oursin | Entries tagged with advice

Because she is bringing us old bats into disrepute (we are more or less in the same age cohort), this is exactly the sort of thing that gets us dismissed, and it's quite clearly weaponised incompetence to get her son to run around buying stuff on the internet for her while she does not do due diligence over her headphones.
You be the judge: should my mum stop asking me to buy her new headphones?:

My son Henry is exaggerating terribly. I don’t lose headphones all the time. I simply put them away in different places and occasionally forget which place that was.
This happens to everyone, especially when you live in a house where things move about over time. I live on my own, in a large, eccentric home. I’m not a hoarder but I often forget where I put things. Henry will come over and find the headphones after I have lost them, and while I’m grateful to him for helping me find them and buying new ones, I could do without some of his lectures.
I’m 76; I don’t need to be told to “be more careful”. I just live my life how I want and sometimes I’m a bit scatty.

It Is Not Rocket Science, lady.

Mind you, also irksome is that thing when somebody prates on of 'in my day' and I think, not merely that I was there in that day and we had electric light and everything, they are, a little calculation suggests, actually somewhat younger and should not be going on like that.

This was something that flitted past me where someone was being driven bananas by her mother-in-law interfering with the baby and upsetting its routine and doing all those things annoying relatives do because they are not going to be kept up all night by agitated babby.... And there was sense that MiL was 'oh, these new-fangled notions' as if in her day it was Ye Wisdomme of Ye Village Cronez rather than paediatricians advising new mothers.

I will, as a historian of medicine, concede that ideas of How To Bring Up Baby have gone through changes, but suspect that 'if babby has got to sleep, let babby sleep in peace' has always been pretty central.

(I realise that there may yet come a time when in a miasmatic wasteland this crone of the tribe maunders on about the time in her day when they had vaccines and codliver oil....)

Goodness knows, some real weirdness is revealed in You Be the Judge in Guardian Saturday, but today's produces a theory which is entirely new to me -

You be the judge: should my housemate stop warming her mug and then pouring the water back into the kettle?

But apart from all this hoohah about HYGIENE, I am rather taken with New Health Scare Theory:

Boiling water twice is a no-no for me – there is a change in quality and taste. My life had a certain drabness to it – I now attribute that to consuming poor-quality water for so long without realising.

This could be a whole new thing, couldn't it? Once-boiled water for vitality!

I was going to ask are they living in a log cabin or what in Ohio if the kitchen is so freezingly cold in the mornings they have to warm up the mugs so that they do not immediately chill the coffee but I see the issue is poor insulation.

Maybe they should do something about insulation rather than bicker over 'secondhand water'?

I'd like to think, yeah, still got it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were desperately scratching around for somebody who'd even heard the name of the author of once-renowned and now pretty well forgotten, except by specialists in the field, sex manual. Which has its centenary this year.

Anyway, have been approached by a journo to talk with them about this work and its author -

- on which it is well over 2 decades since I did any work, really, but I daresay I can fudge something up, at least, I have found a copy of the work in question and the source of my info on the individual, published in 1970. Not aware of any more recent work ahem ahem. The Wikipedia entry is a stub.

My other issue is that next week is shaping up to be unwontedly busy - I signed up for an online conference on Tuesday, and have only recently been informed that the monthly Fellows symposium at the institution whereof I have the honour to be a Fellow is on Wednesday - and I still have that library excursion to fit in -

- plus arranging a call is going to involve juggling timezones.

Still, maybe I can work in my pet theme of, disjunction between agenda of promoting monogamous marriage and having a somewhat contrary personal history....

Firstly:

So, farewell then, PSC, whose advice to the sexually-bothered (rather than the lovelorn) has so oft provided fodder to oursinial musings. Guardian G2 today includes 23 of the best Sexual Healing columns

Not sure if they are The Greatest Hits rather than molto tipico of the kind of thing she addressed: in particular we note (as she stresses in the interview about the lessons learnt over 10 years of agony-aunting):

The female orgasm is still a mystery to some people
I’m still getting questions that show me people continue to think that the only “correct” type of female orgasm is one that’s purely vaginal and doesn’t involve the clitoris. For people to still think that, or to have that as the ideal, is extraordinary, but there it is. They just haven’t had the education to understand otherwise.

