My dad worked at Gatwick Airport as a cleaner in the 70s when he was a teenager. His first week there, a woman drops a duty free bag with a bottle of booze in it and he rushes over to clean it up. He’s just about to put the bag, full of liquid booze and broken glass, in the bin when one of the senior porters stops him and tells him to bring it in the back. Turns out they had a filtration system in the break room for this exact scenario. They’d pour the booze out of the plastic bag and through a sieve that would collect all the broken glass, it would all go into a big container at the bottom and voila, free booze! They offered my dad some, but he declined. Anyway, I guess if you were working at Gatwick in the 70s you could have had a chance to drink some airport jungle juice, you’d just need to be brave enough.

You can get bath crayons for kids that let you write directly on the wall of the shower or w/e. Searching brings up lots of options…

I wonder if it would be possible to find an option at an actual university that still aligns with her interests. Thinking more along witchy lines than medical lines, would something like anthropology interest her? There’s specialisms like ethnomedicine which would explore traditional/herbal medicine from a more academic perspective.

I mean, to start with, throwing out a claim like that with no sources to back you up is not exactly arguing in good faith. It takes a lot more work to deny something when you’re provided with exactly zero context on where or when this might be true (and it certainly isn’t true in all countries at all times based on the data we have available).

There are some studies which suggest that lesbian couples do have a higher rate of domestic abuse. The CDC 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), for example reported that:

Four in 10 lesbian women (43.8%), 6 in 10 bisexual women (61.1%), and 1 in 3 heterosexual women (35.0%) reported experiencing rape, physical violence, and/or stalking within the context of an intimate partner relationship at least once during their lifetime (Table 3). This translates to an estimated 714,000 lesbian women, 2 million bisexual women, and 38.3 million heterosexual women in the United States. Bisexual women experienced significantly higher prevalence of these types of violence compared to lesbian and heterosexual women. (p. 18)

But it concluded that:

There were no statistically significant differences between the of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking when comparing lesbian women and heterosexual women.

This comes down to the fact that, as other commentors have alluded to, there are far fewer women overall in lesbian relationships compared with those in same-sex relationships. Even if the proportion of those suffering domestic abuse is slightly higher in lesbian relationships, there are far more women being abused in heterosexual relationships.

On top of this, it’s important to remember that this percentage is from one survey undertaken in one country, and the reports that exist on lesbian spousal domestic abuse have statistics that vary wildly. The Wikipedia page on lesbian domestic abuse has a good summary of other difficulties in getting a clear picture of its prevalence:

Literature and research regarding domestic violence in lesbian relationships is relatively limited, including in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Many different factors play into this, such as “different definitions of domestic violence, non-random, self-selected and opportunistic sampling methods (often organisation or agency based, or advertising for participants who have experienced violence) and different methods and types of data collected”. This causes results to be unreliable, thus making it difficult to make general assumptions about the rates of lesbian domestic violence. This has caused rates of violence in lesbian relationships to range from 17 to 73 percent as of the 1990s, being too large of a scale to accurately determine the pervasiveness of lesbian abuse in the community.

With regards to homicide, there is again the issue of when/where, plus the lack of detailed statistics. But the chapter on Intimate Partner Homicide in the Routledge Handbook of Homicide Studies (available to download here suggests that the rate of lesbian spousal homicides is in fact the lowest compared to those in heterosexual and gay male relationships:

Available statistics suggests that the rate of IPH [Intimate Partner Homicide] is the lowest in lesbian couples compared to IPH rates in gay and heterosexual couples (Gannoni & Cussen, 2014; Mize & Shackelford, 2008; Statistics Canada, 2019). (p. 179)

That’s honestly all I have time to write right now. But in conclusion, no, what you’re stating here isn’t true, not at all.

I’ve been travelling a lot lately and I seem to manage to forget something different each time…

But ideally:

• Skincare: oil-based cleanser that I can use mornings and evenings, Byoma clarifying serum cos otherwise my skin is not happy, moisturiser, sun cream

• Other: shampoo decanted into small bottle (my hair needs washing every other day), deodorant, tooth brush

• Makeup: primer, glow drops, concealer, multi-purpose pink crayon (can be used as under-eye colour corrector, blush, lip liner and eye shadow depending what I feel like)

I tend not to bring conditioner (can live without), hair moisturising serum, exfoliating serum (only use once a week), eye liner, mascara, lip stick, brow gel, blush, setting powder, foundation but if I were going to a wedding or something I would probs bring all of these.

Ooh that looks good, I’ll have to try the vegetarian version she has.

Leaving this bannock recipe that I often make with soups or stews - super easy and you end up with fresh warm bread in under 20 minutes!

I havn’t used Amazon for a few years and honestly, it just takes discounting it as a possibility. There’s no one website equivalent but the more you search for places to buy things, the more you build up a repertoire of sites for specific things.

I recommend Ethical Book Search for finding cheap second-hand books. Bookshop.org for new books.

Argos can be good if you need an assortment of random things, although it doesn’t always have everything.

