1st ade

I hope (but am not optimistic) that anyone who bought post July 2021 is told "you bought a home next to a pub, what do you expect?"

They didn't "forget" - I have copious amounts of correspondence on my efforts to try and get a culvert included but, "because of the austere times in which the dual carriage way was built" (or some such wording) no one was willing to spend the extra couple of thousand quid NOW to potentially save millions later (if the canal ever got that far) My MP (North Milton Keynes) would not get involved as the new road wasn't in his area, the Bedford MP was interested but "it would be illegal for me to take action based on people outside my constituency". I came to the conclusion that the general populace have little influence and, unless you can raise interest with (say) Depart for Transport, Highways Division, you've got no chance.

Good for them (seriously) I spent moths arguing that the A421 expansion near J13 on the M1 should have the bridges for the proposed Bedford MK link built in as it would cost a few hundred £k during the build and tens of £m (apart from the cost of closing the road...) to do it later. The response from my MP was that North Bucks could not get involved in a project in Bedfordshire and the response from the Bedford MP was it would be illegal for him to be swayed by comments from outside his constituency...

Personal Feeling We already have the Greeny / Love / Happy / HaHa etc which works well for reactions to a post without making the replies longer (and longer) - it also gives a "snapshot" - "seven people found this post funny, one found it sad" in a single place (with the post they refer to) I don't have a particular problem with animated GIF's except that they chew bandwidth, make threads difficult to follow, may not obviously indicate which response they refer to (unless they "quote" the response, which makes the response to the response even longer) - Actually - no, I don't like them That's not to say that a small animated GIF (the "banging the head against a wall" for example) is not acceptable.

We had an Anglian Water man knock on the door just before lockdown - randomly testing. he ran the kitchen cold tap for 60 seconds then filled about six previously sealed 0.2 l containers. Came back next day in a panic - our water had (just) detectable levels of lead - eventually (after checking the street, the garden and inside the house) it was a single joint made with the wrong sort of solder some years previous - I'm not convinced it was a health hazard but having had the joint replaced the lead level is now "not measurable"

Totally agree - but to the average punter "Look, it meets the British standard, it must be OK"

Is this the same item "they cite it conforms to BS5597 standard on their website which I assume for the average consumer would give it some legitimacy but when you look that up it’s the standard for “non-refillable plastic aerosol dispensers”"

Er no; each of which carries (typically) 80 different colours of light each of which carries around 10 Tb/s - it's not uncommon now to have ~800Tb on a fibre and across the Atlantic a "cable" may have four fibre pairs I'd tentatively say that example was relatively "short haul" - for over ~200km the costs of the repeaters (or amplifiers or optical regeneration - take your pick) tends to dominate - so providers go for two or four pairs and really reliable - for short haul across the north sea where you don't need amplifiers, the biggest i've heard of is 196 pair

Part of the reason is the (lack of) attention span unless you really like and appreciate Canal's When Electra was planning their cruises from the marina in MK they introduced "one way trips*" as people got bored with a repeat of the two hour trip out but in reverse [ * - For "one way" they took one group of people for a silent cruise and got a second party on a minibus. At half time and the far end they swapped groups. The one's who'd had a cruise were back in the car park in about twenty minutes while the other group were enjoying "their first cruise on an electric boat" ]

If the OP is genuine, I'd also suggest that asking on a public forum for advice on flouting the rules is not particularly sensible.