There were large bus businesses before Stagecoach and First (BET and Tilling for example) but I think deregulation was ideological first and at best the emergence of local and regional monopolies was the invisible hand of the markets.

I don’t really know, I’m sure it’s in the local paper archives. I lived in South Yorkshire at the time and the joint councils also decided to do a similar thing, and while fares increased (from 10p for adults and 2p for children for most journeys) it still seemed the right thing to do. In comparison Leeds sold off the transport department on day one and the consequences of that are still being seen. Arguably Nottingham allowing a bit of transport business investment may have fended off Stagecoach and First from forming monopolies like they have in many places.

Nottingham has had good municipal transport for a very long time. When deregulation came along in 1986 the council chose to keep the service as a wholly owned company where other cities sold their transport departments off. It expanded by buying bus companies in the surrounding county and in 2001 Transdev, who own Trent Barton, the largest private operator in the county, bought a 5% stake in NCT. Transdev are pretty good at branding and brought that to the business. Like Newcastle, Sheffield and Manchester the city also decided to invest in converting the local train network into a light rail/tram system. A large part of it is having a progressive outlook, I think. It would be difficult to recover that now for many cities, where infrastructure has been built over, and there just isn’t the money and won’t be while central government doesn’t have a national view of public transport.

“He called you three as well?”

K-9 is being used as the base for Thunderbird for Android but it isn’t there yet. FairEmail is a lot closer in functionality at the moment.

I use Thunderbird for Gmail (among other accounts) and it has to regularly compress my Gmail box, which none of the Android clients do - in my experience, Aqua Mail, K-9 and FairEmail all struggle with a decent sized Gmail mailbox after a while.

Probably a Surface (if there’s one with a 5G modem) at the moment. I got a Lenovo Ideapad Duo Chromebook a few years ago but it’s become unusable now and hasn’t been jailbroken to my knowledge. There was a newer version but it wasn’t made available in the UK. Devices like the Juno look promising but are way too expensive for me (accepting they’re around the same price as an iPad and that Android devices are subsidised).

iDrive E2 is $40 a year for 1TB S3 compatible storage and they have promotions quite often. As always with cheap storage don’t rely on it and have a local NAS but it’s handy for offsite. I’ve just transferred out of Wasabi, who were cheap but are less so now.

The one headphone adapter I have doesn’t seem to work, and I don’t think there was one with the phone. Finicky is probably right!

This 2022 Nokia has an FM radio. I had a look at the app and it says ‘Please plug in your headset to tune’. It’s not impossible that the USB C port is wired so wired headphones plugged in through an adaptor act as an aerial I suppose.

Perhaps it could be fuelled by oil derived from large aquatic mammals. There’d be a need for whale meat again #sorrynotsorry