DAVIDH

Wonder if he gets much business anyway now. Would be interesting to know the figures.

Yes, still had a great time, and it's completely different to "season" cruising. No rush for moorings, even though I needed to be near an electric post each night. Pubs generally still open and serving food (I missed the Norada at Potter, which is only opening Friday to Monday during the winter). I visited The Bridge Inn at Acle for the first time in the winter, following the installation of the electric posts the other side of the bridge. It was still quite busy, though they had closed the restaurant off, which concentrated people in the bar area. I preferred it to be honest. More life! I'll get to posting a bit of a travelogue and some images next week.

I am Jean, though it's quite cold at times. It went down to 2c Monday into Tuesday, and delight of delights, it's forecast -1c for tonight!. For my third trip running, I've managed to be aboard when a storm is forecast for the end of the week. Storm Arwen is due to hit on Saturday, so I'm high-tailing it back home tomorrow (Friday). Didn't fancy driving home through storm force winds.

I'm out on Goosander at the moment. The only hire boats I'm seeing are Herbert Woods more modern craft. One or two a day.

Welcome to the forum Deniseanne. As you will have read above, I too will really miss the Yare if it closes. If you do happen to win the lottery and find the money, do let us know. I can promise my continued patronage, even if it's just 3 or 4 times a year.

Just play them at their own game. There's a couple of Leeds Utd games being televised just on Amazon TV soon. They appear to offer you free Prime membership every six months, so I just wait until the appropriate time to subscribe, watch the matches, then cancel the subscriptions before the 30 day free trial is up. You can also get the 30 day free subscription by using a different email and credit card number.

Yes, there are adverts allover the radio at the moment, ramming home that you can get cash back on EVERYTHING you buy using an Amex card. But as you say, this is at the expense of the retailer, who will either accept the charge as a loss of profit.... or pass it back in the form of higher prices.

I should have made it clear that I wasn't speaking of myself. I'm a referral partner of Hoseasons. They're the ones who charge the customer's card, and take the card fee hit.

Nothing wrong with using a credit card for travel, though if the arrangement is Atol protected, such as package holidays, you're protected anyway. Paying by credit card doubles the protection unnecessarily - you can't claim from two insurances. In commerce generally, paying by credit card unnecessarily, such as for items under £100, which aren't covered, just adds to the merchant's costs, which are then passed back to the consumer.

Can quite understand this. We passed laws a few years ago preventing the seller from passing on the credit card charge made by the bank, back on to the buyer. So whatever the bank charges the seller to facilitate the sale, the charge has to be absorbed (or added back in to the price of the item.) In travel that can be as much as 2% of the commission earned by the agent - 20 to 25% of their profit. It's higher on lower priced items of course. It would take a large organisation like Amazon to stand up to the banks, which in essence, are able to charge what they like (within a competitive market). It just adds to the price of the item you want to buy.

Someone's comment on Facebook today

Never managed it yet, after 50+ visits, but to no detriment. The last few years, they seem to have a really nice lady, who I can only guess is some sort of "front of house" manageress. She is very personable, and welcoming. The young waiting staff clearly follow her lead now. I will really miss the place. It's the only Broads pub I've revisited every time I've been down (others a close second). I can remember us sitting in the games room on the first few occasions, because it had a juke box. Then we became more "sophisticated" and frequented the main bar with it's stage and live music at times, (before it was converted to it's present incarnation). Strange that what appears to be a thriving business, should seemingly not have found takers as a going concern.

Another thing I heard was that it wasn't thought we would need interminable boosters, as after 4 or 5 "sessions", the body is able to assemble and keep a memory of the infection, to mount a response. It's like that with Hepatitis B the doctor said. Those in the medical profession have to have the Hep B jab to be able to practice, but after 4 or 5 (can't remember which), it's no longer necessary. The herd immunity thing is a confused message for this reason. Eventually, enough people will be able to mount the response, that the virus can't find a new host. The immunity you get from general infection would last a matter of months, and you may then get it again. Perhaps enough of this reinfection renders you protected in the same way.

