MagsSouth

@cm_bagot 😬

Oh Charlie!

@Tree_Folklore Oh heck. Tread carefully. 😳😂

The lawnmowers will surely come...but right now...this is beautiful ⭐ There was an old Irish belief that Spring had not truly begun until each step taken fell upon at least twelve daisies...and another that warned if you stood upon the first patch of daisies you saw, you yourself would be pushing up daisies before the year was out 🪦💮

@London_W4 You all knew how to pose for a photo. 😂Great pic. 👍

Mornin’. And today we start with a photo of me and my two brothers that they’ve just sent. Taken in Hyde Park in 1989, I’m the one on the right. I was 20 years old, very slim and as you can see with the braces, sporting that 80s vibe.

@TheAttagirls Such an amazing and inspirational woman. 👍😁

Woman of the Day Australian Army nursing sister Betty Jeffrey, born in OTD 1908 in Hobart, was captured by the Japanese as a prisoner of war in 1942 after they sank a ship crammed with women and children evacuees from Singapore. A former secretary, Betty took up nursing when she was 29 and graduated in 1940. She immediately joined the army and arrived in Singapore in February 1941 with the 2/10th Australian General Hospital unit. Twelve months later, days after Singapore fell, she was one of 65 Australian Army nursing sisters evacuated on the Vyner Brooke. They didn’t want to leave. “Our refusal was useless. We were ordered to leave and had to walk out on those superb fellows. All needed attention…I have never felt worse about anything. This was the work we had gone overseas to do.” The Viner Brooke was a cargo ship with capacity for 47 crew and 12 passengers. One of the last evacuee ships leaving Singapore, 181 passengers — mostly women and children — were crammed aboard. It was bombed near Banka Island. Twelve Australian nurses died, 53 scrambled ashore, 21 were murdered on the beach; the remaining 32, including Betty who spent three days in the water, were captured. The nurses were held as POWs at various camps on Sumatra for nearly four years, along with British and Dutch women teachers and missionaries. Conditions were appalling: bug-infested rice (one tablespoon of boiled rice each per day), rotten vegetables, plus a tiny pannikin of foetid water as the daily diet, yet they were made to walk for hours to fetch clean water for the guards' sweet potato crops. Most of the nurses had only the clothes they stood up in. No shoes; they’d taken those off before diving off the Viner Brooke. For punishment, they were made to stand for long periods in the blistering sun. At great personal risk, Betty kept a secret diary and recorded it all. She took her life in her hands: the Japanese confiscated and destroyed all records such as birth or marriage certificates, lists of names, anything written. They even removed the hands from the women’s watches so they couldn’t tell the time. The only reliable indicator of time passing was the rigid, monotonous camp regime with its calls of Tenkō (転向, literally, changing direction, meaning coerced ideological conversion), used as a roll call requiring the women to bow in obeisance to the Japanese emperor. Betty’s diary was written in two exercise books she managed to steal from the Japanese, and hid for weeks and months at a time, sewn into her pillowcase. She also drew sketches of camp life: carrying water, chopping wood. She nursed women as best she could with no resources — those Red Cross parcels containing food and medical supplies were withheld from the POWs — and dug their graves when they died. Eight of her nursing colleagues were among those who didn’t survive. She fought off animals trying to dig up the remains and reburied her friends. She defied her captors, stealing from them and mocking them when forced to bow at Tenkō. “We are…praying for our freedom. If this doesn’t happen soon, we shall be a mess for the rest of our lives.” When Betty was moved to Palembang, another POW camp in Sumatra, she drew a sketch of waving hands and barbed wire. From House Two, they could see their male relatives in the men’s camp. On Christmas Day 1942, the women sang “Oh come, all ye faithful” for the men and waved hankies and hats till they heard a faint “thank you”. Two days later, the men sang the same song to the women. Everyone cried. They were liberated late in 1945 by a rescue mission headed by a South African major. Betty weighed four stone and four pounds (30 kilos) and had severe tuberculosis. She was in hospital for two years. After release, she learnt that mail and Red Cross parcels had been withheld and locally supplied fresh food had been left to rot in the sun and rain. It took years before she could view her captors with any equanimity. “You forget nothing, not a thing, from years like those.” Betty and another Banka Island survivor, Lt Col Vivian Bullwinkel, raised £78k for a memorial to the Australian nurses who died during WW2, and opened the Nurses Memorial Centre in Melbourne in 1949. Betty’s diary and sketches were the basis of her memoir White Coolies published in 1954 and dramatised in the 1997 film Paradise Road.

@tutty352 Just as well I don’t live anywhere near.I’d be coming home with so much stuff. 😳😂

A visit to Ardalanish Weavers on Mull when going back yesterday. Off grid, and hand produced from start to finish. Beautiful items for sale.

