Rachel Hansen 🧷

@TheNorfolkLion I find this fascinating, and I'm not being facetious. As an atheist I am always interested in what makes people believe or want to believe in a god. Is it a feeling of a need for purpose, or loneliness, or just something 'missing'? Genuinely interested.

As some of you who have known me for a while here know, I’m an atheist. However, I’ve also said that I wish I could believe. I was christened as a child and used to believe. As I’ve got older, I’ve become adamant that there’s no such thing as God. But over the last few years, I’ve been softening and trying to believe again. I’ve asked for so-called enlightenment, but nothing has happened. I read the Bible when I was a child but not since, so I’ve decided to start reading it again. It’s now my nightly ritual before bed. Please send prayers 🙏🏻 let’s hope some enlightenment or something meaningful happens. If God or Jesus don’t come to me after that, I’ll have to carry on being an atheist/realist.

@MrJamesMay You get a follow from me purely for the hilarious comebacks to the retards that can't read to the end of a post! Well played, sir.

I’m sure we have all now seen the footage of Metropolitan rozzers kicking a suspected terrorist in the head, repeatedly, when he was down. We can all play a part in putting an end to this sort of police brutality. Mainly by not going around stabbing people.

@PaulMarcoe Spontaneous combustion

4 things I think most GenX was afraid of. Acid Rain Quick sand Bermuda Triangle Amnesia What else?

@intel_lady Where do they learn this hand waving? My local Labour mp does this too!

Never bought a wig so fast. The Green party are absolute gold for me!

Labour Loves the Countryside. It Just Hates the People Who Run It. A woman walks into a tailor's shop in Helmsley, North Yorkshire. She loves the heather hills, she says. The wooded dales. The purple moorland stretching to the horizon. What she cannot stand is the shooting that takes place on the Glorious Twelfth. Jeremy Shaw, the tailor, has heard this before. He considers whether to explain that the heather she travelled three hours to admire exists because of the grouse moor she despises. The gamekeepers who manage the land, suppress the bracken, and keep the moorland in the condition that makes it worth visiting. The cake, in other words, was baked by the baker she came to castigate. What is worrying is that the government shares her confusion. On March 18, Labour published its Land Use Framework. Half a million acres earmarked for solar panels. Nine percent of farmland committed to rewilding. And buried on page 45, a proposal to license game bird shooting, potentially restricting pheasant and partridge releases onto estates. The trail hunting ban came first. Licensing comes next. Each measure arrives with its own rationale. Together they form a programme. Licensing does not prohibit. Bureaucracy does not ban. Smaller shoots simply cannot absorb compliance costs, fold quietly, and nobody in Whitehall answers for the consequence. A Natural England case near Helmsley shows the method. A longstanding partridge shoot was barred from releasing birds until after the season had already started. Shoot days cancelled. Revenue gone. Natural England's hands formally clean. Helmsley bucks every trend in British retail. Four pubs in the town square. A Michelin-starred inn nearby. A tailor forty years in business in what a mentor once called a dying trade. Seventy-five percent of Shaw's revenue is shooting-related. The Pheasant hotel runs at sixty percent shooting occupancy through winter. The deli sells local cheese to Norwegian and German sportsmen. Shooting contributes £3.3 billion annually to the UK economy and supports nearly 147,000 jobs. Pull the shooting thread and the weave comes apart. One Helmsley pub changed hands a few years ago. The new owners decided they wanted nothing to do with shoot trade. They lost heavily, then went back to the estates cap in hand. The market delivered the verdict that policy is not yet ready to impose openly. Licensing achieves the same result without anyone having to take responsibility. The conservation argument collapses under scrutiny. Grouse moor owners have restored 217,000 acres of upland heath in the past 25 years. The almost-extinct curlew is four times more likely to fledge on a managed grouse moor than on unmanaged moorland. The landscape that Whitehall has identified as the problem is the reason the landscape exists in the form they claim to value. When asked what economic trade-offs it had actually modelled, the government was vague. Officials said they recognised shooting's cultural importance and would work with industry toward a sustainable relationship. Starmer has been invited to visit Helmsley and see how the economy functions. He has not replied. He should go. He should meet the gamekeeper loading double guns through winter to keep the household solvent. The beaters earning seventy pounds a day. The tailor measuring 24 keepers for tweed suits stitched with Essex lining and Yorkshire zips. What rural Britain is being offered instead is a licensing regime that will first eliminate smaller shoots, then larger ones, then the hotels and tailors and pubs, until the moorland reverts to bracken and the towns that shooting sustained join the dying high streets that apparently only the countryside had managed to avoid. The heather on the North York Moors, Jeremy Shaw at Carters Country Wear, and the market town of Helmsley. All three exist because of shooting. Labour's Land Use Framework puts all three at risk.

