Julian Phatarfod

Yes we were on the first train and yes we dressed the part 💜✌🏼#ElizabethLine #TfL @TfL @Rosedewy @Theseanything @ScottMagee20

Many of them didn't. Your great-great-grandmother was probably drinking opium for her nerves, sold at the corner shop as cheap as a pint of beer. It was called laudanum, a mix of opium and alcohol that doctors handed out for anxiety, sleeplessness, and "women's troubles." Mothers fed it to crying babies. The babies often stopped crying because they stopped breathing. The men drank. By 1830 the average American was putting away almost two bottles of liquor a week. Whiskey cost less than coffee or milk. People started their day with a shot and ended it with another. Toddlers drank from their parents' rum mugs. ADHD has a long paper trail. A Scottish doctor described kids who couldn't focus in 1798. By 1846 there was a popular German children's book about a boy called Fidgety Philipp who couldn't sit still. In 1902, a London children's doctor named George Still wrote a famous paper on the same kids and called it a "defect of moral control." Same kid, three different centuries. Depression and anxiety had old names too. Melancholia, hysteria, the vapors. Treatments included bloodletting, ice baths, and chaining people to a wall. By 1937, American mental hospitals held 451,672 patients and took up more than half of every hospital bed in the country. Inside the walls, about 1 in 10 patients died each year. Then came the lobotomy. Between 1949 and 1952, around 50,000 Americans were strapped to a chair while a doctor hammered an ice pick through the thin bone above their eye and wiggled it around inside their brain. It took about ten minutes. Sixty percent of the patients were women. About 1 in 20 died from the procedure. Many of the ones who lived came out with no personality left. The man who invented the procedure won a Nobel Prize. Britain's male suicide rate hit 30.3 per 100,000 in 1905. The lowest rates ever recorded in British history are happening right now. Plenty of our ancestors didn't make it. They drank themselves dead. They overdosed on shop-bought opium. They got locked in asylums and never came out. They had picks driven through their eye sockets. They killed themselves in numbers we don't see today. The conditions were always there. The treatments just used to be worse than the disease.

Imagine needing to piss after a 3 hour movie and a brigade of French twinks block every exit like the Hands Across America campaign

Call me antisemitic but shouldn’t this headline read ‘Bulgaria’s Dara wins the 70th Eurovision Song Contest’? 🤔

Sometimes a sentence cuts right to the heart of the human experience in a profound way.

Since 2010, train fares have increased by 65.8%, while fuel duty has decreased by 7.7%. Train fares have increased 8pp above inflation, fuel duty by 65pp below.

This is why for all its flaws Twitter just cannot be beaten because what do you mean someone saw this woman at the Tommy Robinson march and recognised her from an episode of Wife Swap UK that aired 22 years ago in 2004?

I’m an immigrant who’s lived and worked in the UK for 16 years. I have a North American accent and I’m white. I’ve never once been told to ‘go back’ to my ‘shithole country’ or to ‘stop stealing jobs from British people’. You’re not concerned about immigration. You’re racist.

“Should gays oppose the war on Iraq”

Hang it in the Louvre

Cologne Cathedral took 632 years to complete. Construction began in 1248 and was finally finished in 1880, making it one of the longest building projects in architectural history.

The EU’s greatest achievements are often boring on purpose. EHIC, roaming, SEPA, Schengen, mutual recognition, consumer standards. Not empire. Not utopia. A continental operating system that makes daily life easier across borders. That is real civilization.

I put a prompt injection into my LinkedIn bio and recruiters are messaging me in Old English and calling me Lord.

#OnThisDay 38 years ago Thameslink was born and the Snow Hill Tunnel linking Blackfriars and Farringdon reopened to trains after 19 years. Great little Thames TV clip marking the event with drivers eye footage and glimpses of the tunnel without rails: buff.ly/VSS5cKb

Yes this is me unable to open a water bottle

Immigration makes Britain brilliant.

For when you want a merlot not a merlittle