No thanks - I'm on a diet. 7kg lost so far.

Whereas I appear to have put on a stone. I'm holding out a vague hope that it's just my not-very-accurate scales.

[SM] I can heartily recommend Slimming World. It's effective, and it's a very healthy way of eating (and supposed to educate you away from the way of eating that made you fat in the first place). I haven't felt as well as this for yonks. If you can't bear to go to a club meeting (too many echoes of 'The League of Gentlemen' and their sketches of the victimisation at the Fat Club meetings) then do it online, and join the Facebook Group that acts as an online meeting.

[penelope] Was it not Little Britain that did the Slimming Club, I though League of Gentlemen was the Dole office meetings.

[FGZa] I stand corrected. Fat, unemployed... the two go together in that kind of world. *ducks*

Why did you duck?

[FGZ*] Avoiding the sail of a windmill.

And the sale of a windmill, one would hope, to say nothing of a funeral. Don't try to be La Doña Quixote, pen.

Luckily we don't own any windmills - most of them are owned by charitable foundations. There are only a few privately-owned and commerically run mills in NL, and usually they have to diversify to make ends meet - shops, tea rooms and cafes etc. However, there is a large consulation project sponsored by the province to come up with new ideas to make mills less reliant on public money, of which there is less and less available. By the way.

[pen] belt tightening is endemic. Thanks to the banks everybody is now poor while they continue dishing out obscene bonuses.

Something I've never seen explained is what happened to all the money. Bonuses are measured in millions, while the losses are measured in billions, so while one can object to the bonuses for other reasons, that isn't where the money went. It was lost by being lent for mortgages to people who never paid it back, and who spent it on buying houses, so presumably construction firms and property developers got the bulk of it. Who owns those? The banks?