Diane Jackson

Never look back, walk tall, act fine! #Keto #Lipoedema Aerodrome Safeguarding 🛫🛬✈️ Līve 🐝 @CASTAeroSafe

[VeryBritishProblems @SoVeryBritish]

Everyone banged on about doing “No Mow May” but nobody mentioned the following month would be “can’t bloody mow anyway because it won’t stop sodding raining for three seconds June”

[Diane Jackson @MacclassDiane]

@MarioNawfal This is like something from Eurotrash. Antoines de Caunes & Jean-Paul Gaultier would make innuendos about udders and milking. Bonkers.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

November 1971. Chiswick, West London.
Erin Pizzey is 32 years old. She is not a lawyer. Not a politician. Not a doctor.
She is a woman who talked Hounslow Council into lending her a cold, rundown building on Belmont Road — a former community hall — for almost nothing. Her original plan was modest. A warm room. A cup of tea. Somewhere for mothers with young children to simply get out of the house.
Then the door opened.
A woman stood in the entrance. She was covered, head to foot, in bruises. She was holding two small children. She was shaking.
She didn't want tea.
She needed somewhere to hide.
Erin let her in. She didn't turn her away. She didn't tell her to call the police.
Because Erin had already called the police. They told her the same thing they told every woman in Britain at the time: they could not enter a private home over a "domestic dispute." That was the law. The home was private. What happened inside it was a family matter.
When Erin contacted a female civil servant to report what she was seeing, the response was astonishing. The woman told her flatly: "There wasn't a problem of battered wives until you made one."
Erin put down the phone. Then she went back to her residents and made sure they were fed.
Within weeks, 40 mothers and children were sleeping in four tiny rooms. No funding. No staff. No legal authority.
She didn't stop.
By 1973, word had spread through quiet whisper networks — one woman telling another, "There is a place. Go to Chiswick. She won't turn you away." That same year, Erin hosted the first National Women's Aid Conference in the UK. Women from across Britain arrived, and they all recognized the same thing at once: what she had built needed to exist everywhere.
In 1974, the council set a maximum of 36 residents. At peak times, 150 women and children were living inside those walls — sleeping on floors, on chairs, in hallways. The building smelled of cooking, fear, and something else entirely: relief.
Erin was taken to court for overcrowding. She appealed all the way to the House of Lords.
She kept the doors open the entire time.
That same year, she wrote a book. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear. It was the first published account of domestic violence in British history. It used real stories from real women inside the shelter. Overnight, a problem that had no official name was on front pages from London to New York.
The movement spread. Refuges opened across the UK. Then Australia. Then Canada. Then the United States. The pattern she created in four small rooms in West London — no blueprint, no permission, no funding — had been replicated in hundreds of shelters across the Western world.
MP Jack Ashley stood up in Parliament and said: "It was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical."
She was ranked 14th in a poll of the 100 women who shook the world. She was awarded the Italian Peace Prize. She received a CBE. The charity she founded — Chiswick Women's Aid, which became Refuge — grew into the largest domestic violence charity in the United Kingdom, with over 460 employees and an annual income of more than £33 million.
Erin Pizzey passed away on October 4, 2025, aged 86.
She never stopped.
It all began with one woman, one borrowed building, and an absolute refusal to say no.
Forty women and children showed up with nowhere to go.
She made room.

Share this if you believe one ordinary person, refusing to look away, can build a shelter that holds the whole world.

Follow us Lost in Yesterday

[Diane Jackson @MacclassDiane]

@London_W4 Gluten free pasta is good! @hairystool has ‘Wheat-Dependent Exercise-Induced Anaphylaxis’ a condition where eating wheat causes a severe allergic reaction if combined with movement, so his EpiPen is vital because wheat is hidden in all sorts of foods that supermarkets sell sadly.

[Diane Jackson @MacclassDiane]

Very, very sad to hear of the death of actor Anthony Head. I followed his career, thought he was ace, fancied him a bit too, he was very dishy. A colleague who lived in Bath met him and said that he was charm itself ! RIP 🥺

[Diane Jackson @MacclassDiane]

@London_W4 I love it! I bet On Cloud would love it for advertising too! 👟👟

[Diane Jackson @MacclassDiane]

@London_W4 I can heartily recommend Franx on Shaftesbury Ave. & Pinner Cafe on Chalton St. near to the British Library. 😋

[Diane Jackson @MacclassDiane]

@typesfaster Perhaps there’s a disconnect between perception and reality? I did not feel unduly at risk in Manhattan recently, obviously warybut no beggars, no groups of grubby men or speeding thieves on bikes. London is full of that, is threatening and puts me on high alert of being mugged.

[Diane Jackson @MacclassDiane]

@mooramana David Bowie
Prince
Peter Gabriel
Tori Amos
The Rolling Stones
Cyndi Lauper
Līve
Alter Bridge
Iggy Pop
James

[Diane Jackson @MacclassDiane]

@London_W4 Good grief! Thank goodness you’re ok!

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers.

When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it.

They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long.

In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it.

The flowers attract a standing army to our fields.

We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.

[Diane Jackson @MacclassDiane]

@mooramana Please know that you’re an inspiration. x

[Raylene - Undercover Indie ® @UndercoverIndy]

Okay folks from the UK ... it's your time to step up and make a difference ... I hate thieves! 😡

"Please could you keep an eye on here or other forums for my stolen Les Paul R9 from 2014.
It was stolen from West Yorkshire.
The suspect is trying to off load it locally and police are aware.
It might even turn up as a new guitar day post." ~ Yorkshireman David

[Diane Jackson @MacclassDiane]

@itspetergabriel One of my all time favourites, it does not date, unlike my t-shirt of the album cover that is sadly long gone. “When I want to run away, I drive off in my car, but whichever way I go, I come back to the place you are”. 😍

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

If the courts say that a man can be a woman simply because he says he is, then the whole of society breaks down. Everything becomes meaningless, because if a man can be a woman by saying he is, then a man can say he’s a lion and be a lion. Say he’s a rhino and be a rhino. A three year old child can say they’re an adult and demand to be treated as one in a pub. A mountain may no longer be a mountain; it could be a lettuce if someone has said that it is. You see? A man saying they’re a woman and being told they are by a court renders the whole world insane. And that’s exactly what it is to call a man a woman: insane.

[Diane Jackson @MacclassDiane]

@awkwardgoogle @TuitNutrition 😭

[Diane Jackson @MacclassDiane]

@London_W4 I’ve just visited NYC, in stark contrast to London and other places in U.K., there were no daytime gangs like this, no groups of men wailing about their religion, no kids on bikes scouting to snatch phones, and very few visibly homeless people. UK authorities should take note.

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

I need 100,000 signatures to win a parliamentary debate about the ownership of the water industry.

Do your thing internet.

https://t.co/kZz1cXBtz3

[Donna-Louise @NoLongerTheFuzz]

Today the Southport Inquiry published its findings.
I’m not talking about the agencies right now.
I’m talking about his parents.
Because somebody fucking has to.
I’m a former detective. 21 yrs in the force, I know what I’m looking at🧵👇

[The Bee Guy @the_beeguy]

It’s that time of year - folks asking us about #bumblebees - WHY THEY’RE SEEING THEM ON THE GROUND - so here’s a thread to explain.
Please #retweet!
Every queen that survives means a new colony that gets to exist & produce queen #bees for next year!
So important to #share!
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