sally

@TheRealSitts I like how he’s kept his mates, The Inbetweeners, Jamie seems very down to earth and likeable.

Jamie Vardy documentary on Netflix absolutely awesome 👌 easily, in top 5 greatest forwards in the premier league era imho. Up there with all of them. What a story, what a player. Had everything imho...what football can do to you and what football can do FOR you. Top drawer bloke

This is what it would look like if I had a home improvement channel

Easily in the top few songs of the 80s. Maybe #1. So good.

Ok someone had to do it … Andy Burnham walking into Makerfield by election

@afneil I think we can all tell he isn’t a regular jogger……

Just like Andy Burnham, when I go for a jog I invariably find there’s a TV crew in the vicinity. It is SO annoying. 🤣😂

🚨BREAKING: The three girls who were found dead in the sea off Brighton beach were believed to have fallen down a hidden drop whilst paddling 🇬🇧 It’s also believed that all three of the girls were related, and had been at a nearby nightclub before that tragic event unfolded. An absolutely heartbreaking scenario, Rest in peace to those three girls 🕊️

@Michaeljos92972 That looks amazing Michael, happy birthday. What a great community you have ❤️

UPDATE I had a wonderful birthday last night. The community grabbed me and took me out to a local restaurant for great food and bingo night. I hadn't been out of the house in what seems like years. It did me good.

I’ve just walked through central London and passed a group of maybe 30 Jewish schoolchildren. They’re perhaps eight and nine years old. They’re being escorted through the city by two security personnel wearing stab proof vests. What has London become? Are we really a place where Jewish children out in a school trip need guards? It’s a tragic state of affairs.

New zebra crossing at Blackfriars Station floating bus stop. We have tried to explain to @cityoflondon why these bus stops are not safe or accessible for blind people but more are being planned. @citylordmayor can we urgently meet to discuss our concerns please. This is dangerous

I hope that Harwood-Bellis watches this and realises the struggles that Luke has had to endure every day. What might seem a simple task to most like ordering a coffee can cause crippling anxiety. Not to mention that his older brother had a stammer and died young. ❤️ Luke Ayling.

While everyone is waiting for Wes to resign, there is a GCSE marking scandal which needs sorting. There was an error made by OCR in their GCSE Maths exam last year, this was only uncovered thanks to the hard work of a teacher. More than 1,000 students missed a grade boundary by one mark. Ofqual reviewed the matter & upheld the complaint. OCR have shamefully *refused* to re-mark the papers even though students may be forced into unnecessary resits or are missing opportunities due to no fault of their own. Not ok. I have written to OCR asking for a meeting & calling on them to remark the affected papers. Doing nothing is not good enough.