There is a waterspout off Portland Bill (where Marie Stopes' ashes were scattered). Volumes of the Kinsey Report on the Human Female are spontaneously falling off library shelves. The shade of Shere Hite is gibbering and wailing.

We also note the recurrent MenZ B Terribly Poor Stuff theme, what with the one who appears to regard his wife's bisexuality as a USP meaning *3SOMES* and two or three where one feels she did not interrogate sufficiently whether the male querent was actually gratifying his female partner before offering reassurance/solution e.g. 'My stunning wife makes no effort with our sex life' where we should like to know precisely what effort he is putting in, ahem.

However, there are also some of the wilder shores there.

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Secondly, and could we have a big AWWWW for this: David Attenborough seeks out London’s hidden wildlife:

Filming the wildlife of London requires an intrepid, agile presenter, willing to lie on damp grass after dark to encounter hedgehogs, scale heights to hold a peregrine falcon chick, and stake out a Tottenham allotment to get within touching distance of wary wild foxes.
Step forward Sir David Attenborough, who spent his 100th summer seeking out the hidden nature of his home city for an unusually personal and intimate BBC documentary.

This was posted over at agonyaunt but I see the post is locked so not linking there. It's I was asked to provide proof that I wasn’t involved with my husband’s death" (second one down here at Ask A Manager):

I woke up next to my husband in May and found he was dead. I am a teacher in training and the university I go to is well aware of the situation. I have a tattoo on my neck which is the last message he wrote to me, and one day a colleague at work said, “Do you have your name on your neck?” I explained the situation.
Last Friday I was pulled into a room by myself with no warning and asked if I had a letter from the police clearing me of his death. I was told I had overshared at work, and due to the nature of the death (he was only 49 and died unexpectedly) they would like to see a letter from the police clearing me of any wrongdoing. I became extremely upset, and told her I wouldn’t go any further than this unless HR was there to document the conversation and take notes. She then followed me into the car park and asked me not to leave as she “didn’t want me to leave like this.” I told her I was too upset to talk and she still asked me to stay.
I’m only three weeks into my course and am terrified they will look for any reason to throw me off. Am I making a mountain out of a molehill?

Somebody asks about her tattoo, she responds, and then (this person or somebody else) says she's 'overshared at work'. What.

Why even mention the police? One assumes a doctor was involved and provided a certificate that it was a natural death. These happen. At much younger ages than 49.

(And ugh at the pursuing upset person.)

In a former former workplace the I think under 30 husband of a colleague died very unexpectedly of an asthma attack. Our sympathy was somewhat limited by the fact that she was having an affair with a colleague and was visibly ungriefstricken, but we didn't go around muttering 'she done 'im in' rather than making bitchy remarks about merry widows.

There was the famed fitness guru who dropped dead during a marathon.

There was some instance I think I commented on when scandalmongering tabloid journo was trying to drum up a case that some gay celeb had died in Sex Orgy because fit young men don't just drop dead, whereas in fact there are known syndromes that cause that.

But perish the thort that this should stop somebody who fancies themself - well, NOT Miss Marple, would Miss Marple have been anything like so crude if she had the slightest suspicion?

In case this has passed dr rdrz by, it is now possible for ordinary people to register for access to JSTOR's massive collection of scholarly resources.

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This month's freebie from the University of Chicago Press is Courtenay Raia, The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin de Siècle on psychical research.

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Okay, I know I was going off at people getting all up in the woowoo about the Pill, but this is a bit grim about Depo-Provera: Pfizer sued in US over contraceptive that women say caused brain tumours. I was raising my eyebrows at this:

Pfizer argues that it tried to have a tumour warning attached to the drug’s label but this was rejected by the US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The company said in its court filings: “This is a clear pre-emption case because FDA expressly barred Pfizer from adding a warning about meningioma risk, which plaintiffs say state law required.”

and going hmmm, because there was a huge furore in the 70s in the UK about Depo-Provera and what sections of the population were actually being put on it, i.e. there was a whole ethnicity/discrimination pattern going on, and I would not be entirely astonished to find out that there were programmes in certain US states which were maybe no longer sterilising 'the unfit' (though I'm not sure I'd bet good money on it) but blithely applying long-acting hormonal contraception instead.

