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I get that feeling when my heart seems to miss a beat quite often – I have done since childhood. I had a time a few years ago when I was getting panic attacks and the doctor explained that the missed beats (or extrasystolic beats) are very common and are rarely anything to worry about in themselves, although it is wise to check them out just in case they are connected with another problem.
Drinking too much coffee is often quoted as a cause of minor heart irregularities – I don’t know how true this is but I do drink a lot of coffee!
WE might or might not be experiencing a trend of climate change – each ‘hotter than average’ year lends support to this claim.
Human activity adds a small amount to the overall level of CO2 in our atmosphere and more CO2 would lead to global warming.
What we don’t know for sure yet is to what extent human activity is causing global warming (if it is as such) and to what extent it is a natural phenomenon. The last ice-age only ended about 18,000 years ago, and sea levels were much lower then due to the amount of ice piled up over land. Some think we have not reached the peak inter-glacial stage yet.
So can we all drive around in gas guzzlers, fly abroad for holidays and keep filling cupboards with spare plastic carrier bags? Well, global warming or not, we are using up our finite resources at an alarming rate. That is the real environmetal problem facing us.
When the oil and gas is gone at least it will self-limit any human effect on our climate!I think Sharia ‘law’ should be allowed in Britain only within the following limitations:
-It is not in contravention of our national laws.
– It is not imposed on people who are not willing to accept it.
-The greatest penalty it can impose is expulsion of a culprit from islam.Clearly my idea would indicate that I have a poor knowledge of islam, and it would be unworkable, so therefore we should never have Sharia Law anywhere in the EU.
People who join the military must surely be aware that they might have to go on active service. Before the Iraq invasion there had been Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Afghanistan, the previous Iraq trouble and, of course, the Falklands.
Whether we agree with the Iraq war or not and whether we approve of the royal family or not, I think it’s obvious Harry should go if he wants to. But is he insisting he goes, safe in the knowledge that he won’t be sent? Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I think he genuinely wants to serve alongside his comrades.
OK, he might be a target and that might increase the risk to others. All lives are precious but in the final reckoning his life is no more precious than any other soldier’s life.
Assuming we’re talking about LEGAL immigrants, then I’d say yes and no. For very minor offences they shouldn’t necessarily be deported. More serious offenders should be deported after serving their sentences unless it can be shown that they face persecution.
Imagine a situation where an Iranian national who has lived in this country with a girlfriend for many years faces deportation to Iran for after committing a shoplifting offence. If they are returned to Iran they might be put to death for ‘living in sin’ with the girlfriend in the UK although that is not an offence here.
Some countries have laws that apply to their citizens wherever they might be. Britsh laws on ‘sex tourism’ are an example.
Islamic Sharia law presumably applies to muslims wherever they are.
Another example is that it is an offence under British (English?) law for anyone, anywhere in the world, to hijack a plane. So if a Russian hijacks Japanese plane in Brazil, and they come to Britain while on the run, they can be tried under our laws and sentenced to serve in a prison here.
Noisy eaters, especially as they tend to be the sort of people who come ands sit or stand next to you while they eat!
Also people who keep putting on accents or silly voices.
But No.1 on my list is people with ‘singing tourettes’ who sing along to every bit of music or jingle they hear and don’t realise they are doing it!
My own most annoying habit is not finishing sentences when I’m
our decent and pure Anglo-Saxon bloodlines
No such thing! I read somewhere that the British population (other than relatively recent immigrant groups) is genetically 30% Celtic / pre-Celtic and this is roughly the same throughout the British Isles, surprisingly. Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans etc. have had a smaller influence on our genetic make-up although they had major cultural influences.
Since Anglo-Saxons were mongrels (a mixture of Angles and Saxons) they were not ‘pure’ anyway!
I didn’t bother to read the link above but my reply to the thread’s title is that all drivers are one conviction away from a ban. If the driving offence is serious – e.g. drink driving, dangerous driving or gross speeding, the driver will probably get a ban straight off, even for a first offence.
There is a widespread taboo about eating pork that goes beyond islam. It is well known that Jews do not eat pork for the same reason – i.e. it is considered ‘unclean’. Also some Christians do not eat it and there was always the old country saying: ‘it’s only safe to eat pork during the months with and ‘R’ in them’.
I am an atheist-humanist and I do not eat pork on principle either, for different reasons to do with the way I saw pigs treated by some farmers, market, drivers and abbatoir workers during a time when I occasionally drove livestock lorries. Taking pigs to the abbatoir during the day and then coming home to take the dog for a walk seemed like a double standard too far.
But it’s OK to sing about piggies in my book!!!!!
It is right that some recognition of the evils of slavery be marked 200 years after the slave trade was abolished.
What we are recognising is that a terrible wrong was perpetrated by some humans against others. Slavery has had a lasting effect on world demographics.
But the wrongs were committed by and against people who all died over a century ago. We do not need to apoplogise because all the people who should have apologised are long dead, as are all the people they should have apologised to.
We are all, in a sense, beneficiaries of history, whether it be good history or bad history. We owe the line of ancestry that led to our very existence to past wars, tragedies etc.
Many of us would not be here had it not been for the First World War, for instance. Many of the young men who died in that war might, if the war hadn’t happened, lived to marry the girls who became our grandmothers / great grandmothers, meaning that we’d never have been born but someone else would have.
The same is true of slavery. It set the unique patterns of descent that led to the births of most of the Afro-Carribean and Afro-American alive today. What we should be remembering about slavery is the terrible injustice and cruelty, just like we remember with the holocaust.
What we need to take from this bicentenary is a determination never to let anything like this happen again. But we do hear of East European girls being people trafficked as sex slaves, people in debt in India who end up as bonded labourers (basically slaves), people in China being thrown in jail to work as prison labourers.
