ROSETTE!!!!!!!!!!11 That'l be the day!!!!!!!!!!!

I am not that great at this wonderful game and as for getting a rosette!Pink porkers are more likely to fly over my roof.However I did get massy but purely because I don't care about keeping a 100% hit rate and when there is a Y in the grid I resort to sticking it on any word possible! It will be downgraded to rare of course but this time I won't be miffed(unlike when eland, for example, went to rare yet other antelopes still score as common). Meanwhile I will go back to occasionally dreaming that I may get as far as needing only one word to get that rosette!

Midsummer Boulevard?? Is it a safe zone Penny??!!!

From what I read about him Gooding was only young really when he died (64 I think) and had been ill for a while. He had got pleasure from building the collection and perhaps it helped him cope with the illness? Our local auction house does a specialist section in the sales a couple of times a year and I often wonder about why people keep them instead of drinking them. I have a few ideas but most of them are quite sad. Presents from deceased relatives maybe or bought to celebrate milestone events that they need the bottle to help remember?Just me being a bit sentimental I suppose.

Oh Penny how  I agree about smiling and greeting being at best ignored or worst still looked upon with suspicion! It is ever the fate of customer facing jobs I'm afraid. I have to plead guilty to sometimes being excessively cheerful to those who seem the most disgruntled by my friendliness just to give them a better reason to scowl at me!!

Hi Penny
over the years I have taken a number of different dogs to many different hotels and I have seen those  words on notices in many of them and had that said to me as well. Many places say that they prefer furry guests to children! The current furry resident has even stayed in a Michelin Star hotel ( just the one night we are not made of money!) and got chef made biscuits ( not sure she appreciated the difference to Winalot Shapes as she eats everything she sees as quickly as possible!) The world has certainly moved on in this respect as 30 odd years ago it was hard to find a self catering cottage or even a caravan that allowed a dog to stay. Living now in the Lake District we are lucky enough to have endless cafes,shops and hotels happy to let a dogs in on our doorstep.At  the shop where I work we have dog biscuits under the counter and actively encourage shoppers to bring them in.

I have heard of it but please NO! Don't encourage words like this!!!!Let it remain in silly magazines and illiterate newspapers if it has to be anywhere.

I'm sorry but I was not advocating generational warfare. I was simply agreeing that we used glass bottles and walked more than we drove etc. Yes we may have been "greener" purely by default ( my parents were young during the war and I still scrape butter papers and stretch a chicken miles like my Mother taught me) but waving a placard and saying that "they" (Governments and therefore again by default older people) have to do something about  greenhouse gases etc ( and of course things need to change) but not having it pointed out to them that we are all "they" and change starts with an individual and their choices is wrong. Being an employee of a company that sells less than necessary products doesn't make me an ogre either and indeed some of us have tried to point out that our products are over packaged which is at least trying to make a small difference as an individual.If we all make a series of small changes and of course keep reminding governments that changes at their level are needed then maybe we can stop the world sliding into oblivion regardless of our generation.