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And also in the realm of reproductive control: Of embryos and vaccines: If you REALLY want to protect the unborn... on rubella. Abortion historian notes that one reason (apart from thalidomide) for resurgence of abortion activism in UK in early 60s had been a German measles epidemic.... Also recall that my sister - who like me was not of a generation that routinely got this vaccine in childhood - when she fell pregnant with her first getting tested in the antenatal clinic to see if she needed to get the jab stat (in fact, she had high level of antibodies, so maybe we'd all had German measles among all our other many childhood ailments and barely noticed....)

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Something more agreeable: the Royal School of Needlework's Stitch Bank:

RSN Stitch Bank is a free resource designed to preserve the art of hand embroidery through digitally conserving and showcasing the wide variety of the world’s embroidery stitches and the ways in which they have been used in different cultures and times. Now containing over 500 stitches, each stitch entry contains information about its history, use and structure as well as a step-by-step method with photographs, illustrations and video.

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Asking good questions is harder than giving great answers: this so resonated with my experience as an archivist: 'often when people ask for help or information, what they ask for isn't what they actually want'.

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Many years ago I used to go to a restaurant- Le Bistingo in South Ken, as I recall - that had a cartoon pinned on the wall depicting a chef bodily ejecting a diner. Waiter to observers: 'He Attempted To Add Salt'. This was rather my reaction to this particularly WTF 'You Be The Judge': Should my partner stop hankering after salt and pepper shakers?

Why do you need salt and pepper on the table, haven't you seasoned the food adequately? (oh, and btw, Gene, as a comment remarks, salt has naturally antiseptic properties*).

*I remember some historical drama of Ye Medeevles on the telly in my youth about dousing somebody's flogged back in salt water (?or rubbing it with salt) to stop it festering.

That thing happened this week whereby a couple of weeks ago I was looking everywhere for a book I knew I had somewhere (unless maybe I'd lent to somebody sometime and they'd never returned it, it being the biography of an NZ-born sex reformer published by Penguin NZ: and currently available according to bookfinder.com, 2nd hand, from NZ, at PRICES, not to mention, how long would that take?).

And then I was looking for Other Book entirely, in fact just vaguely casting my eye over shelf adjacent to where I was looking for that, and there was That Book, stuck between two other books and way out of any kind of order.

We are not sure that is not, in fact, entirely typical of its subject....

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I was taking my customary constitutional at lunchtime today, and walking across the grass among the trees, under which there was a certain amount of debris of fallen leaves and twigs (these were not the horse chestnuts that were madly casting conkers on the ground), caught my foot and stumbled slightly, and somebody said, 'Be careful!'

I went off muttering that there is not a lot of point in issuing warnings to be careful after the event, but people do tend to do that, don't they, sigh.

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I am not sure this is an oddness, but normally, by the time a conference at which I am supposed to be keynoting is only just over a week away, participants will have had at least a draft version of the programme, indicating time the thing is starting, slot they are speaking in, etc.

(I also had to do a certain amount of nudging to discover how long I was expected to Go On for.)

Seem to have been seeing a cluster of things about litter, and picking it up, lately, what with this one Lake District: Family shouted at for picking up litter, and the thing I posted recently about the young woman who was snarking on the Canals and Rovers Trust about what she perceived as her singlehanded mission to declutter the local canal bank: "Elena might feel alone in tackling London's litter waste", and then this week's 'You Be The Judge' in the weekend Guardian is on a related theme:

Should my girlfriend stop picking up other people’s litter?

(She is at least throwing it away in a responsible fashion: I worry about the couple whose flat is being cluttered up with culinary appliances where one feels maybe the ones that aren't actually being used anymore could be rehomed via charity shops before they are buried under an avalanche of redundant ricecookers etc).

As far as litter and clutter goes, National Trust tears down Union flag from 180-year-old monument. Actually, carefully removed, and we think there are probably conservation issues involved: quote from NT 'We will assess whether any damage has been caused to the monument'. See also White horse checked for any damage caused by flag. We do not think respect and care for heritage is uppermost in the minds of people who do these jelly-bellied flagflapping gestures.

