Catherine Pengilly

@SamaHoole There is a charity based near me in Devon called The Daisy Garland and that film is a recommended watch from them. Sadly different diet and many different meds over the years haven’t managed to stop our grandsons seizures but it’s wonderful for those it does help x

The man who co-directed Airplane! spent the 1990s watching his baby son have a hundred seizures a day. Jim Abrahams gave the world "Surely you can't be serious." Then his eleven-month-old, Charlie, developed an epilepsy so violent the seizures came in the dozens, sometimes a hundred in a single day, while he was already on a fistful of medications. The specialists were not short of opinions. The family visited the best neurologists in America. The verdict was a life of continued seizures and what one doctor called progressive retardation. Brain surgery was floated. More drugs were floated. A change of diet never came up, because not one of those specialists thought to raise it. Jim, being a man who had spent his career refusing to take things at face value, went digging through the medical literature himself and found a treatment that had been sitting in the textbooks the whole time. A high-fat, near-zero-carbohydrate diet, used since the 1920s, gathering dust because it could not be bottled and sold. He took Charlie to Johns Hopkins, one of the last places in the country still bothering to use it. The seizures stopped within days. Charlie stayed on the diet for five years, went back to eating normally, and never had another seizure in his life. He turned thirty a few years ago. He became a preschool teacher. Jim was so quietly furious that a cure had been hiding in plain sight that he and his wife Nancy founded the Charlie Foundation, and he made a film about it, First Do No Harm, starring Meryl Streep. His estimate of how long the foundation would need to exist before the obvious caught on was about a year. That was 1994. The foundation is still going. Funny how slowly the obvious travels when nobody profits from you knowing it.

@saniyafatma1278 Absolutely! You look as if you are made for each other xx

My dog passed away seven months ago. Yesterday, I met this beautiful dog at the local animal shelter. Should I adopt it? I think I should

There is a dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi the size of New Jersey. Here is what feeds it. - Synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, sprayed on the corn belt every year - The soil cannot hold it all, so the excess washes down to the Gulf - It feeds algae blooms that strip the water of oxygen - Almost nothing survives. It hit a record 8,776 square miles in 2017. - Over 40% of that corn is grown to become ethanol, a fuel additive Cattle get a documentary made about their burps. The corn monoculture quietly suffocates an area the size of a small state every summer, and keeps its halo.

@toniwriter @KnoopsChocolate Quite right too!

I’m not saying I’ve spent a lot of money in @KnoopsChocolate but I am saying I was given a gold membership 😬💖

@autcareandshare I can’t wait to build them! I’m away on a gemmology course the week of my birthday so it will be delayed for a while! In the midst of revision at the moment!

@autcareandshare I’ve just bought my birthday present from my hubby, the new Lego crystals kit. I’ve told him it’s the cheapest gemstones he’s ever got away with!

Good morning all, Ryan's brother carl is mad about lego but we are running out of places to store it he'll build it then nowhere to display it, and he really wants to build more so I had a think how can he build the sets without having to store/ open/display them, I had a look on the Internet and found a lego club they send you lego to build complete sets star wars the titanic Harry Potters alley thingy you name it he can build take pictures then send it back and if he wants to he can buy his own set and keep it unopened with the pic of the build next to it, because in years to come some of these sets unopened will be worth a small fortune, and last night he sat and built his first set , halfway through Ryan sat and watched him building, which for me was the best bit the two of them sharing a activity, have a great day everyone.

@aliciaandrz Every success for the future. I truly believe you can do this and I’m sure your family agree too x

@aliciaandrz As well as getting it on prescription if you are deemed in need of it. I hope you find a way to either continue to buy it privately or to find another way to help stem the addiction cravings. You have done so well, ok, you had a little blip but you’re back on it and I wish you

hello friends. I don’t have an exact start date anymore but I know I’m over three months sober currently. now that insurance is no longer covering my GLP-1, I’m going to have to be more active & purposeful about my ongoing recovery. I don’t exactly know what that looks like, because I am not going back to AA, but I have a little bit of time to figure it out. for those of you in recovery but not in AA, what do you do to work on your sobriety day to day?

Activist: "We're the only animals that drink another species' milk. It's disgusting." Farmer: "Ever seen a cat with a saucer of cream?" Activist: "That's because we give it to them." Farmer: "And an orphan kitten gets raised on goat's milk, a lamb on cow's milk, and a dog will happily nurse a litter of piglets. Cross-species milk drinking happens all over the place. We're just the ones who built a fridge for it." Activist: "But we do it as adults." Farmer: "We do everything as adults. We're the only animals that drink wine as adults, drive cars as adults, and pay council tax as adults. None of it is an argument against the next thing." Activist: "It's still unnatural." Farmer: "So is the phone you typed that on, the trousers you're in, and the roof over your head. 'No other animal does it' tells you about other animals. It says nothing about us." Activist: "..." Farmer: "We're the only animal that does the whole supermarket. Singling out the milk aisle is a strange spot to suddenly go feral."

