard- the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) introduced with great fanfare a few years ago and like most things associated with shipping open to a great deal of skullduggery. This is because many operators on the fringes of shipping are one step away from good old fashioned pirates. You have dodgy registries whereby the flag of the vessel is powerless and has absolutely minimal standards. Think Mongolia for example, purely a legal fiction. Then you have coastal states such as the UAE which basically don't give a shit. As many contract workers there are effectively indentured bonds men for the duration of their work permits the UAE government doesn't give a toss for its legal obligations under the MLC and if a couple of dozen seamen wash up on their coast who cares? Finally the citizenship of the seamen involved comes into play. Some countries make quite a fuss over the mistreatment of their citizens,most don't, including sadly the UK for most of us. From the seamen point of view it also gets complicated. If the owner doesn't pay your wages the crew can exercise a lien on the vessel which basically means that if its forcibly sold even for scrap the proceeds must first pay out all the crews outstanding wages. However if the vessel is classed as a wreck that doesn't apply. (I maybe wrong on this as it's a few years since I studied maritime law and this kind of thing isn't my everyday work life!) Also if the crew leave or abandon the vessel they forfeit their rights to claim. There's loads more I could write but without going into technicalities that's a broad summary.

Why would they be? Democracy as we know it died in 2020. Whether we'll ever get it back remains to be seen. The attitude towards lockdown lifting would seem to indicate we won't and most people don't seem to care.

Well I suppose all those killjoys whinging about loud motorbikes will have to find something else to moan about.

Shame we can't get them banged up for years though.

Living in Somerset you'll be enduring some of the hardest water in the country. When we lived in Portishead we regularly had issues with our heating due to lime scale deposits causing chaos. Gloucestershire is better, still hard but still a lot less than Somerset.

Might make you go with a bang but better than bzzzzzz.

Series 3 bmw was almost as bad. Had to do it from inside the wheel arch. And if it was the so-called halo lamp that was a cool £70 plus fitting as virtually impossible to do outside a pro garage. Who designs these bloody things?!

My first house cost me more than double my salary which is certainly cheaper than today as houses have gone up a hell of a lot more than pay. However I was paying 15% pa interest in my mortgage which is hugely more than today. Also in 1983 unemployment was pretty high and government was not quite so quick to throw money about. And yes I'm a boomer.

Had an appointment in Cheltenham for ears. So rode there and back the interesting way. Have to do the same again on Thursday so what a shame. Might only be 30 miles or so but it's nice just to be out on the bike.

Saw that last night. I have dynaplug and so far I've not needed it. I do like his little vids on YouTube they are always good.

Or the bimble even.

I like the Ghost D30 armour and now have a full set which I can swap around between various bits of kit as needed. I don't actually like back armour that much although usually wear it. So far it's been the only bit of armour I've owned that's failed in use (not during an off either) although it was RST own brand stuff so probably not the best.

A while since I've been to ours but pre-Covid you just rocked up, dumped whatever you had in the appropriate place and went on your way. If you were in a van you needed to show it was not commercial and proof of address. Nothing more.

In the long ago our first (new) house was in Washington New Town. About two weeks after we'd moved in there was a bang and a flash and every single electric device that was live (Inc. the heating system) was toast with the exception of our insanely expensive Bosch oven which survived. Turned out that down the road where they were installing mains the jcb driver managed to partially sever the mains electric and sent all the live current down the earth. About 15 houses affected and a huge amount in compensation to pay out for all the destroyed kit.

I'm planning on JT sprockets.

We've had one fitted since house was new. Never had an issue with it but the energy supplier? Bloody useless - for 2 years tried to say we had 2 electric meters and charged us double. Turns out they had conflated our house number with another property in the same road which had the same site number during construction. Idiots.

Those two brands are in the frame along with RK. All are in the £120-130 range plus sprockets.

Probably, which is quite disheartening if you are trying to avoid boosting the Chinese economy .