Reading the first question addressed in Ask a Manager today:

I have been at my job for a two years, and the job requires international travel, often with members of a team. We often go to very safe countries (Europe, Singapore), but for a new client we had to travel to South Africa. I’m South African and therefore am quite aware of the risks and safety measures necessary, particularly in the areas in which we were traveling, as was HR, which repeatedly sent emails about safety precautions.
Unfortunately, my fellow team members continuously engaged in risky behavior over the course of the trip (jogging at night alone by the freeway, wearing expensive jewelry in public, getting rides from random taxis on the street…). I repeated my concerns to them repeatedly, as did the hotel manager (who was so concerned that he ended up asking me to tell them to stop, saying he didn’t want the hotel to be held responsible for their choices). They didn’t take my concerns seriously, saying they were “experienced” travelers because they’d gone to Europe before, and I was being “overly cautious.” The entire experience was incredibly stressful, it was like babysitting toddlers.

I can't help wondering if fellow-team members spent their youth being bombarded with stories about The Dangerous Big City (and that's just in USA) and the teeming hell-holes that are the Major Capitals of Europe, and now they have been there and discovered that they are not actually sinks of vice and depravity, they think that all such warnings are entirely spurious fear-mongering?

Besides the story of the boy who cried Wolf! (except this is more like, if the villagers kept crying Wolf! every time they saw a wee doggie coming up the village street) I have a vague recollection of a ?fairy tale/children's story of somebody who is brought up to think Out There is terribly dangerous. And something happens and they go out there and are not immediately eaten, so they think Nothing Is Dangerous. And if as the tale progresses they don't actually end up eaten it is only through luck rather than good risk management.

In my post about manners yesterday, conuly brought up in the comments a couple of posts to Ask A Manager from An Awful Young Man, who, on the evidence given, probably knows all the intricacies of cutlery and which way to pass the port, but is unfit for release into general society:

First post:

I was travelling home on a packed train with my bike. Suddently, I was approached by a lady who asked me, rather rudely, to give my seat to a man, her father, who was travelling with her. Since I was sitting on a regular seat (not a seat designated for disabled passangers) and had to read some materials to prepare for my interview, I ignored her. Unfortunately, when I was getting off the train, I accidentally moved my bike in a way that it caught and left dirty stains on her coat. I did not think much of this till the next day when I ran into the same woman and one of directors in the lift in my office building. It transpired that she is the CEO’s wife. She said nothing and did not acknowledge me, but it was very clear to me that she recognised me.

He did not get the job and thinks Spiteful Bitch put the kibosh on. Commentators have a lovely time handing him his head.

Second post:

I wish I had been told the receptionist/janitor/security guard story by career services at my university, which is one of those prestigious English ones. (Note from Alison: This is a reference to advice that you should be polite to receptionists/janitors/security guards when interviewing.) We get a lot of tips about how to write our resume and cover letter and how we should conduct ourselves during interviews, but not this type of real life recommendation.

'I was raised by wolves before they threw me out of the pack for antisocial behaviour and somehow I got into Oxbridge'.

But, my dearios, is this not a positively archetypal morality tale? At least one of the commenters pointed out its resemblance to Folktale Motif of Young Man on Quest who Fails to Help Old Woman, Bad Luck Eventuates/His Despised Younger Brother Does Help Her, Go Him, Wealth and Princess Are His Lot.

So there's that one.

It could also make a 'Sliding Doors' tale where the different outcomes of doing the wrong and right thing change destiny.

Or maybe he's condemned to repeat that journey and interview over and over again, Groundhog Day style, until he Learns His Lesson.

Or, maybe this is one of those novels that takes An Incident and does it from different viewpoints and that while to Mr I Am The Main Character here, this is all terribly important, there are other people who are going about their lives and barely noticing him unless they have to, and even then they have their own concerns.

This is all a bit Dept Groucho Marx here - would anyone who is not of these awful people's leanings want to live within 100 miles of them anyway, and in fact are they not a creepy cult in the making? The settlement sprawls over 160 acres and it's called Return to the Land. Its founders say it is an "intentional community based around shared ancestry". (And I think we can predict what the position of women within it is before even getting to that part of the write-up, no?)

