One of the other advantages for bees is that cities generally have lower pesticide levels than arable land.

Perhaps the old folks could have shipped their kids off to India all those years ago.

Ceci n'est pas un chien avec une pipe.

Of course, "faire une pipe" has a rather different meaning.

Not sure I could stop my kids using it as a climbing frame.

seefish3 - on a related note, I occasionally get paused for moderation for no discernable reason.
Alex - if only to save yourself time in the future it may be a good idea to drop commenters a note to explain what it was that caused the filter to throw a wobbly so we can try to avoid it in future.
Assuming the filter tells you, of course.

Sue: - for certain highly specialised forms of terror, yes. The terror that the pizza boy might not arrive in time, the terror that you might nod off before someone passes round, the terror that you might get to the weekend without some supplies - yes.

Dickens World looks far too clean to me. Where are the piles of dung and the dead dogs and the Hogarthian gin palaces?

Kids do swallow stuff. I shouldn't worry about it, if I were you. While we were being told about the dangers of Lego our daughter was in the garden eating gravel.

For all Dan says, my experience of many everyday objects is that they've been too firmly funneled into making me use them the way the designer intended and not open-ended enough.
This is most obvious, of course, in toys; even Lego are moving away from generalised stuff that allows you to use your mind towards specialised kits that show you what to make and how to make it.

I'm always saddened by Lego kits on eBay which have been assembled and then taken apart and kept in the original box with the original instructions. What a narrow existence.

Looks too much like this...
http://tinyurl.com/m5jja9
to be taken seriously.

Can't easily take photos of my daughter's bookshelves, but they're built to be climbed up. She's only six and can't reach the top - I knew she'd climb them anyway, so I made them climbable.

"lest we descend into peasant-hood."

Help, help, I'm being repressed. Come and see the violence inherent in the system...

I'd be damned annoyed were it roaming in my vegetable patch. They're veggivorous.

Assuming the clock is right, that bloke spent over ten minutes driving round City Hall! What was he doing, playing hide and seek?

Many years ago I helped run a Saturday club for disabled kids in Barnes, London. One day we were playing around the pond out in the park when a dog arrived with a "wheelchair" for its back legs.

The kids, many wheelchair users themselves, thought this was magic and spent the entire afternoon making a fuss of it - the owner was really good about it and stayed until it was time to go home.

They talked about it for years later.