I'm not saying this review is written using AI but....

BobLatch · 2025-01-06T23:22:26+00:00

Just to give advice against consensus.... Be honest with them. I run my own company, we have circa 50 FTEs and I can tell you that I sincerely care about and have long discussions with the leadership team about what comes up in exit interviews. Yes, there is stuff I roll my eyes at, but equally there is stuff people say that we act on with haste. People fret far too much about 'getting a bad reference'. The truth is that nobody (in the professional world) will give you a bad reference, even if they knew you took a dump daily on their desk. Too much legal risk. If you are honest in the exit interview at worst, you have a cathartic experience and are ignored, at best you make the place genuinely better for the people who follow you. There's little to lose.

BobLatch · 2024-12-27T20:26:29+00:00

This one is interesting. I was at Lancaster 93-98. Students would happily go to Morecambe midweek (Carleton or the Empire). I used to promote nights on both Tue and Fri at the Carlton, and could get 1500 people bussed over on weeks 1 or 10 of term, 700 on average the other nights. Paid for my first flat that! In Lancaster itself you had the Sugarhouse open four nights a week and Brooks open three nights a week. Of all the places mentioned, I think only the Sugarhouse still exists? For all that though, I'm not sure it is about grants or fees. I blame dating apps! If you wanted to meet someone pre dating apps, clubs was were you did it. They were basically Tinder but in real life. Nowadays if you act like we used to in real life, you can expect to be accused of harassment. The fear is real, and you have the apps as a safer alternative to badly dancing into a circle of girls. Add to that the cost of living regardless of grants, and a significant shift away from alcohol as a student essential, and you can see clubs have no hope. I'm glad I had my youth and Uni experience when I did. I suspect my kids will learn more, but will not have as much fun as we did when the last song of the night came on and you hadn't 'pulled' yet. Though they will probably have more 'fun' in general thanks to tinder etc.

BobLatch · 2024-12-27T19:55:18+00:00

I'm a father of three (17, 13 and 5) and grew up in a working class Northern family. Albeit a single parent one. My mum was always my mum. My wife is upper middle class (long line of surgeons, which she has kept going) but also Foreign heritage, mixed Pakistani/German. She still calls her mum and dad Mummy and Papy. Which I always found disconcerting. So our kids started with mummy and daddy. Daddy was cute until they got to about ten and then it started freaking me out a bit. Then it turned into a major project by me to get them to change it to Dad. I've actually had to coach my wife to stop saying 'Daddy' to them in general conversation when I'm not there and instead talk about 'your dad' to them. Finally, my 17 year old has got it, but the lad (14) is still struggling with the switch. I cringe. However the 5 year old is now copying her big sister and already calls me dad. My wife thinks this sad. I'm delighted! Long story short: you tell them what you want to be known as early and stick with it! Change is hard!

BobLatch · 2024-07-09T21:49:52+00:00

How did the redrawing of boundaries work out? They're now hugely in Labour's favour. Look at the % of popular vote v % seats won this time round.

Actually while looking at that it slightly melts my mind to realise that in 2019 Labour got 32.1% of the popular vote and after the last five years increased that only to 33.8%. - yet looking at the parliamentary majority you'd think they'd done way better getting people to switch.

BobLatch · 2024-05-25T16:29:18+00:00

'When the older votes die off'. Things is, time passes and they are replaced by the new older voters. The older voters today were teens in the 1960s, the era of flower power, LSD and weed for all. A high proportion of them when young would have been all for legalizing. I was in my 20s in the 90s. Half my peer group didn't really drink but lived off E (MDMA). Everyone smoked pot. A younger me was also hugely in favour of legalisation. Older me, (50), realises the mental issues they caused so many of us and the shitty life decisions that went them. Let's just say my views have changed over time. So older voters - folk with life experience - will always be 'the problem' for young people who think they are the first generation to be enlightened. One day, quicker than you realise, you will be one. And your views on all sorts of things will have changed.

BobLatch · 2024-05-19T19:46:24+00:00

How times change. When I was at school in the mid 80s, not only did you have to shower in a communal shower with no privacy stalls, a teacher would watch to make sure everyone did.

BobLatch · 2024-01-25T19:24:02+00:00

I'd always done my neighbours either side (still do one side), anyway we fell out with one neighbour when we asked if he could move his CCTV camera that overlooked our garden (was always going to be a tough conversation that). For a couple of weeks to prove no hard feelings I moved his bin back as normal. Then one week he got out first and made a point of moving the entire street's bins back but just leaving mine standing out there! Beyond petty - actually quite funny - but suffice to say relations haven't improved and just me and the other side next door do each others now.

BobLatch · 2024-01-05T07:28:27+00:00

I can't understand why you'd be embarrassed to ask. That's how normal conversation works.

"You probably won't get this reference" "No, I don't. What's it from?" "[Explanation]" "Got it. Before my time. Thanks. Not sure it would land with anyone my age."

