Earthman

Mr Singh walks into a bank in London and asks to see the bank manager. He explains he's going to Europe on business for two weeks and needs to borrow £5000. The Manager says the bank will need some kind of security for the loan, so Mr Singh hands over the keys to a new Rolls Royce, which costs quarter of a million pounds. “The car is parked on the street in front of the bank,” says Mr Singh, “and I have all the necessary papers.” The bank manager agrees to accept the car as collateral for the loan. After Mr Singh leaves, the manager, the bank's area manager and all their colleagues enjoy a good laugh at the man for using a £250,000 Rolls Royce as collateral against a £5,000 loan. One of the employees drives the Rolls into the bank's underground carpark and parks it there. Two weeks later, Mr Singh returns, repays the £5000 and the interest, which comes to £15.41. The manager says, "Sir, I must tell you, we’re all a little puzzled. While you were away, we checked you out and discovered that you’re a multimillionaire. Why would you bother to borrow £5,000?" The man replies, "Where else in London can I park my car for two weeks for only £15.41?"

@MbarkCherguia That’s not how oil is produced ever head of pore pressure

You're digging in your backyard and this happens. What do you do?

@SamaHoole And they worry about putting sunscreen on the children and cream makes you fat

The British Vitamin D problem is not new. Britain sits between 50 and 58 degrees north. London is on the same latitude as Calgary. Edinburgh is level with Moscow. From October to March, the sun does not rise high enough above the horizon for the UVB wavelength your skin needs to actually reach the ground. You can stand naked in February noon sunlight on the south coast and produce essentially zero vitamin D. This is six months of the year, every year, for the entire history of human habitation on these islands. The British have known this, in their bones, for ten thousand years. Look at what was eaten in winter, before anyone had ever heard the term cholecalciferol: Oily fish. Herring, mackerel, sprats, kippers. Three or four times a week from October to March. A single kipper carries roughly 250 IU of D3. Cod liver oil. Spooned into every British child between 1850 and 1980, a teaspoon at a time. Distributed free by the Ministry of Food in the war on the explicit understanding that British children needed it through the dark months. Rickets fell by 90 per cent between 1940 and 1960. Cod liver oil was the reason. Liver. Eaten weekly in working households until 1985. Egg yolks from hens that had been outside in the summer. Grass-fed butter, made from cream from cows on summer pasture, the fat-soluble vitamins banked into the cream and eaten through the winter. The British solution to the British problem, evolved over centuries by people who could not articulate the biochemistry but knew, with absolute certainty, what kept the children growing through the dark months. Then between 1955 and 2010, the British removed almost all of them. Cod liver oil reduced to a niche supplement. Liver dropped from weekly to never. Oily fish consumption halved. Eggs rationed by the Department of Health on cholesterol grounds since retracted. Butter replaced with margarine carrying no fat-soluble vitamins at all. Result, by 2020: roughly half of all British adults are vitamin D deficient by the end of winter. A third of children. Rickets has reappeared in British paediatric wards. The NHS now recommends every adult take a supplement from October to March. This is the NHS recommending in 2026 what the British diet was doing automatically in 1926. The geography has not changed. The latitude is the same. The sun is still inadequate from October. The food used to handle it. The kippers are still being smoked at Craster. The cod liver oil is on the chemist's shelf. The liver is at the butcher. The butter is in the dairy aisle, behind the spreads. The sun was always seasonal. The food was the backup. The backup got thrown out. Get it back.

@Wishfullthinki9 @TheGriftReport Coz they’re cheap

@TheGriftReport Why why why do you have people awnsering phones and dealing with enquiries who cant/don't speak or understand English.

Councillor apologises after asking council call handler to speak English as critics agree with her Eastbourne Borough Councillor Elaine Hamilton, in her 60s, called the council helpdesk and struggled to understand the operator. She politely said “I’m sorry but I can’t understand you, can I speak to someone who can speak English please?” The comment triggered a backlash with some social media users branding her racist. Hamilton has now issued a statement apologising and saying she regretted any offence caused. Critics including local residents and fellow councillors have agreed with her, arguing English should be the language used for all council services so ratepayers can be properly understood.

Bloody jokers

@nkh12349 X

You want a love that sets your mind, heart and body on fire 😏🔥

@nkh12349 C

I photographed the 1st pic yesterday whilst out cycling because it was such a beautiful sight & obviously brilliant for pollinators. Today, it's been sprayed with herbicide & the Dandelions are all wilting! What a shocking waste & another unnecessary bit of land doused in poison.

@donnarainey4 @pambizbuster When are people going to wake up !!!!

Current life in the UK 5 am. de-ice the car .. 12pm - sunbathe & reapply SPF 8pm - put the heating on .. 🤭🤭🤭🤭🤭🤭🤭🤭🤭

The moment of this snow leopard's return to freedom leaves you speechless.

@KeruboSk @rospay15 Don’t think your relationship is a very understanding one. Understanding is a vital ingredient in the romance cocktail

My boyfriend and I are planning to buy a house together after dating for 3 years. He earns significantly more than I do, so he’d be contributing about 70% of the down payment. Because of that, he wants the house to be only in his name. He says it’s just “fair” based on the numbers, but we’d both be living there, splitting bills, and building a life together. I’ve been watching a lot of relationship content about equity vs equality, and it made me realize things don’t always have to be 50/50 but this feels like I’d have no security at all. He said if we ever broke up, he’d “do the right thing,” but that doesn’t really reassure me. My friends say don’t move in unless my name is on it. His friends apparently think I’m being entitled. Now I feel stuck between trusting him and protecting myself. Is this a red flag I’m trying too hard to rationalize?

