Vix

@raven_brah 😂😂you’re funny - we DIDN’T have a fridge/freezer, tv, washing machine, central heating or phone when I was growing up - I’d never even heard of fast food - I’d never even been in a restaurant! We’d never visited a hairdresser, beauty parlour or had a manicure, I could go on….

Boomers seem to forget that fast food used to be a normal, everyday expense for them because it was affordable. You could get a burger easily on minimum wage, it wasn’t some fancy treat you had once a year as a reward for pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

@medicalmodelbri @Mary_Tom11 Practising medicine. Without a license. Doing that thing that the GMC was created to prevent. Hey ho.

A dr will have completed 7 to 8 years of training before administering their first anaesthetic, and will be fully supervised by a consultant throughout. A non-dr Physician Assistant in Anaesthesia has 2 years of training and often works unsupervised. Who would you choose?

You'll want to be sitting down for this bit. Water companies are currently £82.7 billion in debt, have paid themselves £85 billion in dividends, leak over a trillion of litres of water per year, dump sewage for almost 4 million hours per year, have been convicted of over 1,200 criminal acts since 1989 and an average of 35% of your bill goes on nothing but paying more interest and yet more dividends. And not a single company has ever lost their operating licence. 👇

@NadineDorries Nadine Dorries, the Online Safety Act was your doing. I genuinely can’t find a strong enough word right now to describe how furious I am with you. We really do need to start putting politicians in jail for lies and failures. x.com/i/status/16608…

Your father retired at sixty. He bought a caravan. He saw his grandkids on Tuesdays. He had time. You are sixty four. Your knees are gone. Your back is ruined. And they have moved the line again. Sixty seven. Then sixty eight. Then sixty nine. They sold three years of your retirement to balance their books. They sold five years of your wife's pension to balance their books. They will sell your children's whole retirement before they are done. Healthy life expectancy in this country is sixty three. You will retire sick. If you retire at all. The printer at Threadneedle Street never stops. The spending at the Treasury never stops. The excuses at Downing Street never stop. Three machines grinding through your life. You were not given more years to enjoy. You were given more years to serve.

Now there's a very, very good question. Thames Water have now admitted that they are not treating (dousing) their sewage for phosphate due to a "supply issue". That by the way has a massive and negative impact on water quality and aquatic life. Funny they didn't mention any of that until they were called out on it. How many other WCs I wonder are having supply issues?

@anishmoonka Helluva way to get out of helping his son with his homework

Karl Bushby was 29 when he left his 5-year-old son in England, flew to the bottom of South America, and started walking home. That was in 1998. He's 57 now, and still walking. He set himself two rules: no transport of any kind, and no going home until he reached England on foot from the south. The full route is 36,000 miles, about one and a half trips around the world. He's covered roughly 30,000 so far. He walked the deserts of northern Chile, where water was sometimes days away. He floated down a river in Colombia hidden under a pile of branches. The jungle was crawling with FARC fighters, armed rebels who would have killed him on sight. They passed within feet of him once. He did 18 days in a Panama jail for entering without a visa. The army flew him there in a helicopter. When they let him out, they took him back to the exact spot of his arrest so he could walk those miles too. In 2006 he walked across the frozen sea between Alaska and Russia. It took 14 days with one partner. They jumped between floating chunks of ice and swam the gaps in survival suits, in water cold enough to kill a man in minutes. They climbed 30-foot walls of ice piled up from collisions. The wind kept blowing the ice the wrong way. When they crawled onto Russian soil 52 miles north of where they'd meant to land, border guards were waiting and arrested them on the spot. In 2013, Russia banned him for five years. So he walked from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington DC in protest. About 4,800 km on foot, roughly the width of the United States, just to make a point. They lifted the ban. When he couldn't get a visa for Iran, he swam the Caspian Sea instead. 179 miles, 31 days, with one other walker and two Azerbaijani swimmers. His father Keith has been running things from home for 27 years. Asked recently how he'll feel when Karl finally makes it back, he said: "I'll be glad he's done it. But it will be strange to not have him out there." He's walking through Austria now, along the Danube River, with about 1,000 miles left. He hopes to reach the English Channel by September. After that, he needs special permission to walk through a service tunnel under the sea between France and England, since he hates swimming and a boat would break his own rules. He told BBC Radio last summer: "Getting home, I just don't know, it's weird. It's a very strange place to be in, where suddenly your purpose for living will have a hard stop." If he makes it through that tunnel, there will be a line of footprints stretching from the bottom of South America to a small house in the north of England. The son he left behind will be 33.