(You can get brucellosis from 'warm fresh goats' milk', you know.)

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Dept, have none of these issues manifested before travelling together??? You be the judge: Should my partner stop obsessively cutting costs when we travel? We discover that although they've been partners for seven years they don't live together, so possibly they really haven't come up against this sort of clash of styles:

I don’t want to share Persephone’s suitcase because she doesn’t pack properly and I find that stressful. I may put all my stuff in one backpack, but it is very well organised. Persephone’s packing style is hectic and she doesn’t have a separate laundry bag for her unclean clothes, she just throws them all in together. I don’t want dirty laundry touching my stuff, thanks very much.

And one is a foodie and one is not, and there's a real clash of priorities going on there that you'd think might have come up in 7 years....

At least last week's YBTJ contestants seem to have discovered the flashpoint of difference fairly early on: should my flatmate start using the spice rack I made: and honestly, what is the point of a poncey hand-carved spice-rack with matching jars that he hasn't got round to labelling? I am team shop-bought packaging that can actually be identified without opening it up and sticking one's nose in.

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Dept, the Fifties were actually quite anomalous: In the longer–term context, then, it is the mid-20th century which looks unusual, and it is worth considering why:

There is no doubt that the percentage of families which are headed by a lone parent has increased since the mid-20th century, and this has often been equated with the breakdown of the nuclear family system. However, it is not clear that the nuclear family is actually in decline. Most children are still living in two parent homes, and the percentage of lone parent families in the 19th century was not very different to the percentage today – although as explained below, such families were very differently formed.

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Dept, the annual PSC deviation into sense: This may seem radical to you, but a woman does not need a penis in order to be satisfied. Okay, it's depressing that the couple come 'from a conservative background; we believe that sex before marriage is a sin and saved ourselves until we got married in our early 30s' but don't seem to have done any due diligence on how to do ye conjugalz - there have been books on how to have a happy fulfilled Christian marriage since the 1920s at least. Sigh.

Do we think this trip is doomed already???

My best friend Kady and I are planning a backpacking trip around south-east Asia in a few months and I have proposed the idea of us getting matching tattoos:

We’re both 20, and I think we’ll look back on them when we’re older and remember what a fun life we’ve lived. Tattoos are a reminder of a particular time, and I want to cherish our youth. I’ve found a cool tattoo parlour in northern Thailand, where we’ll be staying. I’ve seen videos of people having great experiences there and the tattoo artist is really talented.... It’s not like I want to get a random tattoo. I’m quite creative and have already started sketching ideas that represent who Kady and I are.

You're 20, duckie....

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In other gruesome news, okay, it is not one bloke spreading his seed to 100s, but I'm not actually sure that 'a worldwide limit of 75 families for each sperm donor' as applied by the European Sperm Bank isn't somewhat on the high side, even when it doesn't turn out further down the line with more sophisticated testing that a donor has a rare cancer-causing mutation.

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And this is sad, rather than gruesome, and makes me wonder about the whole marketing of the 'freezing eggs' thing as 'a groundbreaking act of empowerment', especially as it hasn't turned out like that:

I did not anticipate the emotional landscape that I would face a decade later, as a scientific intervention became a personal meditation on time, money, and unfulfilled dreams.

This week's You Be The Judge column in Guardian Saturday: My dad wants to track my location on his phone. Should he leave me alone?:

My dad and I disagree about whether he should follow me on the Find My Friends phone app, which lets you track people in real time. He used to, but when I went to university I removed him as a follower. I don’t think he needs to know where I am all the time.
I’m 27 now, but it’s still a bone of contention. Dad says I don’t call him enough – I think that’s why he’s being so persistent about being re-added. He says: “I would know what you were up to if you let me follow you on Find My Friends.”
But I don’t want him tracking me, as he used to take it too far when I was younger. Once, when I was in a coffee shop, he texted me saying: “Hope you enjoy your coffee.” It’s nosy and I felt like I was under surveillance. It was funny for a bit, but then I thought: how often is he looking? That sort of thing happened several times as a teenager.