Cass Art for art supplies and Love Crafts for knitting and sewing.

B&Q and Screwfix for DIY and home stuff.

There’s probably more places I use semi-regularly that I can’t think of right now. You often end up paying slightly more but I think it’s worth it to not support Bezos and I buy less stuff than I would otherwise which is good in the end anyway.

That’s devastating. I hadn’t heard of the Arran whitebeam before, I’ll have to look out for it when on Arran next.

Arran whitebeam is one of the rarest and most endangered trees in the world. It is a hybrid of rowan and rock whitebeam which has stayed on the Isle of Arran since the last glaciers were formed.

Yes! I’ve really gotten into actually making use of my freezer recently. It’s also great for spices and herbs that you use less frequently.

• Fresh tumeric and ginger: just grate off what you need and pop it back.
• Chillies: freeze whole and cut up and use as needed
• Herbs: how well they freeze depends. Things like sage, thyme, curry leaves freeze really well. Basil and coriander will be very soggy when they defrost but are fine if you’re just using them in a sauce.

The experiences trans men and women have with misogyny will never not be fascinating to me. Like, for the first time ever we have this huge sample size of people who have experienced how their gender presentation affects how people interact with them, giving tangible proof of misogyny in action. And it can’t just be swept aside with ‘MaYbE tHe wOmEn JuSt miSuNDerStOoD’ or ‘mAYbe tHe mAN diDN’t MeAn iT LiKE tHaT’. I mean idiots will still make idiot arguments but at least it chips away at them a little bit.

Honestly, from a design perspective I do think the one on the right is actually better in some respects. Yes, it wouldn’t scale well, there’s too many colours, it’s too busy, but it has some good points. The font choice draws you in more, with less space between the letters making it easier to read at a glance and the ‘f’ creating interest. And the house is actually united with the text, whereas in the left image it feels completely disconnected.

I would be pretty disappointed if I’d paid for a logo and I got the left image tbh, it’s not very interesting or memorable. Yes, fuck AI, but I’m not sure this is the best comparison because both logos suck in different ways.

I love ‘dreich’ (rhymes with ‘greek’) because it perfectly sums up British weather most of the time.

Also a fan of ‘banging’, as in top, class, right good.

This made me think of an article I read today about the Nazi occupation of Rome during WWII:

Marjorie Scaretti, my great-aunt, lived in Rome for much of her life. She was in the Apennines after the armistice talks of July 1943 and returned to Rome on 20 October, two days after the remaining Jews of the Roman ghetto were sent by train to Auschwitz. Her husband, Enrico, was a banker, some of whose property and businesses were appropriated by Mussolini after he refused to join the Fascist Party. Aunt Marjorie kept a diary, and in its pages she writes about the furtive lives Romans led during the occupation: the ceaseless speculation about where the Allies were; whether the Nazis would destroy Rome by defending it from an Allied attack, turning it into another Stalingrad; at which prison or police station someone was being held and how to get them out – many arrests in the months of the occupation were entirely arbitrary.

[…] She wrote of ‘the hair’s-breadth escapes, the adventures, the amazing and often fantastic existence of thousands of fugitives, coupled with the fear, the secret anxiety, the danger and the want, the heroic, the ludicrous and the vile – all packed into the daily life of the harassed citizen’. Josette Bruccoleri, an interviewee in Trevelyan’s book, spoke of the same unease: ‘Everyone seemed to be in possession of some great secret which they did not dare reveal. People hardly spoke to each other and if they did it was only for a moment. I myself felt like a time bomb ready to explode, but like everybody else I did my best to look as innocent as possible.’

Not exactly the same, but every day it feels like there are more and more echoes of the past.

You’re welcome! Glad it was useful :)

I don’t have time to translate right now but here’s an article from Deutsche Welle that goes into some detail on the (alleged) property damage. Essentially it’s tied in with the attempted occupation of the FU university in Berlin. Hope that helps!

I’ve started seeing a few more comics/memes which have women as the representative of a universal experience (rather than, as you say, representing a sexist trope) and it’s absurd how happy it makes me.

The actual article, in case anyone’s interested: https://archive.is/qfunJ

I haven’t done much sewing but I found Tilly and the Buttons to be very clear and easy to follow. It helped that the pattern I was following had a YouTube video along with it. But the pattern itself was clear and straightforward as well.

People can argue all day long that we should be responsible for our own pads/tampons etc. but ultimately these arguments of where the responsibility lies miss the point. It’s just nice, it’s such a relief when you get caught out and have an emergency and you know you don’t have to worry about making something makeshift or finding a shop or having some change to use one of the crappy vending machines in the bathroom. I was ambivalent about free period products before moving to Scotland last year but just having them available when you need them is fantastic. Like the state doesn’t need to provide them but god does it make such a difference when they do.

Yes! Both so useful…

I use white vinegar for cleaning the microwave as well - a tub of it heated up fin there for a minute and it makes it much easier to clean.

And a sprinkle of bicarb in the bottom of a bin to reduce smells.