Harry Peterson

Likewise gravy on pancakes - sounds disgusting to most southerners but when you change the word 'pancakes' to 'Yorkshire Puddings' it's suddenly OK. Same batter! 😉

With you absolutely, but this is a minority view still in these forums. I remain absolutely convinced that the only reason P&O still cling to this is to enable them to create an absolutely false impression of luxury and high end cruising. As to Michelin starred restaurants, very few give a damn what you wear. I asked the question of one such place and received the very sensible answer that they didn’t mind what their customers wore - so long as they were comfortable.

Give it time. P&O has changed immeasurably in so many ways over the last few years, and formal dress will disappear at some point as the old traditionalists cease to use it. The process has started, and the conclusion is inevitable. The only question is when.

We were the ones watching the pennies when we first married. We managed to buy a 2-bed maisonette near Bromley a few months after the wedding, but it absolutely cleaned us out - and the mortgage repayments were only just affordable. Still much easier for us though than the equivalent couple today in their early 20s. £9500 for that maisonette, £400,000+ now. Maybe 6 times average salary then, but more than double that now. And we had tax relief on the mortgage interest.

Delighted to learn that I’m not the only freak in here! Confirmed Microsoft Money (a souped up spreadsheet still with a huge fan base) user since 1998 and account books before that! Absolutely essential when we first got married, but still extremely useful for tracking items purchased. Good to know that two people could eat tolerably well on £5 pw in the early 70s! With a LOT of eggs, cheese, bread and baked beans. Basic: Egg on toast. Luxury: Egg on cheese on toast Supreme luxury: Eggs on cheese on toast, with beans.

All the children in the Home Ed group are the same: it’s the way they’ve been educated to be - look after each other. Very easy in that sort of environment, but almost impossible in most schools. Having said that, though, our children were educated in our village primary school, and it was much the same there. They were village kids, the teachers were all local, and everyone knew each other. When our daughter talks about it to friends now they tell her it must have been some imaginary Enid Blyton world!

We haven't - but I'd like to! If you have a link, I'd be interested. It's a Ninja Woodfire we have, though, and the smoke inevitably involves heat at the same time, so not sure how it would work. Great for smoking and cooking whole chickens though, plus the usual things. Wife highly delighted with it because it's so quick and easy to use.

A couple of years back, I found when playing around with various car insurance options that adding my daughter actually reduced the premium by a small amount! Age starts to count against you at some point! Didn't work this year, so maybe it was a one-off, but we only pay about £180 for each car anyway, and that included the add-on with Saga to fix the premium for three years.

That’s not good, Graham. They’re an absolute menace here, too. Not a lot you can do really, though. It’s a constant battle here with the wildlife to get some of the crops grown!

She is, Jane. Very much so. Brought up to be so in her Home Ed group of about 25 - socialisation was high on the agenda, and they got involved in all sorts of external activities, such as drama, Scouts etc. She’s taken leading roles in local stage productions, and was really looking forward to school to make new friends. The only disappointment yesterday was not having found a new ‘best friend’ on day one! Our grandson is only 7, and he decided he wanted to go to school too, like his sister. He started yesterday too for the first time. He has a little cousin who has Down’s Syndrome and he adores her. It’s just not an issue, so when he met a little boy yesterday with quite severe autism and nobody to play with, he went straight up to him, announced his name, and said ‘Let’s play football’. The child’s one to one carer said it was the first time he’d ever gone off on his own with other children. That’s just awful. Home Education gets a lot of stick, some of it justifiably when it’s not done properly. When it is done properly, though, and there are qualified teachers such as my daughter in this group, along with academics and other professionals, it’s absolutely first class. The teaching ratio of a private school, but none of the cost. What’s absolutely crazy, though, is that they have to pay their own examination entrance fees for GCSEs and A levels, and that can easily run into several hundred pounds or more. There are some savings though - no expensive school uniforms, and holidays outside school holidays. That’s now changing!