Okay, I will concede that I come at this as someone From A Different Era, who was traveling in distant parts of the world (parts where the folks at home might, actually, have had some reason for concern about me) and communicating by airletter &/or postcard with my family. By the 1990s I did make the occasional landline phonecall to partner and parents when I was on research trips etc, partly because there were various wheezes of special numbers to call via designated credit card which were not ruinously expensive.

But honestly. She's just going about her usual normal daily business. We think Father needs to get a hobby, and to reconsider the claim that 'it’s not stalking, it’s love' (surely what all stalkers think/say?).

Am having visions of Victorian Papas putting Airtags in daughters' crinolines.... wouldn't they have been all over it, eh?

I find the work this project is doing on matrimonial law very exciting, and also how they are digging way beyond the big scandalous divorce cases to the quotidien: The Most Radical Legislation of the Nineteenth Century: ‘Wherefore She Prays for an Order for the Protection of her Earnings and Property’ (though I'm now wondering what happened in 1893, perhaps that is an episode Still to Come).

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This is almost a reverse case: a woman scientist who was forced to conceal that she was married in order to keep on working: The secret life of Miss Ruby Payne-Scott:

Until the amendment of the Public Service Act in November 1966, women employed in the Australian Public Service were required to resign upon marriage. Married women were obliged to accept temporary positions with poor career prospects and no entitlements. Like countless other women, the scientist hid her marriage. When her six-year secret was finally exposed in 1950, she was forced to retire as a permanent staffer and was reinstated on a temporary basis. Never one to mince words, Ruby told the CSIRO:
Personally I feel no legal or moral obligation to have taken any other action than I have in making my marriage known… the present procedure with regard to married women… seems to go far beyond the simple statement in the Act … [it] is ridiculous and can lead to ridiculous results.

I wonder a bit if the suspicions over her Communist and feminist affiliations were in the mix.

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A different perspective on declining population and who it is who are not having children (wo wo deth of civ etc etc): Recent research has found that it’s more likely to be men who aren’t able to have children even if they want them: 'Men’s role in declining birth rates is often overlooked, says Vincent Straub, who studies men’s health and fertility at the University of Oxford'.

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Some recent offerings from the Cambridge Population History People: To the manor bound: Serfdom in Europe; What kept the rich and the poor apart in industrial Manchester?

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This one should probably have featured in my post earlier this week: ‘An Absurd Rage for Public Speaking’: An Abolitionist Fair Orator in the London Debating Societies, 1788–1791

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Actually, duckie, I think the term here would be 'kept woman', and your friends actually pick up on that: I’m a ‘trad wife’ in a happy marriage. How can I get my friends to accept me for who I am?. Is this spooky or what?

One night I ended up at a party with people I didn’t know and someone slipped something in my drink and I lost all memory until the next morning when I woke up on the sofa in a strange man’s apartment. He had rescued me and taken me to his place. I didn’t leave his flat for three months, except to be taken out to dinner and sent off to a gym to get back in shape.

And what exactly does she do apart from having lovely holidays that could form topics of conversation, hmmmm?

Am pissed off with Goodreads, which - or possibly it is some Amazon bot which is doing this - is totally inconsistently doing Weird Stuff to the information pertaining to the Clorindaverse books which I carefully manually input myself at time of publication and which is now being messed up.

I.e. existence of ebooks being disappeared (2 editions being listed rather than 3) - cover image not showing up - and something having ingested all the ISBN info into the Kindle entry so I cannot re-input that into a new ebook entry (I was wont to do this and just have the ASIN for the Kindle entry) - also having to delete whatever it is image the system thinks has been uploaded for the cover and re-uploading the perfectly good one that was already there.

And why this has happened to some volumes in this extensive saga and not others, who can say.

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In other news today, some random passing thorts:

If this is what he thinks, a) he has not been reading the right kind of science fiction, has he, because there is a fairly long tradition of This Is A Very Disturbing Idea (e.g. David Karp, One) and b) it does explains why he can get behind AI reducing art and all creativity into gloop:

“I think we are moving to a world in which we all become cells in a single organism,” Zuckerberg replied, “where we can communicate automatically and can all work together seamlessly.”

