PsiMonk

6. Cosleep - safe, as long as you follow the accepted "rules" and much more likely to settle your baby easily in the first six months!

Nice story - but I'm still not convinced by electric bikes:

1. More to go wrong - bicycles are so brilliant because they're (largely) so simple.

2. Not necessary - OK, so a few killer hills do work up a sweat, but a quick flannel down at the other end deals with that.

3. Not green - right now, chances are most office and home recharging points will be using electricity from non-renewable sources; in the energy-crunch future, we'll need all the renewable power we can save just for the essentials.

4. The idea it's a good thing that a cyclist can get up to 30mph is very questionable. At that speed, cyclists will become arguably more dangerous to themselves and others than motorcyclists.

5. Less healthy for you

"Don't give the finger" - I always find being absolutely smilingly polite and friendly while ticking off a lunatic really disarms them.

"Excuse me, were you aware what the large yellow box you've just parked in was for? It's an ASL, that means..." or "Excuse me, but I just wanted to check that you were aware of nearly clipping me on that last corner... just checking as I thought you might want to modify your driving style slightly so that in future you don't have to face the horrible aftermath of having seriously injured or killed a cyclist in order just to shave a few seconds off your rush to the next set of lights. Just a thought, anyway, as obviously both the psychological and potental legal ramifications to you if you continued to drive like that might be severe. Anyway, have a good rest of your day. Goodbye... and thanks for not quite killing me back there."

Go with the super-polite and it really disarms road rage drivers. Failing that, keeping a d-lock or a solid pump to hand occasionally prove a valuable deterrant.

I'd also add read "Cyclecraft" - absolutely brilliant book on safe cycling. And don't just take the lane when it's a narrow street - take it whenever necessary/safer for you to do so - big bends in the country, junctions in the city, through road-narrowing schemes, on nearly all roundabouts etc.

You don't need water in a nappy bucket! We put ours in a mesh bag-lined bucket with lid, then couple of drops of tea tree. Result - no smell, no mess.

And as to tinyfeet reckoning real nappies are leaky? We swapped to real nappies after two months partly because we were finding disposables leaky overnight. Now we use a booster pad in a real nappy overnight and baby will go through without any discomfort or leak.

This government couldn't give a figgy pudding about green issues. They talk the talk, but fuel tax freeze tells the real story. As does failing to fix the woeful situation on grants for offgrid generation, as does failing to kaibosh the ludicrous roads and runways expansion schemes they've got going through.