@Tom_Slater_ @grok when did this happen?

The police are just standing around, and the little shits know it ‘The feds are doing nothing, bro, shall we go in?’ What a mess

@DreyfusJames Spud agrees

Yes. There ARE bad & irresponsible dog owners. No. There are NOT ‘dog friendly’ places everywhere. Bottom line. Dogs are integral to this country. Here before you. Way before. Always have been. Always will be. Most people love them. You don’t? Too bad. Cope. 🤷

@KingBobIIV @FlashheartV2 Here endeth the lesson.

And lo, it came to pass in the land of Cream Teas, that a great confusion fell upon the people, for they knew not the proper order of things. And a man, being foolish in his ways, did take the scone, still warm, and he did spread the cream upon it first. Then did he lay the jam atop the cream, and behold, it slid about like a sinner without footing, and the taste thereof was weak, and the texture was an abomination. And the Lord looked down and said, “What is this nonsense?” For the Lord had decreed from the beginning, saying, “First the jam, firm upon the scone, that it may anchor the sweetness, and then the cream, rich and righteous, set upon it like a crown.” But the Cream-First Heretics hardened their hearts. They said, “Nay, we shall do it our own way,” and they piled the cream high, and the jam did weep and run down the sides, and stained their fingers, and their shame was visible to all. And the Lord gave them over to their folly. Their scones were dry. Their toppings slid. Their tea went cold. And there was much wailing, and gnashing of teeth, and soggy bottoms. But unto the Jam-First People of Cornwall, the Lord showed favour. Their scones were balanced. Their toppings held fast. Their bites were harmonious and pleasing unto Him. And He said, “These are my chosen people, for they have understood the order I set before them.” And so it was written: Blessed are the Jam-First, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. But woe unto the Cream-First, for they shall dwell in everlasting disappointment, where the jam never sets, and the cream forever slides.

@SamanthaTaghoy Windswept and interesting....my little Spud

ATTENTION EVERYBODY: Comment, share or quote tweet this post with a photo of your dog(s). Britain is a nation of dog lovers. Let’s show the BBC that they will never get rid of man’s best friend. I’ll go first. Meet Mr. Jelly!

@MartinSLewis My father discussed his will with me before he passed, and suggested to leave more to me as I was less well off than my brother. I gently said no. It would not have been fair, and could have made an issue between my brother and I.

Today’s Poll: If a couple had two adult children - one financially very successful and one struggling - should their Will leave their estate 50-50, or divide it more based on need? Which comes CLOSEST to your view in this hypothetical?

@saniyafatma1278 He was loved. So was my beautiful Bella on her last trip to the beach x

@KingBobIIV He definitely knows. Because he is at the beach with the wind in his hair... ❤️

Blowy morning at Sennen Cove with my Bob. He's getting on now, and can't walk far. My most precious beautiful boy. Do you think he knows how much he is loved?

🎧

@Matt_Pinner B'Stard

Help me out: I need a highly specific, aggressively masculine name for a tiny Chihuahua puppy. Nothing cute. I'm desperate.

@24tog My Spud doesn't ever look at the TV so we leave the radio on, tuned to Lovers Rock Radio as apparently reggae is calming for dogs!

@MartinSLewis Everybody's faking it.

TELL US: What life lessons have you learnt that you’d want to tell an equivalent to your younger self leaving school or university now - whether its money issues, work issues or any others Please reply here. Like your faves, and podcast producer Matt will collate to be read out

What movie is 10/10, yet hardly anyone has heard of it?

In case anyone was wondering what the definition of urgent is at @HMRCgovuk, I was told by them today that they are escalating my query by marking it as urgent but to allow up to 71 WEEKS for resolution. Ridiculous.

@MissDFreeman @AldiUK I can't see it on my feed for some reason, but glad it's giving everyone a chuckle!

@rachaich @AldiUK It's thereee 😂

Ahem, @AldiUK . There seems to be a security issue in my local store.

@AldiUK #YESALDI

@rachaich We'd love to share this on our social channels. Please reply #YESALDI if we have your permission!