Mara

[itsnotaboutwork @itsnotaboutwork]

sketchbook corner: lost property...

[Mara @MooLou27]

@SamaHoole @JeremyCordite Home Economics it was called in my school. We had a very scary teacher, but the fact I still remember her, her lessons and what she taught me as a teenager many, many years later must say something about her teaching methods.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A British girl in 1960 left school able to roast a joint, render the dripping, make a suet crust and bone a fish. Her granddaughter was taught to design the box a pizza comes in.

It was called domestic science, and it was on the timetable from the 1870s. Once a week you carried your ingredients in on the bus in a wicker basket with a tea towel over the top. A woman in a white overall, who frightened everybody, taught you the lot.

- How to choose a cheap cut and make it tender
- How to make stock from the bones
- How to use up the cold joint on Monday
- How to feed a family of 5 for a week on a wage

The boys were next door doing woodwork, and went home to be fed by someone who had passed the course.

In 1990 the National Curriculum abolished it. Cooking was folded into a new subject called design and technology, alongside plastics and electronics. Pupils no longer cooked a meal. They "developed a food product". They surveyed their classmates on preferred toppings, drew the packaging, and wrote an evaluation.

Thousands of school kitchens were stripped out, since nobody needed an oven to draw a box.

That was 36 years ago. The first children through it are now the parents, standing in a supermarket with no idea what to do with a shoulder of lamb, and being told that their weight is a failure of willpower.

It was a decision. A country that had taught every girl to turn a carcass into a week of dinners chose to teach her children to be customers.

[Jamie Jenkins @statsjamie]

Andy Burnham is promoting Google Maps to help drivers find cheaper fuel.

Useful, but it misses the bigger picture.

Diesel has risen from 141.46p a litre in February to 199.52p now.

That means a private motorist is paying almost 10p more VAT on every litre of diesel than in February.

Meanwhile, petrol and diesel duty already raises around £24 billion a year.

So yes, Google Maps might help you find the cheapest forecourt.

But it doesn’t make £2 diesel cheap.

And the higher cost doesn’t just hit drivers, it feeds through transport, deliveries and ultimately the prices we all pay.

You don’t even have to drive a diesel car to pay the price of expensive diesel.

Full analysis 👇

https://t.co/2skKEXLjXo

[Steven Barrett @SBarrettBar]

Eventually we'll be so poor that even the Mainstream Media will have to notice ...

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

A whopping 1,739 illegal migrants arrived in the UK over the last week.

Fri - 91.
Cost to taxpayers = £31m

Sat - 164.
Cost = £56m

Sun - 418.
Cost = £142m

Mon - 609.
Cost = £207m

Tues - 338.
Cost = £115m

Wed - 119.
Cost = £40m

Total = £591m

This invasion can’t go on.

[Prickles and Paws @Prickles_Paws]

✨Could you nominate us for £5,000? ✨

This award would make a huge difference to our work rescuing and rehabilitating hedgehogs across Cornwall.

Nominate us 💚: https://t.co/prh9v8RIhJ

[Mara @MooLou27]

@kevinhollinrake The sneering attitude of your @Conservatives MP. This is why you will never win my vote back. You don’t listen and you don’t learn. Ever.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

For 60 years the blue tits of Britain broke into the milk on your doorstep, and all they ever took was the cream.

It was first seen in Swaythling, near Southampton, in 1921. A blue tit landed on a bottle, pecked through the cap and drank. By the 1950s every tit in the country seemed to know the trick. Housewives put out saucers, stones and upturned cups. The birds learned to follow the milk float down the street and be waiting at the next step.

You will remember the bottle. Silver foil on top, and beneath it 2 inches of thick yellow cream that had risen overnight, with the white milk underneath. The first one down in the morning got it on the porridge.

That cream was the whole point of the burglary. A bird cannot digest milk. It has no means of handling the sugar in it. Cream is nearly all fat, with very little sugar, so the tits drank down to the line and stopped.

A wild animal weighing 11 grams, with every bird table and berry bush in the street to choose from, worked out how to open a sealed container to get at butterfat.

