French bean

Well one of the things the Stadtverwahltung here is looking at is banning delivery vehicles from the town centre. They're not supposed to come in after 10 but they all ignore it so I suspect there will be automated bollards being installed soon. If that happens here and in other towns in then makes working on a so called self employed contract with penalties even less attractive.

Maybe because they have to work and besides there's always nice people like you and me to take in parcels as well as the local pick up point.

We're always having issues with DPD, The amount of times they claim something is delivered or no one was in or the left it with a neighbour without leaving a card. Same old story, same with Hermes and I believe with GLA. Deliverers on so called self employed contracts, paid by the parcel and if it's not delivered then penalised and with us, they appear to be all eastern European with worse German than me. The race to the bottom in the name of profit.

Used to love listening to Just a Minute when travelling home from work.

It's weird with trains here, my experience is the S Bahn is good, the Regio Bahn seems to be virtually always on time where as the ICE is really a lottery

If it lives, the Chinese know how to cook it

I just hope all the predictions are wrong, that the UK can survive and stand on its own two feet without needing the help of the US and the Chinese vultures. I also hope that he EU remains and continues to grow because we need a strong EU to counter again the Chines and the Americans. somehow I can't see it working out like that.

The Chinese are renowned for not telling the truth and for smothering any form of whistleblowing. You also have the massive industrialisation, the propensity to cut corners and the very high levels of industrial farming on contaminated land. Saw a programme a couple of weeks ago where the Chinese admit that something like 70% of their waterways are polluted. Take all  that into account and there is a lot the Chinese aren't saying like how exactly did this virus crossover from animals to humans. IIRC the SARS virus came out of China as well.

Loosely tied in is the film Als Hitler das rosa Kaninchen stahl   Story about Judith Kerr when she was a child being forced out of Germany for being Jewish and their life as refugees in Switzerland and then Paris. No blood and gore but gives a child's perspective of been Jewish when the Nazis came to power. Worth seeing.

Think of what happens when there's a technical defect on a car and the manufacturer issues a recall. After a defect is reported on a aircraft, especially one that has safety implications then a similar process happens only it is far more stringent. This is issued by the Aviation authority of the country where the defect was recorded, the CAA in the UK and the FAA in the US. Tyre blow outs does suggest a technical problem and a repair instruction or a safety bulletin would have been issued to deal with that particular problem. Now post crash the work carried out was fitting rubber self sealing inner tanks, As far as I'm aware, Concorde was the only civil aircraft to have these inner tanks fitted. These are normally only on military aircraft because they are naturally at more risk of tanks being punctured. Now the programme mentioned by HEM actually made reference to previous tyre problems and I think certain things were done, but unfortunately as previously said, you cannot engineer out every eventuality otherwise it wouldn't fly because of weight and no one would buy it because of cost,

Aircraft tyres are not like car tyres, they have a very short life between replacement, secondly they are remoulded regularly, I forget how often but it's at least half a dozen times. Burst tyres on aircraft happen far more often then you realise, probably everyday, somewhere in the world, will an aircraft tyre burst.   As for what happened in 1979, I can't say but every accident is different and what they found this time is that the piece of debris from the previous aircraft had cut the tyre along its edge, it acted like a knife, you can try and protect against most things, but there's always something that hasn't been thought of and this accident was a case of the coming together of so many different factors at the same time. The accident itself wasn't just a case of human error, it was a combination of things that came together.   Perhaps you ought to focus on the fact that since its first commercial flight in 1976 I believe until this accident, there were no Concorde crashes. In the same timescale a number of 747's, 737's DC10's, Airbuses and other commercial aircraft had crashed. The only aircraft that had a safer record was the VC10 which had two crashes between 1964 and 2013

It wasn't just the burst tyre, it was the debris from the tyre hitting an overfilled fuel tank that could not absorb the shock wave that then ruptured the tank, the tank blew out, it wasn't punctured from the outside. In addition, the balance of the aircraft was wrong by too much heavy luggage being loaded at the back of the aircraft thereby altering the centre of gravity. Next issue was the flight engineer going through the procedure for an engine fire when the engine wasn't burning and the aircraft was still trying to take off. That meant the aircraft (badly loaded and carrying too much fuel) then loss 25% of its power.   Aeronautical Engineers will always try to design for the worst case scenario but unfortunately as is usual with accidents this was a case of lots of little things coming together to cause the tragic accident.

Have you seen the two giant hangers at Cardington outside Bedford? Built for the R100 and R101 in the 20's I believe. You can see them for miles and one of the hangers is now home to the Airlander 10.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_HAV_304/Airlander_10

That's at Sinsheim, the Buran is at Speyer. The Buran is very impressive and as for the Concorde and TU144, you can really see the difference in build quality between the two, like comparing a Landrover to a Rangerover

Meghan's father comes over as having more understanding of the requirements for being a Royal than Meghan has.   https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-51166306/thomas-markle-meghan-and-harry-cheapening-royals