One of TV doctors commented last night that Europe is more of a timing thing. Although many countries are now ahead of us in the double vaccination rates (because of the reluctance to jab the 12 to 16 year olds), they started later than us. Our immunity started to wain in the late summer, and we began the booster program a couple of months ago. Europe's immunity is waning around now, at a time when colder weather leaves more people vulnerable. The Delta variant didn't hit them so hard then because of their jab rate success, but it's now finding the vulnerable. It's hoped that a booster program across Europe will bring the infection rate back down. In essence, Europe is tracking where the UK was a few weeks ago.

Best 8oz burger and battered chicken pieces on the Broads. Just like the demise of the steak pie at the Ship Inn at Reedham, I will miss them.

Oh that's a sad end of an era. Always been my favourite pub on the Broads. I'm surprised it's just closing though. I would have thought it would have sold better as a going concern. Hope it reopens as a pub, and doesn't become part of someone's plan for a housing development.

Illuminating explanation there Peter. Interesting that a slight "wobble" in Earth's orbit can cause so much devastation too. It could be that the current warming is more to do with factors we have not created, though the effect seems to be the same. Perhaps Earth's temperature will right itself eventually, though with timescales of thousands of years, the damage will already have been done. My view is that whatever the reason for climate warming, we have a means of reducing it, starting with the steps being taken at COP 26. At least the nations of the world acknowledge there is a problem now. I also think the steps we are going to need to take, will usher in a new era where the last 50 years will seem like a golden age. People have become relatively well off. Jetting off on multiple holidays each year had become the norm before Covid. Food prices were kept low due (in part) to improvements in agriculture. Technology was gobbled up by the extra discretional spend in most (not all) peoples pockets, and eating out was an affordable leisure activity. Unless new tech comes along to make the new world we will be living in cheaper, I can see money getting tighter across the board. We've heard about heat pumps, and the UK decision to phase out new gas boilers by 2035. The only way i can see this happening is if a surcharge is put on our power bills (much like it is to pay for loft insulation and cavity wall insulation), so that everyone can have access to a grant at the time of their boiler replacement. I think the government will find it irresistible to not apply taxes to our flights. Currently, we do not charge VAT on aviation fuel. Can't see that lasting, The government has already adopted "The polluter pays" principle by introducing an Ultra APD tax to long haul flights of 5,500 miles or more in the last Budget As an aside, the treasury has surely noted that the amounts flowing into the coffers from hospitality, has increased as a result of people being unable to jet off and spend their cash abroad, over the last two years. As businesses across the world, have to pay more to be more sustainable, these costs will be added to the goods we buy. It all points to a smaller disposable spend.

It was on Universe, the new series with Prof Brian Cox. This from NASA: How long will the Sun shine? If our Sun is four and a half billion years old, how much longer will it shine? Stars like our Sun burn for about nine or 10 billion years. So our Sun is about halfway through its life. But don’t worry. It still has about 5,000,000,000—five billion—years to go. The sun is what makes our planet inhabitable. Any closer to the sun and things would become molten. Any further away and it would be too cold to exist, and all water would be locked away, frozen. He (Brian Cox) estimates it's taken 5 billion years of this uninterrupted state for intelligent life to develop here on Earth. There are billions of stars out there (I'm told), but the vast majority are in a state of flux, with unsteady orbits. Because of that, he believes the odds are against finding intelligent life elsewhere in the Galaxy. You would need a steady orbit, just the right distance from a sun, and that must not change for up to 5 billion years for life to get a foothold. He says, just imagine that we have become one of the few outposts of intelligent life in the Universe, and we let it slip away by our own mis-management. Read more here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/19/earths-demise-could-rid-galaxy-of-meaning-warns-brian-cox-ahead-of-cop26

Not sure this is right. Politicians have no reason to want to subjugate their citizens to the hardships that will be necessary to keep the temperature down. Why are they committing to lower CO2 when they know it will make their governments unpopular? They have no choice, because what ever is spent/experienced now, is likely to be dwarfed by what will be needed if we leave it until later, if the scientific predictions are correct. The alternative would be to do nothing and hope this warming trend reverses of it's own accord. Would you want to take that risk with the planet, and the generations to come?