@ihtesham2005 @thfcwally I teach this study to my psychology A level students

To get a license to drive a black cab in London, you have to memorize 25,000 streets, 20,000 landmarks, and the fastest route between any two points in a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. It takes most people three to four years. A British neuroscientist asked the obvious question nobody had thought to ask. What does that actually do to a human brain? Her name was Eleanor Maguire. The study changed neuroscience forever. The exam is called The Knowledge. It was introduced in 1865, and the format has barely changed since. Applicants ride a moped around London for years with a clipboard strapped to the handlebars, tracing every possible route between every possible pair of points in the city. They get tested in person by an examiner who can ask them, on the spot, for the shortest legal route between any two addresses in a database of tens of thousands. Half the people who attempt it fail. The ones who pass have spent an average of four years studying full time and have taken the test 12 times before getting through. Maguire was watching a TV movie about it in 1995 when she had the idea. These were not ordinary people. They were people running one of the most extreme spatial memory training programs that exists anywhere on Earth. If the human brain could be reshaped by experience, this was the cleanest natural experiment anyone was ever going to find. She put 16 of them in an MRI machine. Their posterior hippocampi were significantly larger than the brains of matched controls. The longer a driver had been working, the bigger the difference got. A 40-year veteran had a measurably more developed hippocampus than a 5-year veteran, and both had more than someone who had never driven a cab. Here is why that finding broke a century of consensus. Until 2000, every neuroscience textbook in the world taught a version of the same idea. The adult brain is essentially fixed. You are born with a set number of neurons. Childhood is the window where the wiring gets laid down. After puberty, the structure freezes, and the rest of your life is just slow decline. Maguire's study was one of the first pieces of human evidence that this was simply wrong. Adult brains physically remodel themselves in response to what you ask them to do. Not metaphorically. Structurally. With grey matter you can measure on a scan. The skeptics had an obvious objection. Maybe people with bigger hippocampi were just more likely to become taxi drivers in the first place. The brains were not changing. The job was selecting for brains that already looked that way. So Maguire ran the experiment again. Properly this time. She recruited 79 trainees who were just starting to study for The Knowledge and 31 controls who were not. She scanned all of them at the start. Then she waited four years. Of the 79 trainees, 39 eventually passed the exam and 20 failed. She scanned them again. The trainees who passed had grown larger posterior hippocampi over those four years. The trainees who failed had not. The controls who never studied had not. The brain change was not selection. It was construction. The act of memorizing the city had physically rebuilt the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory, and the rebuild only happened in the people who actually did the work. There is a quieter finding from this research that almost nobody quotes, and it is the one I cannot stop thinking about. The drivers had a bigger posterior hippocampus, but they had a smaller anterior hippocampus. The brain had not magically expanded. It had reallocated. Tissue that was being used for one type of memory had been compressed to make room for another. When Maguire ran follow-up cognitive tests, the cabbies were measurably worse than controls at certain visual memory tasks unrelated to navigation. They had paid for The Knowledge with something else. The trade was real. She also ran a second control experiment that is the part of the story most people never hear. She scanned London bus drivers. Same hours behind the wheel. Same city. Same traffic. Same stress. The only difference was that bus drivers follow fixed routes. They do not have to navigate. Their hippocampi looked completely normal. The cab drivers had not grown bigger hippocampi from driving. They had grown them from the constant, active, effortful retrieval of spatial information from memory. That distinction is the entire study. Then in 2020, McGill researchers ran the inverse experiment. They tracked 50 regular drivers and measured how often they used GPS. The participants who relied most heavily on turn-by-turn navigation had measurably weaker spatial memory. When the researchers retested a subset of them three years later, the heavier GPS users had declined fastest. The hippocampus, the same region the cabbies had built up by ignoring shortcuts, was being slowly hollowed out in everyone else by accepting them. The mechanism Maguire spent 25 years documenting works in both directions. Brains grow what you make them grow. They lose what you stop asking them to do. The taxi drivers were running the most intense spatial memory training program on Earth. Most of the rest of us are running the opposite program without realizing it. Maguire died in early 2025. UCL's tribute described the cabbie study as a stroke of creative genius. She had spent her entire career on a single question. What does it physically take to remember something, and what changes inside a person who remembers a lot of it. The answer is the part that should change how you live.

No, waiting lists are only “falling” because of smoke and mirrors. Knocking sick people off the list then refusing to let them back on. Shameful!

@NormanBrennan @sussex_police 💔tragic

BREAKING NEWS UPDATE; The bodies found this morning were 3 Women; at 5.45am one apparently got into difficulty in the sea & it appears two others (friends) went into the water to help; all three sadly perished! Watch @sussex_police for Accurate Updates👇😞

@deanmfc1885 @grs_67 I said same, he hesitated from that point you knew he’d lost his man

@grs_67 Don’t do it to yourself fella. On the goal I gotta disagree there’s a split second where AD looks like he can intercept and counter I sit dock lower and thought in real time he could’ve won it but hesitated hesitated and backed off then he don’t engage at all

I'm currently re watching the game, reached their 1st goal, Sturge had comfortly dealt with Belloumi out on the right wing, the double substitution is made on 64' and within a matter of seconds the ball gets played out to the Hull right wing and Belloumi scores e

@EnserMark We have had learning walks where they wanted to see if we could do it, switch the lesson to show questioning of disadvantaged students…

@llawlim1 Sounds like the kind of mad thing that people say

Teachers are frequently told to make questioning a priority in their lessons - but are rarely given much guidance on what that questioning should involve. I take a look at what makes effective questioning in the geography classroom. open.substack.com/pub/enserm/p/w… #GeogChat

“Fairytale” 🤣🤣 Premier league level team with parachute payments lol

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.

@greeborunner @EnserMark Wasn’t sure if this is just us or is widespread? Agreed we think it’s silly too.

@llawlim1 @EnserMark That sounds silly.