Then the habit died, in about 10 years. Nobody trapped them or changed the caps. The milk changed. It was homogenised so the cream no longer rose, then skimmed so it was hardly there, then moved to a plastic jug in a supermarket.

The blue tits inspected the red top, found nothing in it worth stealing, and went back to the hedge.

They were the last creatures in Britain to judge a pint of milk on what was actually in it.

[Paul Golding @PaulGolding]

TWO DAYS.

That's how long Mohammed Abbas had the keys to his taxpayer-funded house in Cardiff before he struck.

He crossed the Channel by dinghy from France in March, claiming to be Palestinian. He was then convicted of assaulting a police officer. And the Home Office handed him a £250,000 two-bedroom house all to himself.

On July 30, at 2am, he forced his way into a family home in Cardiff. Two young sisters, one under 13, woke to find him exposing himself in their bedroom doorway.

He has admitted the offences at Cardiff Crown Court, and the Home Office now says it will deport him "at the earliest opportunity".

The earliest opportunity was before those girls were ever put at risk.

Deport foreign offenders on conviction. No exceptions.

Britain First.

[Jamie Jenkins @statsjamie]

🚨 1,620 SMALL BOAT ARRIVALS IN JUST FIVE DAYS.

That's 1,620 people arriving in 21 boats between 2 and 6 October.

Years of promises. Billions spent on the asylum system. Yet the boats keep coming.

Britain needs a border system that actually works, not more empty promises.

[Peter Bleksley @PeterBleksley]

Yesterday’s figures are in.
1,739 illegals have now entered the UK in the past six days via dinghies.
Hell in a handcart springs to mind.

[Nigel Farage @Nigel_Farage]

Mohammed Abbas came by boat in March.

By June, he’d assaulted a police officer and was convicted.

By July, he’d been given a free home. Two days later, he sexually assaulted two young girls.

Only Reform will end this utter madness.

[Cut My Tax @CutMyTaxUK]

Andy Burnham has posted a misleading tweet trying to claim credit for the fact that Google Maps lists petrol prices. "I won't accept that there's nothing I can do to help," he says, ignoring the fact that his government has already hoovered up another £110m in additional tax revenue on higher fuel prices since the 1st of August and that tax constitutes 47% of the price of petrol.

If fuel prices stay at their current levels, the full extra amount that Labour will rake in from VAT on fuel by next August is £1.2bn.

Moreover if Labour's planned 3p fuel duty increase on 1 January 2027, followed by 2p on 1 March 2027 and an April RPI uplift go ahead, then another £1.7bn of revenue will be raised in the first 7 months of 2027, meaning a total tax increase of £2.95bn over the Aug 26 to Aug 27 period.

If Burnham really wanted to make fuel more affordable, the least he would do is to reduce the level of tax so the government was no longer raking in even more cash from higher fuel prices.

[James McMurdock MP @JMcMurdockMP]

Words:
We’ve listened. We’re sorry.

Actions:

[Mara @MooLou27]

@andyburnham Oh that’s alright then. Thanks SO much! SO grateful. Who needs google maps when I can drive past 3 fuel stations on my way to work and see that they’re ALL expensive. How about some help with extortionate taxes?

[Mara @MooLou27]

@CarlBovisNature I’ve got a little list forming, don’t you worry!

[Carl Bovis @CarlBovisNature]

Can you please do me a favour🙏
Just click this link & have a quick look at my bird shop:
https://t.co/eDF51peMUo
No need to buy anything, but you might see some ideas for Christmas 😉
Sorry for mentioning the 'C' word, but as a small business, I need to plan ahead.🐦🙏❤️

[Mara @MooLou27]

@CPhilpOfficial It’s not about you though or party politics is it. The country is in a mess thanks to you and the @UKLabour If you want what’s best for the country, you’ll do whatever is right even if that means working other parties who have the momentum. Country first, party second.

[Carl Bovis @CarlBovisNature]

Blue Tit gliding in with its cape... 😁😍🐦