Me

every school should have a "fix-it lab" where students learn to repair their clothes, bikes and electronics. we should grow up knowing that not everything is disposable, that care and repair are part of living well on this planet.

🚨 Pregnancy related deaths in Texas have jumped 56% since abortion was banned.

A grumpy man can control a family without ever raising his voice. He just has to make his displeasure expensive enough. A long silence at dinner. A ruined car ride. Soon, everyone starts pre-adjusting. The kids are told “not now” before they can ask. She chooses the restaurant he likes, the movie he won’t complain through, the route that avoids traffic because traffic makes him unbearable. This is how a household becomes organized around one person’s refusal to regulate themselves.

So M&S have come out & said self service checkouts have contributed to the increase in shoplifting. I was in a Primark yesterday & there was a big queue waiting to be served & the self service was empty even though a member of staff was trying to get people to use them. Perhaps they are now coming to the conclusion that most people don’t want self service as we want to be served by a human being not a machine.

The European mind can’t comprehend American lake summer

In 1946 the British government introduced free school milk for every child in the country. One third of a pint, every school day, from the age of five to the age of fifteen. The milk was whole. Full-fat. From British dairy herds. It was delivered to the school gate in small glass bottles with foil caps and left on the doorstep in metal crates, where it sat in the sun until morning break if the weather was warm and developed a slightly suspect taste that an entire generation of British adults can still describe with uncomfortable precision. The generation that grew up on school milk was, by every anthropometric measure, the healthiest generation of British children ever recorded. Average height increased. Bone density improved. Dental health, despite the sugar in everything else, improved. Iron deficiency rates among school-age children dropped. The growth charts that the Ministry of Health had been keeping since the war showed a consistent, measurable, year-on-year improvement that tracked precisely onto the introduction of the milk programme. In 1971 Margaret Thatcher, then Education Secretary, cut free school milk for children over seven. The tabloids called her Thatcher the Milk Snatcher. She was vilified. She kept the policy. The next generation of British children, the ones who grew up without the daily third of a pint, were measurably less healthy than the one before. The growth charts show it. The dental records show it. The conscription medicals, while they lasted, showed it. The thing the milk had been providing, the calcium, the vitamin D, the vitamin A, the complete amino acid profile, the conjugated linoleic acid, the fat-soluble nutrients that a growing skeleton requires in order to reach its genetic potential, was no longer arriving at morning break in a glass bottle with a foil cap. It was replaced, eventually, by nothing. Or by a carton of fruit juice. Or by a packet of crisps from the vending machine that appeared in the school corridor in the 1990s. The generation that drank the milk is now in its seventies and eighties. They are, on average, taller, stronger-boned, and longer-lived than the generation that came after them. The milk was not magic. The milk was milk. It was the thing the body needed, delivered at the time the body needed it, at a cost the government considered acceptable until it didn't. The cost of not providing it has been rather higher.

Someone should make a list of right wing and left wing dog breeds

Be brutally honest, what's one thing Americans are simply better at than the rest of the world??

People think middle class is about income and it’s funny. You can’t change your class in the UK. You’re born into a class and it is what it is.