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My granny was a lousy cook. (A great engineer - could make almost anything in wood or steel, but dreadful with a frying pan!) If we ever complained about her latest efforts she would always say: "Eat it up - what doesn't fatten will help to fill up!" The result, I suspect, of bringing up a young family on rationing during the war. I still dread omelettes as she cremated so many of them.

May it be a happy, healthy and rewarding one for all!

I'll wholeheartedly second that. Let's hope that 2021 will be an improvement on this year.

Outside Stone Manor, west of Kidderminster on the Bromsgrove Road

Hi Jerry, I think there are at least 3 different reverse dies for the F14, all with different, mutually exclusive, die flaws. Please refer to my 2015 post below. More Pennies - Page 29 - British Coin Related Discussions & Enquiries - British Coin Forum - Predecimal.com

Donald Trump in residence?

Happy New Year. 2021 will be better.

But its fun going round the wrekin is it not .... Love shropshire

Absolutely spot on, Peck. The problem with the shooting of Mark Duggan is that the entire proceedings is shrouded in mystery. Was he a gun toting low life chav on his way to despatch a rival gang member, or was he, as you say, an unarmed man who was the victim of a planned police execution ? Who knows ~ in fact we don't know and will have to wait for the inquest conducted by the (apparently) unbiased IPCC. We do know the police can be trigger happy on occasions and have "accidentally" shot dead innocent men. Harry Stanley and Jean Charles de-Menezes spring readily to mind. You're also right about the banks. I daren't use all the adjectives I'd like to use about them, because Chris would probably (and rightly) ban me. The current austerity is down totally to their greed and profligacy. Nothing to do with Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, everything to do with them. They are the reason the rest of us are suffering from a decreased standard of living, and seeing our incomes squeezed. What's more, as I said a week or two back, not a single word about them paying back what they've shafted the public purse for. I would so like to put Cameron on the spot over the banks and what they owe the British people. As far as I can tell, those who have paid into the state second pension and its predecessor, SERPS, will not lose out on what they have contributed ~ so they could still end up with quite a bit more than £140 per week. The real winners will be those who are already in a solid occupational pension, who have been contracted out, and who are set to reach state pension age after 2016. They will cream their works pension, and the full £140 per week in one go, having paid nothing into the increase. The ultimate winners will be guys born in most of 1951, all of 1952 and the greater part of 1953, who will be the last to benefit from drawing their (noe enhanced) state pension at age 65. I know about this because I'm currently engaged in a project about it at work. This is organising a pre-retirement course for older workers. Not sure why they've given it to me, but although slightly incredulous at first, I've actually found the entire subject, extremely interesting and productive of a lot of useful knowledge. Useful link here Having worked as an armed response officer for 8 years I'll just stop you there. The former was "bigged up" by witnesses to sound like an IRA terrorist. The mainland was getting hammered at the time. He was challenged by armed officers in the street and reacted by raising the table leg (which was in a bag and reported to police as a sawn off shotgun). I would have dropped him stone cold. The latter was the subject of a bungled surveillance op and was believed to be a suicide bomber on a packed train with a primed device. The strike team were ORDERED to shoot. I would have taken the shot(s) also because 1 life is definitely worth less than dozens of innocents. As for Mr Duggan I have no inside knowledge as I am out of the loop now, but "executed"? You need to have a word with yourself Mike. A police firearms officer is faced with split second decisions, life or death ones. I worked on the ethos that the priority was 1) my life, because if I get dropped I cannot protect anybody 2) my colleagues 3) the public and 4) the subject. For a firearms officer to pull the trigger there has to be a genuine or perceived immediate threat to life. There is no shoot to kill, as an AFO you shoot to "stop or incapacitate" the subject. An AFO is also subject to the laws of the land and you always ran the risk of being charged with murder if the wheels came off. Pulling the trigger is the very last thing that any of us wanted to do and it was the very last thing that our training primed us to do.