Yes, most important of all @Quidam, have a good and succesful surgery and quick recovery!
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Aww bless 
Sometimes it just takes someone saying something in the way that makes it click for YOU! I’m so happy I’ve been able to do that for you 
There’s some people here who have been able to really help me too - what goes around comes around
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Retired English teachers, secretary’s of all varieties (2 of which were personal to two big corporations), one professor from Princeton University because I had a question about something that I’d wanted an answer on in understandable terms, countless other people from all walks of education (some from the Open University), my family and hundreds if not thousands of hours posting on forums about it, then AI came out so I spent hours there as well. All this about a problem which came about in 1994 after writing a letter to the prime minister of England with a complaint!
In which I funnily enough received a reply from his secretary noting the letter had be forwarded to him, and a sarky remark about my wording problem, which to many sounded a completely stupid problem.
And even after joining here it wasn’t long before I started asking about my problem…
And yet to start with and the first couple of p.m.'s I was none the wiser, and then you said something nobody had ever said before, ‘it belongs to someone or something’
And suddenly it made sense because I had all my life heard people say things like ‘this belongs to me’, or ‘this belongs to them’ and in another previous post I had written about how people own land, woods and mountains, which had been there for thousands of years before, and will be there thousands of years ahead, and yet they say it belongs to them, they own it.
Hopefully I haven’t waffled to much and caused confusion as I’m not very good with this language lark, and neither do I want to blow your ego through the roof as this could cause me to be frowned upon by the higher few here.
But I honestly thought this problem would be coming to my grave with me, the only problem I had in all of my life, and you fixed it within 3 days!
I know I thanked you in pm afterwards, but it never felt enough, and I certainly never explained the problem in the length that I have here.
And if I have gone over the top here with this response, and certain people don’t like to see praise because it goes against whatever teachings they follow to the letter, then that’s their problem, it belongs to them! 
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Grammar nazi’s are soooo 
How rude coming from the PM’s secretary tho 
I think I laugh at myself and throw enough self- deprecating comments around, that we will all get away with it intact 
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It was to do with a school.
The first school I was sent too in a small village.
My first few weeks at the school involved me running out of the gate and turning left to run home, thinking back I should of turned right, the woods were equally as close regarding distance to my home.
I learnt from that though, my second school I would run to the woods, the police and parents were not impressed!
The main gate of my first school was/is no wider than 3ft and had a small pavement in front of it, then a busy main road. The road through the village was used as a rat run between the M1 motorway and a town called Leighton Buzzard.
Those were the days before speed camera’s and police traffic vans with cameras on board, lorries and cars moved mighty fast back then!
Then years later my daughter started at the same school.
One day I picked her up in the first few weeks of her starting the school. I was sat in the car watching the main gate where the kids come out. I was early so all was quiet, no other parents waiting, yet more cars and lorries than I’d ever remembered were hurtling past me, still no cameras, speed bumps or anything else to slow them down.
Then from nowhere a child ran out of the gate, never turned left, never turned right. Just ran straight across the road to the other side without looking.
And though the child made it to the other side without being hit, in my mind he had been run over by 3 cars and a lorry.
So I wrote a letter to the prime minister saying about what I had seen, and it wouldn’t be long before a child would be killed outside the gate if something wasn’t done. I said that it would not make me feel guilty because I had reported the issue to him, and being a pubic highway I would be arrested if I started putting in speed bumps on my own.
So to prevent a child’s death he was the only one with the power to do something.
I left it at that then and put it out of my mind, I had dealt with my concerns.
The next thing was this letter from the secretary, it said the prime minister had received the letter, and the issue would be dealt with, at the bottom of this letter was some words saying about how nice it was for me to send my daughter to the same school I attended, and it was a shame that I hadn’t paid attention at the school as my use of the English vocabulary was pretty bad. (and she highlighted the problem)
Anyway a few weeks later the council installed a long railing outside the gate, high enough to stop a child getting over and run into the road.
I also received another letter from MK council, it said there was absolutely no need to go to the prime minister about this and I should of contacted them first.
I never replied, the prime ministers secretary had built a wall in my mind that I’d run head first into.
If you ever fancy a career change, I could write to them again and say I’ve found the perfect prime minister to run the UK.
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Well that sounds like something worth taking some snarky remarks for. Good job 
I’d never ‘cut it’ as a politician. I think you have to have some degree of corruption to make it to the top for starters, …. And I’d be cutting their pay packets as the first point of business and they’d all vote me out before I got started on working on the rest of the corruption and implementing a whole range of ideas that would be in the public’s ( instead of the elites) best interest.
Expect Starmer to be gone before the year is out tho. His shiz is about to catch up with him. Wait & watch 
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If you are just chatting with each other about random stuff not related to “Retreat Etiquette …”, please do so via PM. Public threads need to be on topic (for the most part).
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My fault @trusolo
I did read the terms/conditions and source code of the whole site as well!
Which incidentally you might want to fill in the <meta name=“keywords” part.
And add the robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
I guess I took some of the wording to literally in the water cooler terms and conditions About the The Watercooler category …
Post about anything you want to discuss, serious or light, that doesn’t fit elsewhere. Enjoy some discussion, friendly chat, or just hang out with Dhamma friends
Anyway again my sincere apologies, I’ll try harder in the future to keep on topic (for the most part)
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I think it’s fair to say any thread can be about anything, but not every thread can be about everything, if that makes sense.
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No, not really!
But no worries as they would say in Oz!
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