No gifts

Not quite a top five here, more a top two and bottom three.

When going to a wedding, or a christening or a baby shower or other similar event, particularly when the host has explicitly said that gifts should NOT be brought, you have a number of options:

Do as the host says, just come and celebrate the occasion but don’t bring a present. Again, that’s what the host wanted.

If you can think of a particular thing that you know the host was looking for but haven’t been able to find yet, then if you can get hold of it then it would be a great gift, But only if you know it was something the host was definitely searching for.

What is not acceptable is to:

Give a token gift just because you think it inappropriate to go without one

Give money or vouchers

Make a donation to a charity of your choice in their name

White House Deep House Red House

In one of the most expensive and most conservative areas of London, in a small street of sober Georgian terracing, there is one house that has been painted with bright red stripes. That isn’t new information, it was prominent in local and even national press. And incidentally in time I think the new paintwork currently seen as garish and out-of-character and objectionable will come to be seen as neighbourhood attraction and slapped with a preservation order.

But the point is that the neighbours did object. Quite rightly. Not to the unplanned colours, but to the owner had wanted to build a massive basement extension, going down two whole floors of the entire property’s footprint. It would have caused massive disruption and massive mess, the houses on either side would have become virtually uninhabitable for months on end while bulldozers and diggers ploughed in.

The issue here is a planning loophole. While a party wall agreement goes a tiny way towards helping to allow for risk of structural damage, it in no way recompenses the afflicted neighbour. And that’s something that helps nobody. If at the end of the work there is minimal exterior change, as with mega basements and similar development, then planning rules become almost irrelevant. Yet it is not the end result that pees off the neighbours, it is the hell they must put up with to get there.

If there was a legal obligation to properly compensate the neighbours for that disruption then the central house owner would have been allowed to build their desired basement palace but the afflicted parties would be paid appropriately for that disruption.

Charlie

It makes me sick. People were murdered and you ARE helping to condone it. Every time you say that they were merely "mis-interpreting" the words of a book that they frankly explicitly hideously obviously using to justify their action.

Islam is not a race anyway, it is an idea. Some think a good idea and some think a bad idea. The sort of idea that is "encouraged" by nonsensical crimes of blasphemy and apostacy.

If an idea is scientific it is open to scientific testing. If an idea is ridiculous it is open to ridicule.

Mais je ne suis pas Charlie. Je n’ai pas le coeur ou le génie. Désolé.