JulesB🇺🇦

@Biggreenbooks Thanks Simon :-) I have DMed

@jules20thC Ideal! As you did all the hard work, I'll send you another of Catherine's dyslexia friendly books too. Can you DM me the name and address to send them to please. I'll get it sorted asap, S

IT'S WEDNESDAY! #buyastrangerabook day is EIGHT YEARS OLD! The grooviest day of all. I'll give out TWO books. FOR FREE. If you'd like one, let me know. Also, if you'd like to #BuyAStrangerABook too, let me know. It's a thing! Look. biggreenbookshop.com/stuff-you-migh… UK only

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up. He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour. Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself. Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it. Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows. Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result. Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing. The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

68% of schoolgirls want female-only sport, yet @uniofleicester Student Union say a female-only sport society isn’t needed and have rejected @UoLWSS application This is their values and goals

I think what you mean to say is: Jo Shaw was killed by her ex-partner after he forced his way into her house armed with a device minutes before an explosion that killed both them. Jo had previously reported him to the police. R.I.P Jo

@LeeMcClymont @BirdyBooky @sheawilliamsy @ramendik If you trained as a teacher and had some actual classroom experience you might understand teenage girls more: they need and want privacy without the presence of boys. This is a normal and healthy expectation. Men who oppose it need their hard drives checked.

It's #buyastrangerabook day's 8th birthday! @MortonAlasdair has kindly offered to buy someone the book of their choice, up to £20! So, if there's a particular book you're after, let us know! UK only

Whoever is making these decisions has never been a 13 year old girl with a heavy period and the attendant pain and diarrhoea that can come with it. Sorry to be indelicate, but having been that teen girl I can't imagine the misery of having all that going on while a group of lads stood outside. The ones I went to school with would never have let it go. I'm sure plenty of boys don't like this either. A lot of work in modern institutions seems to be unlearning things we learned long ago, in order to pursue some of the most stupid and incoherent nonsense the world has ever heard.

@Biggreenbooks How about Dance of Resistance by Catherine Johnson?

@jules20thC I'm sure you're up to the challenge!

@IvanTheK @diannew314159 😝😝😝😝

A reminder that it has now been 244 days since the @EHRC sent @bphillipsonMP its draft guidance on single-sex spaces. But she has yet to table it in parliament.

A man with a history of domestic violence turned up where his ex, her parents & child were living. He detonated a grenade, killing her. People have noticed because it was a *grenade* @Metro calls it ‘a domestic fight’. Did they both have grenades? metro.co.uk/2026/05/05/man…

Surrey County Council is refusing to release a damning report into the horrific abuse of 10-year-old Sara Sharif to protect her killer father's data protection rights, the report reveals authorities had known about Urfan Sharif's extensive domestic violence history for years but repeatedly failed to protect his daughter, Sara was tortured with over 100 injuries including being beaten with a cricket bat and metal pole, strangled until her neck broke, burnt with an iron and bitten before she was murdered in August 2023, despite known risks the council granted her violent father a licence to transport vulnerable schoolchildren, social workers lost key evidence in the system and failed to join the dots on her repeated unexplained injuries, the risk posed by Sharif was overlooked, underestimated and not acted upon by almost all professionals involved, Woking MP Will Forster has slammed the council for prioritising the murderer's privacy over child safety and called for them to be put into special measures,

Normalize being a tomboy again without needing to become a boy:

JUST IN: A Trump judicial nominee was asked point blank: is Trump eligible to run for a third term? Their answer: “I would have to review the actual wording…” Sen. Chris Coons then asked every nominee in the room to confirm the Constitution bars a third term. Silence. Every single one of them refused to say it. Trump is appointing judges who won’t affirm the 22nd Amendment to his face. Never stop connecting the dots.

FFS

Tweet of the Day

A reminder that it has now been 243 days since the @EHRC sent @bphillipsonMP its draft guidance on single-sex spaces. But she has yet to table it in parliament.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: Donald Trump texted me that if my son gets killed, I deserve it because I was a traitor to him. I’d probably get put in jail if I released the texts. That’s our president. That’s the man who says MAGA is everything he wants it to be.