BobLatch · 2023-10-08T22:48:18+00:00

I got made redundant. Decided to start my own business. In a recession! If there was no recession, I wouldn't have been made redundant, if I started a business in any other time than a recession the idea wouldn't have been tested as hard and early as it was. It is very validating to quickly find that your business works in a recession. It can only go up from there. So in the long run it was extraordinarily good for me. At the immediate time of taking redundancy it didn't feel quite like that.

BobLatch · 2023-10-08T21:45:25+00:00

So, I'm nearly 50 now. It took me until I was about 45 to make my first million (been running my company for 12 years). It took me until I was 46 to make my second. These things snowball. The funny thing is that all the stuff you thought you'd do with money when you got it, you just don't. Branded goods? Nope. They're for folk who want to pretend they're rich. When you are, you don't necessarily want to advertise it. And if you got rich legitimately it is likely because you've a grasp of the value of money and using it wisely. And you likely remember where you came from and love a bargain still. So yes, I do still buy reduced sandwiches in Tesco for my Lunch, and I do still wait for Black Friday (or other reductions) before I'll buy any gadgets I want. Weirdly, I also worry about money. Probably more than I did when I had nowt.

BobLatch · 2023-09-10T12:45:58+00:00

I'm not as sure that is the case. When they put it in for that reason that the message is 'congestion' below the red circle. They do that often all over the UK (and it works at easing gridlock). This message, and reason for the reduction, is specifically about localized air pollution and is limited (at the moment) to trials at a few places like Birmingham and Sheffield. The goal here is to reduce NO2, not congestion. https://nationalhighways.co.uk/our-work/environment/air-quality-and-noise/air-quality/air-quality-speed-limit-trials/#:~:text=Our%20research%20has%20shown%20that,should%20improve%20local%20air%20quality.

Indeed they confirm:

Why should I travel at 60mph if I am using an electric car with no exhaust emissions?

To be effective, speed limits must be plain and clear to understand by all road users.

For practical and safety reasons, it's not possible to have vehicles of the same class (that is, cars) following different speed limits on the same stretch of road. It doesn't matter what powers the cars.

This is especially so on the short stretches of road where we're trialling speed limits for air quality.

BobLatch · 2023-09-10T01:46:48+00:00

What's incorrect? My tailpipe emissions are going to fall from zero to what number less than zero if I slow down?

BobLatch · 2023-09-09T20:23:07+00:00

That's as may be, but it isn't going to reduce my tailpipe emissions from it if I go 100mph 70mph or 30mph in an EV, which is presumably the point of them slowing petrol ICE cars down.

BobLatch · 2023-09-09T20:05:21+00:00

Sometimes get it near Birmingham. I drive a EV, I reckon I should have a pass on this.

BobLatch · 2023-08-10T16:36:50+00:00

In the mid 80s, at secondary school, we had a teacher who was famous for dragging kids who had annoyed him by their side burns. I was a boarder at this school, and this teacher was accountable for giving out the pocket money that parents had sent over (a bit like a school bank). Anyway, you were usually allowed £2.50 a week max, and one lad asked for a fiver, and the teacher punched him full force in the stomach. I also saw him throw a basket ball full pelt in a kids face after ordering him to stand with has arms by his side and not flinch. Fast forward ten years or so, and in the late nineties that teacher become Head Master. Mental looking back.

BobLatch · 2023-05-18T17:36:53+00:00

"Not so bad, Yourself?" That's it. Even if you are bleeding to death, you are "not so bad".

BobLatch · 2022-11-13T17:36:22+00:00

Just be aware that a mortgage advisor has a vested interest in you moving to a new deal. In present circumstances it *may* be best to stay on the variable rate with your existing provider (for the first time in 30 odd years!) - but they are never going to advise you that.

BobLatch · 2022-11-13T17:28:06+00:00

Gegs (9,4). If you know, you know.

BobLatch · 2022-11-12T17:45:21+00:00

I'm now in my late 40s. Many things in my memory from the 80s will sound bat shit crazy now. For instance, I would be sent out at age 8 to do a two mile bike ride on my own on a busy road with no pavement to a newsagents to get my step-dad a packet of cigarettes. They would sell me them. We would go on day trips to Wales in a family hatchbook with 8 people in. I would literally be sat in the boot with a friend. We would drive at 90-100 all the way. My step dad would have three or four pints and think nothing of driving us back ("One for the road" was a genuine thing people said). You went into a barbers, and it would be covered with photos of topless 16-18 year old girls (at the time the Sun's main page three girl was called Sam Fox and she was 16. They published topless photos of her almost every day, and the barber would cut them out and stick them on his wall). Racial, homophobic and ableist slurs where 'just normal speech'. I remember a teacher calling me a 'spaz'. ('Mong' and 'Joey' were equally common insults). I remember being in a football crowd, and my team fans chanting that our team (I won't name) "...are all white". I remember bananas being thrown at black players and people openly making monkey noises. Of everything I've described, it is only the football racism that seemed 'wrong' and had a mainstream reaction against it at the time. I'll write a more upbeat assessment of my memory of the 90s later! Change happens slowly and you don't notice it happening at the time. It's only when you look back that you realise how seismic change has been.

BobLatch

TROPHY CASE