I’m sure you’re right! She came back yesterday with a nice little story about her first day at school. She’s not played football before and knew absolutely nothing about it or its rules (nobody in the family has any great interest in it). The teacher asked her to play on the Right Wing. “I can’t play on the Right Wing - I’m Left Wing”.

Hell's teeth, Jane, those figures are shocking! She's done extremely well to have achieved what she has, and that includes having such a supportive family. She's very clever - and very lucky! Our 'little' granddaughter started school for the first time today. At 12! Just an induction week, but she's been home educated until now. She decided she'd like to go to secondary school, and it went every bit as well as I thought it would. Very confident and extremely socialised. Almost as if she'd been to a public school. But with maybe some very different views on certain matters unmentionable here......

Thanks Andy! Brilliant! One more for the ‘Boomers’ teach your grandchildren unsuitable phrases’ handbook……..😉

Good news! Have a great holiday.

How’s the garden, Avril, and particularly the rose and the veg?

Fair point. We paid for our children. And their tuition fees, living costs etc. But we’ve always got on well with our children, and still do. The relationship I had with my parents was a little more fractious!

I’m out of touch! I thought there were still long delays in getting the theory and practical tests. And the money? Our daughter failed her first test at 17 and we dropped it after that because of the potential impact on A levels. Our son sailed through a few weeks after his 17th birthday, but then didn’t drive again - or need to - for close on 20 years! That was a baptism of fire, because you couldn’t get any refresher lessons at that point because of Covid. I was about 20 before I could afford lessons. Just 12, in Birmingham when I was a student, and failure wasn’t an option. No more money!

That's impressive, Jane. Not that common at 17 these days I suspect. Well done that young woman!

It certainly improved life for all those fishermen back in the day when it was a little fishing village though…….

I’ve forgotten now exactly where this smell was, but it was only in one specific public area, and it’s possible that it doesn’t actually affect any cabins. Like you, we’re always aft, so I can’t be sure of that, but we only ever noticed it when passing through one of the public areas.

We missed out on all that, but back in the 80s we had quite a storm, which woke us up, and our 3 year old daughter. We didn’t want her to be frightened of storms and lightning, so we took her to the window to watch the ‘pretty lights’. She was fine with that. So were we. But the house wasn’t, because lightning hit the TV aerial, with the inevitable consequences and a huge bang. No structural damage, fortunately, and relatively minor electrical damage, but the huge electrical charge did jump across from the aerial wiring to the main wiring. The thing that sticks in my mind most though was the phrase used by a secondhand shop I took the damaged VCR to: ”Is it ‘ookey?” Nice piece of Essex slang, imported from the East End! Meaningless to me at the time. Initially.

That’s horrible, Avril - sorry to hear that, and particularly your dad’s rose. I hope you manage to save it, and as many of the other plants as you can.

It’s certainly an interesting story, and maritime lawyers will be licking their lips. The prospect, remote though it is, of a Grenfell-style fire on one of the new, huge, ships is chilling. It may not prove too much of an issue for P&O - time will tell. “Carnival, the world’s biggest cruise operator, said the panels in question were fitted on one ship in its fleet but they had passed “all required certifications at the time of installation”. However, it said it was aware of the recent test failure.”

Quite a few Ninja fans in here, I think. New to Ninja ourselves, but just discovered this a couple of weeks back when Ninja were having a sale. It's an all-in-one BBQ grill, smoker and air fryer and VERY impressive - 3 smoked whole chickens cooked outside already in it, apart from all the other stuff, and my very keen cook of a wife is deeply in love with it! She always fancied a smoker, but they're very expensive and rather limited - this does that, and a whole heap more. Sorry to sound like an advert, but it's genuinely one of the most impressive and useful things we've bought for quite a while. Anyone else using one?

That is indescribably sad to hear, Bazrat. I’m so very sorry. I can’t imagine what you must be going through, but you know that all the forum users will be thinking of you.