"Just grow crops on that land instead of raising cattle." Lovely idea. Have you ever actually stood on it? I mean the hard country, the two-thirds of British farmland that can grow nothing else. The land the postcards leave out. Go and look at what it actually is. It is a Cumbrian fell at four hundred metres, where the soil is shallower than your hand is long and the rain comes in sideways for most of the year. It is a Welsh hillside so steep that a tractor on it becomes a cautionary tale, retold in the pub for a generation. It is the high Pennines, where the frost hangs on into June and the wind has strong opinions about anything that dares to grow upright. It is Dartmoor, the Highlands, and the moor above your nearest market town: peat, bracken and acid grass, where the closest thing to an arable field is wishful thinking. Nobody is hoarding these places. No farmer is sitting on prime wheat country out of spite, running cattle on it for a laugh. On this ground, the grazing animal is the entire harvest. There is no better crop for it to be blocking. Sow wheat on a fell and it will sprout, shiver, take one look at the weather, and give up. Scatter quinoa across mid-Wales and the sheep will watch it fail with the calm of creatures who have seen this film before. The people demanding crops have mistaken a relief map for a menu. They are ordering dishes the land was never able to serve. Strip the animals off these hills and you free up nothing for vegetables. You simply switch the food production off and hand the rain back to the bracken. Grass grows there because nothing else will. The cow eats it because nothing else can. That is the entire arrangement, and it is the only one on the table. So before you redraw British farming from a laptop, go and stand on the land you mean to convert. Wear good boots. It will not have changed its mind by the time you arrive.

@SamaHoole If you disagree with Natural England's proposed policy, here are the email addresses (found through public records and deductive reasoning) for you to email your thoughts to. I advise NOT being abusive. pastebin.com/jy47HWPD

Dartmoor's hill ponies have grazed those commons for longer than there has been a country called England. Fewer than a thousand are left, down from six thousand a generation ago. The United Nations listed them as endangered in 2023. So, naturally, the body charged with protecting nature has decided to get rid of nine in ten of the survivors. There is a process, obviously. Natural England's new grazing contracts now count the ponies in the same bucket as the cattle and sheep. A commoner with a fixed quota has a choice: keep a semi-wild pony worth nothing at market, or use the slot for a lamb he can sell. Guess which one survives the spreadsheet. The rest are gathered in the autumn drifts, and with nowhere to put thousands of unhandled moorland ponies, the next stop is the abattoir. Natural England would like it noted that it has not ordered a cull. It has merely built a machine whose only output is a cull, switched it on, and handed the bolt gun to a farmer so the fingerprints land elsewhere. Very tidy. And now the funny part. The pony is the best tool on the entire moor for eating Molinia, the coarse purple grass strangling Dartmoor into a brown monoculture. Cattle and sheep won't touch it. The ponies hoover it down and clear the ground for the orchids, the wildflowers and the insects behind them. Remove the ponies and the moor chokes into precisely the lifeless scrubland the contract was meant to prevent. So the conservation strategy, in full: protect the habitat by deleting the animal that maintains the habitat. A masterclass. Better still, Natural England's own Fursdon review looked at this exact question and told them, in plain English, not to lump ponies in with cattle and not to cut pony numbers. They read it, praised it, said they fully supported it, then did the precise opposite. Four thousand years these animals have run Dartmoor with no committee and no contract. They could be gone within one, and the people who did it will write it up as a win for nature.

@celtic_jaime Went in C&A in March when we visited Krawow! Blast from the past!

Who remembers C&A

@CrossCountryUK Thank you. I phoned and Kerry was very helpful.

@pinguigloo Hi Catherine. We don't have access to claim details here, so please call our team on 03447 369 123 (option 4) Mon-Fri 09:00 - 17:00 Sat 09:00 - 16:00 and they can look into that for you. ^EB

@CrossCountryUK how long should it take for you to acknowledge an email? Sent one 2 weeks ago and have now resent it. Hope to hear back ASAP

@CrossCountryUK Thank you, I will try that

@CrossCountryUK @CrossCountryUK now 15th June, we haven’t had a reply to either the email we sent 20th May or the one on 2nd June regarding a refund and repayment of a taxi fare as the train altered its journey and was no longer stopping at Newton Abbot leaving 2 stranded in Exeter at midnight.

@pinguigloo It should be 10 working days for a response but may be more during busy times. ^DA

@aliciaandrz There is always the need!!

I didn’t need any of these fancy journals. & yet.

My waiter had dementia and forgot my order. I visited a cafe in Japan that ONLY hires people with Dementia. It's called the Cafe Of Mistaken Orders. Sometimes the servers bring you the wrong food, never bring your order, or sit down and join you instead. But the point of this cafe is to be a place for dementia patients to feel needed and have purpose. And this cafe is working. Japan has discovered that being socially connected actually slows down the progression of dementia. So now there are 8,000 dementia cafes all over Japan! The U.S. should be more like Japan. We should keep elders out of nursing homes, find ways to give them purpose, and part of society until their last days.

Activist: "Your sheep are unsustainable." Farmer: "Compared to what?" Activist: "Anything. They're a drain on the land." Farmer: "This land grows grass and nothing else. Too steep to plough, too wet to crop, too thin to bother. The sheep is the only thing alive that turns it into food." Activist: "Grow plants instead." Farmer: "Nothing arable grows here, I've told you. So walk me through it. A solar-powered animal eats a crop I can't, on ground I can't farm, and hands me back the most bioavailable protein going. What's the more sustainable version of that?" Activist: "Lab protein. Soy." Farmer: "Both want flat land, inputs, and a factory. Mine wants rain and a fence. And while she's at it she grows a fleece, a renewable textile that composts in a hedge, off the same blade of grass." Activist: "Wool's barely used anymore." Farmer: "Because you swapped it for plastic dragged out of the ground, shedding microfibre into the rivers, sat in landfill for four centuries. You picked the oil jumper and called the wool one wasteful." Activist: "It's still livestock." Farmer: "It's grass, sun, sheep, dinner, and a jumper, on land that otherwise feeds nobody. If you've got a tidier loop than that, I'm all ears." Activist: "..." Farmer: "Sustainable means it keeps going on its own. She's been managing that on this hill since before the word turned up."