Let us all go be grit in the machinery, shall we?

Maybe I am interrogating this from the wrong perspective, but reading this: I’m married to a man but have erotic infatuations with women on television, I was going to myself, really, duckie, why don't you just write fanfic to get it out of your system?

Latest in the Guardian You be the judge column: should my girlfriend stop scrolling on her phone while we’re watching TV?

After we finish work in the evenings, she’ll constantly be watching videos on Instagram or reading stuff on Reddit while we watch television together. I think that the time we spend together in the evenings should be sacred. I want to do stuff as a couple, but can’t if she’s not fully present. We recently had a friend from university, Penny, come to stay with us and Fran started scrolling during a film we were all watching. Penny backed me up and told Fran it was irritating.

Okay, the elephant in the room here for me at least is that they're supposedly spending time 'together' but they're watching TV, and apart from the thought that this isn't what I particularly consider 'together time' to be treated as hallowed, who has chosen what they are watching, eh?

(Hint: I think it's Edward.)

Plus it becomes clear that they treat watching TV/movies as a different kind of experience (whether this is to do with Fran's ADHD or not, deponent sayeth not, people are various):

I watch a film with my own eyes, not someone else’s, but my boyfriend and best friend seem to think it’s a collective experience. They want to enjoy the punchlines and discuss the plot together.... I watch a film with my own eyes, not someone else’s, but my boyfriend and best friend seem to think it’s a collective experience. They want to enjoy the punchlines and discuss the plot together. I have my phone on mute when they are watching TV, so I don’t buy the fact that it disrupts their viewing experience.

People enjoy things differently. There is no 'correct' way - okay, those people who are yacky in theatres/cinemas/concerts and deploy their phones to the point of interference with the enjoyment of others, they are Doin it RONG - but how people consume things is getting awfully close to the 'it's not really reading IF---' some made-up thing.

Partner is having problems with mobile charging very very slowly.

So far I have worked through the obvious things like, trying another charger/plugging it in somewhere else/turning it off and turning it on again.

Uninstalled one app which might have been draining the battery (??).

Tried putting it in aeroplane mode.

A whole load of things suggested in The Manual or online turn out Not To Work on this particular model (e.g. codes to enter Diagnostic Mode).

Please can anyone offer suggestions as to where to go from here?

Dept, call of the wiiiiild: Tom Gauld watches the nature writer at work – cartoon.

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Dept, Down With This Shocking Practice!!!: the Haggis Wildlife Foundation raising awareness of The Truth Behind Commercial Haggis Farming (video). Make sure your haggis is ethically produced!

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Dept of, I am very much inclined to cite, for once, 'Throughout The Whole of History': Beards are alpha, ‘rat boys’ are in – and the rules of masculinity are as baffling as ever: 'It’s easy to grasp at shallow concepts of manliness – after all, beards are easier to grow than good relationships or life satisfaction'.

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Dept of, do rather feel he is applying Protestant Work Effic to leisure time: Amanda wants to spend her free time unwinding, but her boyfriend Paul likes planned activities. You decide who needs to take a chill pill, though a good deal of the problem seems to be that he wants to plan and schedule her activities as well. This might come over better if he expressed it in terms of being more fun to do things with her, but it honestly sounds more like resentment at her less frenzied pace.

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Dept of Old Old Stories: The Conway Disappearance Effect on the people (usually, but not always, women) who disappear from the narrative of scientific/technological discoveries. Though I will slightly twist this narrative to suggest that Rosalind Franklin is probably better-known for Not Getting The Nobel than Dorothy Hodgkin for actually getting it. (But me myself I have also writ on the topic of the invisibilising of women in the stories of science.)

I mean, isn't life full enough of these already, sigh?

Personally I think this must just be one manifestation of Phil being one of those people whose puppy-dog desire to be Little Friend of All The World lacks any consideration for his actual nearest and dearest, their inclinations, their time and energy, etc:

You be the judge: should my boyfriend let the neighbours have keys to our garden?

They've barely even moved in; they hardly know these people; and he's going 'whoa! our garden is Liberty Hall!'