@_CatintheHat Why is it better?

I’ve just had news from someone who was able to access a Sanofi Nuvaxovid (previously Novavax) Covid vaccine in Bristol as part of the NHS Spring booster campaign (for those few who are actually eligible). Has anyone else had any joy accessing Nuvaxovid in the wild?!

81% of doctors fear patients are being put at risk because of how advanced practitioners are being used by employers in the NHS. Read more from @TheDrMagazine 👇

The UK personal allowance has been frozen at £12,570 since April 2021. That's the bit of your salary you keep before HMRC starts taking 20% off everything above it. In 2021, £12,570 was a reasonable tax-free bracket. Inflation since then has been roughly 25% cumulative, and the price of basically everything you actually spend money on has gone up — energy, rent, food, council tax, fuel. If the personal allowance had simply tracked inflation, it would now be closer to £15,700. Instead, the threshold sits exactly where it did when Sunak set it five years ago, and is locked there until 2030. The cost shows up everywhere except on your payslip. Every shop, every bill, every bit of your monthly budget feels tighter — while the threshold that's supposed to protect the first slice of your wages from tax just sits there at 2021 levels. The official line is that they 'haven't raised taxes.' They haven't needed to. Inflation does the job for them, every single year, until 2030.

@happyathome44 @_CatintheHat Absolutely - initially told my (eventually diagnosed) Crohn’s was phantom pain (???) and anxiety 🙄

Imagine being one of the passengers on board the hantavirus cruise ship. 3 passengers have already died & at least 6 others are infected. You start to develop flu-like symptoms. You tell the doctor. “Don’t worry, dear, it’s probably just anxiety.” 🤯 theguardian.com/world/2026/may…

I didn't know you could give a gift of 5 million quid and the recipient pays NO TAX

.@BBCr4today you've had an item on @AmazonUK using drones for deliveries and one on the rapidly diminishing number of birds. Could you put two and two together and ask @AmazonUK what the effect on birdlife will be of filling our skies with drones?

@SandyofSuffolk @Ocado Told not good!

@SandyofSuffolk Try @Ocado - they price match Tesco and you are good in advance the use by dates of everything - quality is excellent

To those of you wondering how my first Tesco online shop went, I'd say ok but I wouldn't choose to do it again. Its fine if you're unwell and can't get out BUT: One small substitution - 6 little bags of Twiglets substituted for one big bag so I'm not bothered about that. What does bother me is the quality and use by dates, like the green beans they've sent me. Use by today! And the quality, or lack thereof! I've cut some decent bits off, blanched them and frozen them but really supermarkets shouldn't be selling produce of this poor quality. So no, I won't be repeating the experience unless I'm unwell. I'll be going back to Aldi in person next week and also saving myself about £15 on what Tesco charge. And I'll be picking decent quality vegetables too.

Samsung family in South Korea pays off record $8bn inheritance tax bill. IHT rate is 50%. The family said that "paying taxes is a natural duty of citizens". It establishes a benchmark for others. Can you imagine the super-rich doing the same in the UK? bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

"Concern that pellets clean-up 'could take years'." Remember those millions of plastic beads dumped onto Camber Sands by Southern Water last November, the stuff that contains any number of heavy metals, lead, arsenic, etc. What's happened since, CEO gone to jail, any directors being prosecuted? Of course not. It's the EA who's in charge. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

Just heard self-centred hypocrite Nigel Farage on @BBCNews say that no British politician has been physically attacked more than him. An insult to the memory of Jo Cox and David Amess, both murdered.

@drkeithsiau Airborne? Bout time we had airpurifiers indoors?

Ok, what do we need to know about Hantavirus?