Right in the middle of a rainy moment, a tiny bird becomes the star of something truly magical—a perfect water droplet lands on its head, forming a crown-like splash that feels almost unreal. The timing is flawless, capturing a split second where nature turns playful.

Something very relaxing after a long week sitting in the sun in my boat eating cod and chips

@MasterNotesX C

Test psicológico: ¿Qué mujer te atrae más? (Lee tu resultado ↓↓↓)

@FlowerdewBob Local travel should be free then not driving to town would be a no brainer.

long advocated this, efficiency savings on so many staff, and equipment to collect & police fares, for safety still need to count in and out so suggest any credit card will open gates -maybe nominal voluntary fee for travel insurance &/or prize draw, tourists buy a pass

@theiaincameron Interesting how navigation is altered by perspective

Today I found out that Edinburgh is farther west than Blackpool.

@FlowerdewBob Humans leave scars on the environment what ever they seem to do over fishing monoculture over exploitation of aquifers ….

and nuclear power stations are built out of cardboard aren't they, oil refineries from sugar lollipops and strip mining coal makes beautiful meadows

@SamaHoole @ProfTimNoakes Same with oxtail and shin cheap cuts fantastic food value

Liver and onions was on the kitchen table of roughly every British household in the country, at least once a fortnight, from approximately 1850 to approximately 1985. A Tuesday meal. Whatever day the butcher had lamb's liver in, or pig's liver if you were further down the week, or ox liver if the household was stretching the budget. Your mother bought it that afternoon. Still warm, or nearly. Deep burgundy, slick and glossy on the butcher's paper. Half a pound. Tuppence. Change from a shilling. She sliced it quarter of an inch thick, dusted it in seasoned flour, and laid it in a pan where a pound of onions had been going soft in bacon fat for twenty minutes. Two minutes one side. Two minutes the other. The middle still faintly pink. Overcooked liver was a mortal sin in a British kitchen, spoken of by grandmothers with genuine sadness, the way a priest might discuss a lapsed parishioner. Pan juices deglazed with water and Worcestershire, poured over. Mashed potato. A pile of cabbage. A rasher of bacon laid across the top if it was a good week. The whole thing cost, in 1962, approximately 8p per serving. It delivered, in a single plate, the highest concentration of bioavailable vitamin A in any food on earth, more B12 than any supplement will ever contain, haem iron at absorption rates a plant source cannot match, copper, zinc, choline, folate, and selenium. Nobody called it a superfood. Nobody called anything a superfood. It was called Tuesday. Then, between 1985 and 2005, liver quietly disappeared. Mothers stopped buying it. The butcher stopped ordering it. The supermarket stopped stocking it. By 2010, most British adults under thirty had never knowingly eaten it. The word now carries a faint cultural embarrassment. A food your nan ate. Something to move past. Meanwhile, 20% of British women of childbearing age are anaemic. The NHS prescribes them ferrous sulphate tablets that cause nausea and take six months to address a deficiency one plate of liver a fortnight would correct in weeks. The women taking the tablets are, in many cases, the granddaughters of the women who ate the liver. The deficiency is cultural amnesia with a prescription attached. Your butcher still has lamb's liver in the counter. Ask him. He will be delighted. He might throw in the kidneys. Flour. Bacon fat. Onions. Four minutes total. Worcestershire. Mashed potato underneath. The grandmother is gone, but the dish remembers her, and so do you, whether you knew her or not. Eat it. Pass it on.

Chips fried in beef dripping were a different object to what passes for a chip today. Walk into a Whitby chippy in 1978. The fryer has been on since 11am. The fat in it is beef dripping, held at 180 degrees by a man in a white apron who has been frying chips since he was fifteen. There are no seed oils in the building. The idea would not occur to anyone. Thick-cut Maris Pipers, ninety seconds in the dripping. Dark gold at the edges, fluffy inside, crisp in a way that sets your teeth against them. Salt. Vinegar. Paper. Two bob. You eat them walking home along the harbour wall. The chip tastes of the chip and also of something underneath the chip, something deeper, something you don't have a name for because you are nine and nobody names it, it is just what chips taste like. That taste was beef dripping. By 2002, 90% of British chippies had switched to rapeseed, palm, or sunflower oil, on the advice of public health officials citing research since quietly retracted. A stable saturated fat used for ten thousand years, swapped for an industrial oil invented in 1911, oxidised at fryer temperatures for twelve hours a day. A seed-oil chip is lighter, flatter. The crust doesn't hold. The flavour stops at the potato. No deeper note. No roast beef on a Friday. Ask a British person under thirty what chips are supposed to taste like and they will describe, with complete sincerity, the chip they have always eaten. A chip their great-grandfather would have considered a practical joke. They cannot miss it, because the reference point was removed from the national palate before they were born. A handful of chippies still fry in dripping. The Magpie in Whitby. A few survivors in Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Black Country. Go. Drive. Queue. Eat them standing up, out of the paper. You will understand, in one bite, what was taken. The cow is still in the field. The suet is still at the butcher. The fryer could be switched back tomorrow. A whole country forgot what a chip was.