Also are we just a leeetle suspicious that upstairs neighbour claims that previous resident was happy to hand out keys to the garden? Hmmmmmm. The next thing you know, upstairs neighbour and her offspring are holding parties there.

And in further ick: I’m off on holiday - but who knows where? Will my ‘mystery travel’ experiment end in delight or disappointment?

Okay, I can get fraught up enough even with a meticulously planned and angsted-over itinerary over All The Things That Might Go Wrong, and perhaps I am now Too Old and Set In My Ways for this kind of spontaneity.

But honestly, while she was actually there, didn't she at least do some looking about for local attractions and come across the famed Therme spa?

But this icon comes from Hannah Woolley's The accomplish'd ladies delight, in preserving, physick, beautifying, and cookery. : Containing I. The art of preserving and candying fruits and flowers; and the making of all sorts of conserves, syrups, and jellies. II. The physical cabinet: or, excellent receipts in physick and chirurgery; together with some beautifying waters, to adorn and add loveliness to the face and body: and also some new and excellent receipts relating to the female sex: and for the general good of families, is added the true receipt for making that famous cordial drink Daffy's elixir salutis. III. The compleat cook's guide: or, directions for dressing all sorts of flesh, fowl and fish, both in the English and French mode; with all sorts of sauces and sallets: and the making pyes, pasties, tarts, and custards, with the forms and shapes of many of them..

She also wrote The queen-like closet: or, Rich cabinet : stored with all manner of rare receipts for preserving, candying and cookery. Very pleasant and beneficial to all ingenious persons of the female sex. To which is added, A supplement, presented to all ingenious ladies, and gentlewomen. By Hannah Woolley.;
The compleat servant-maid: or, The young maidens tutor : Directing them how they may fit, and qualifie themselves for any of these employments. Viz. Waiting-woman, house-keeper, chamber-maid, cook-maid, under-cook-maid, nursery-maid, dairy-maid, laundry-maid, house-maid, scullery-maid. Whereunto is added a suppiiment [sic] containing the choicest receipts and rarest secrets in physick and chyrurgery; also for salting and drying English ham equal to Westphalia. The compleat market-man and market-woman, in buying fowl, fish, flesh, &c. and to know their goodness or badness in every respect, to prevent being cheated.
The gentlewomans companion, or, A guide to the female sex : containing directions of behaviour in all places, companies, relations and conditions, from their childhood down to old age ... with letters and discourses upon all occasions : where unto is added, A guide for cook-maids, dairy-maids, chamber-maids, and all others that go to service, the whole being an exact rule for the female sex in general;
and The cook's guide: or, Rare receipts for cookery : Published and set forth particularly for ladies and gentlwomen; being very beneficial for all those that desire the true way of dressing of all sorts of flesh, fowles, and fish; the best directions for all manner of kickshaws, and the most ho-good sawces: whereby noble persons and others in their hospitalities may be gratified in their gusto's.

What a way with a title that lets you know exactly what you're getting, eh?.

She also, I discovered (or perhaps was reminded, it's a while since I had occasion to think about her), may have taught at a pioneer girls' school at Sutton House in Hackney, where

Rare examples of 17th-century decorative paper-cutting found amid debris at a historic house in east London that was part of what was known as “the ladies’ university” are to go on display. Eight examples of the art form have been identified, including a hen embellished with coloured silk and a tiny folded star. They were discovered on a lintel where they are assumed to have settled after falling between floorboards about 350 years ago.

(We note that this 'woke' establishment besides ladylike decorative arts taught 'reading, writing, arithmetic, French, housekeeping, music and dancing').

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It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog

Entries tagged with advice

I want to smack this old trout with a codfish

Yet another thing to worry about???

Possibly scraping around for someone

This icon is doubly appropriate

So much WTF

Omniumgatherum

Oddnesses of life

Rubbish

Wolf! Wolf!

There are a million stories....

Well, questions/all more complicated here....

Down in the woodshed

A bit Mr Barrett of Wimpole Street, do we think?

Closing more tabs

This and that

Who is choosing what they watch in 'partner time'?

Help help phone problem

Scraping around a bit

Possibly a personal distaste for surprises and the unpredictable?

This is not actually a culinary post -