Peter, I didn't read the poster as saying man had caused these mass extinction events. It was just pointing out that these events did happen. Clearly man couldn't have caused them as we probably wasn't around at the time. Maybe I over-stated it and to use a word of the moment "conflated" the two issues. The problem is that we have no real lived scientific data from those times and can only estimate what could happen today. There are already many countries at risk from melting ice of one form or another, in respect of flooding. Common sense tells me that if the temperature increases, more ice will melt and many areas will be flooded. Apparently, one consequence of the ice melt will be that the carbon which has been locked within for millions of years, will be released into our atmosphere, accelerating the global warming process. I believe that's why there's a figure of 1.5c, which it's considered a tipping point. I accept that Earth has been a lot hotter than it is now, but there was no human life to sustain at that time. What do we do, just sit back and say it's meant to be or do what we can to sustain the temperature to reasonable levels. Let's face it, most (not all) of the people who post on here, won't be around to see the effects of the Earth warming. It's the next two generations who will be affected, and it's no coincidence that it's that age group who are being most vocal. It was this film I saw in the Singapore auditorium which really made me think. It shows what is predicted to happen as temperatures rise between now and 2100 (for whatever reason), if no action is taken.

With or without China's help, according to the latest COP 26 briefing, if all the signatory countries fulfil their promises, the earth's temperature is on target to reach 1.7c above pre-industrial levels, down from 2.6c (I think), projected before the latest round of pledges. That's not far off the 1.5c we need to keep below to stop the earth's climate reaching the point of no return. So just doing nothing because we perceive China and other countries to be "not pulling their weight" is very dangerous. I visited Singapore in 2019, a country very switched on to climate change and sustainability, visiting the Gardens By The Bay. Amongst the exhibits, I came across the message in the image below, which really shook me. We think we're masters of the Earth, but as you can read from the mass extinctions that have taken place in the past, over millions of years, our planet knows how to cleans itself if it's being managed badly.

Not sure at all. It won't just be over this COP26 fortnight you here the sustainability message. It's going to be more in your face than ever before now. Even your children will be reminding you it's their future you're saving. Plus I wouldn't think it beyond the realms of possibility that the government finds it very attractive to tax aviation much more than it currently does.

I don't think people will cancel. More likely those who haven't booked yet, might think twice when they see the costs. I personally don't think these prices will stick, and wouldn't be surprised to see a lower set in place after Christmas if the overseas market gets going again. Having said that, one thing I didn't consider earlier, was the desire for people to be more "green", to not fly as much as before the pandemic began. The COP 26 agenda has been front and centre over the last week or so, and is bound to influence people's choices in the future. They may now take perhaps one main holiday abroad, and substitute overseas city breaks etc, with holidays at home. There's lots of variables.

Guessing it's this one Simon https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/business/richardsons-boss-says-uk-holidays-here-to-stay-8465084 Not quite sure what this means: "He expects with the addition of Easter being open next year he will see a similar performance again next year – and he expects boating holidays to be up about 30% next year. “Basically that will flatten out because we’ll be sold out,” he said" If they were sold out this year, surely Easter (which wasn't available to book this year), will not increase their turnover by 30%. Plus they have disposed of over 30 of this season's boats, and as far as I can tell, have replaced them with just 4 small cruisers.

Which boatyard do the logs refer to? I cant think of one that had a Calypso, a Superbe, a Concorde and a W Mariner all in the same fleet.