@SamaHoole @flamingyam Never ceases to amaze me the things people believe they’ve just invented. 🤷🏼‍♀️😳

Beef tea was the most reliable medicine in the British pharmacopoeia for over a century. It saved soldiers in the Crimea, fed Florence Nightingale's recovering wounded, kept new mothers alive through the worst of childbed fever, and held weakened patients steady through pneumonia, typhoid, and measles. Between roughly 1840 and 1960, it was what a doctor prescribed when food could no longer be eaten but nutrition could not be skipped. The recipe was simple. A pound of shin or stewing steak from the butcher, cut into half-inch cubes, placed in a stoneware jar with a spoon of water and a pinch of salt, sealed, and set in a pan of simmering water for three hours. The meat released its juices. The result was strained through muslin. A clear, deep brown liquid that smelled of concentrated beef and tasted of nothing else. A teacup contained roughly 6g of complete protein, the full B-vitamin profile of the meat, free amino acids in their most bioavailable form, creatine, taurine, and the haem iron from the haemoglobin. Absorbed by a gut too weak to handle anything solid. Given to women after childbirth. To children recovering from fevers. To soldiers in field hospitals. To the elderly in workhouses. To anyone who couldn't eat but had to be fed. Bovril was launched in 1886 as a shelf-stable industrial version, originally developed to feed the French army. By 1900 a jar sat in roughly a third of British households. The modern equivalent is a "bone broth" sold by a wellness brand in Shoreditch at £8 a serving, made from chicken bones in a Wakefield factory with added "natural flavouring." The real version is forty minutes of work in your kitchen with a piece of beef shin and a jam jar. The Victorian sickbed knew exactly what it was doing.

@LifeAfloat Fresh air and nature, freely available and does wonders. 👍😁

Sometimes mental health is not transformed by a single dramatic moment but neither is living with it a static process. It can change through small acts of movement, connection and persistence. I have come to know this very well. For this year’s theme of "Action" for #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek, I walked upstream through a mountain beck in the northern Lake District. It was a reminder for me healing is quieter than I imagine. Just like my solo journeys. One step. One breath. With every step or paddle stroke, one decision to keep going.

@visitnorthyork Either Michael Portillo or Andrew Graham Dixon. 😁

If you could sit down here and chat with anyone for a full hour, who would you choose?

@karenfthompson Aw, no that’s awful. 😭

Oh my days, my dear Twits.. I am so upset.. Every morning on my way to work I go through a place called Morton Hall and every morning on the left-hand side there was a big grass verge and there were three ducks every morning .. just walking around minding their own business .. quaking away And some mornings, you know you think yourself “ hello ducks Good Morning” This morning coming up the road I saw a car with its hazard lights on and as I got closer the Man had gotten out of his car and was walking back up the road and there were the three ducks dead on the road , he must’ve been absolutely doing a tonne on that road and just hit and killed all three of them literally just before I got there.. It’s a sad day. I don’t feel like working today. 🥺

@LadyHaywire Congratulations. 👍😁👏🏻

Whoever guessed 'Lucky For Some' 13th of May for Baby Haywire wins! Born at 1.32am & arrived so quickly she was delivered in the caul so already made a name for herself in the delivery room. 6lbs 15oz & absolutely beautiful even if her speedy arrival meant only gas & air 😍

@Tree_Folklore It’s amazing that such a tiny thing can sing out so loud. It’s lovely to hear. 😃

The Wren, known in Irish as Dreoilín, busies itself hopping from branch to branch, snatching an insect here and another there 🪶 Despite its tiny size, the Wren has one of the loudest and most complex songs of any bird in Ireland or Britain and its voice can seem far larger than the bird itself 🎶 To the Druids it was the Magus Avium — the “magical bird.” They believed its bright, bubbling song carried whispers from the Otherworld, and was a voice that could reveal hidden knowledge. By constantly hunting insects and spiders among bark, leaves, and roots, it helps keep woodland and hedgerow ecosystems in balance and some believe the reverence the wren once held among the Druids later twisted into something darker. During later New Year traditions associated with Saint Stephen's Day, the Wren was symbolically “punished” for its supposed betrayal of Saint Stephen...maybe an echo of older beliefs lingering beneath newer stories 📖 🪶

@ColinSpenc4257 Mum’s perfect that look from day 1. 😂

THE LOOK.

@mand_brun2 @bo66ie29 It’s beautiful. 😁

I do love a nice doorway and where I live has a lovely one

@gggirl924 I put it on my feet nowadays to keep a clear chest. Appears to work. 👍😁

Did your mother lather you down with Vicks VapoRub whenever you were sick? Mine sure did.

@London_W4 @StellaMcCartney Fab pic. I bet your kids don’t get a look in now. 👍😂

An afternoon with my beautiful granddaughter (and my daughters and son in law) who is modelling a @StellaMcCartney cardigan. She’s rather more fashionable than me. Bought for her by my daughter’s ex boss. That’s the sort of boss you want.

@karenfthompson Awesome. A strong, determined gal. 👍😁👏🏻

And this is the photo you have all been waiting for .. Little Evelyn was born of the 20th of March weighing in at 2 lb 3 oz Nine weeks early … Just under six weeks later weighing over 4 lb , with no tubes, no special feeds, no nothing, Defying all odds … Baby Evelyn came home last night… Here is proud daddy punching the air as he lovingly carry’s his daughter home from the hospital to begin their new life together…. ♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️

@Kristinartz Good Housekeeping Compendium of Cookery revised edition 1955. It has everything. 😁My mum in law gave it to me, hope it was because I love to cook and not because she thought I couldn’t. 😂

Try to say it honestly, okay? 😁

@Disc_light Great image. 😁

Morning all and a very wet one here in Staithes! Last night was nice though and I managed to at least take this. Today if the 4th anniversary of my heart attack, still feels like yesterday

@PhilipLynn15267 Wishing her a fabulous 100 birthday. An amazing lady, I bet she has many a tale to tell. 😁

@TheRebeccaRiots Very talented and patient. It looks great. 👍😁👏🏻

The finished Radiant star raglan, my first allover colourwork knit. The chart was by the amazing Ella Gordon who lives on Shetland, but the maths and figuring out how to turn it into a jumper was me. Hair is model’s own, sadly for her.