Sarah

Disabled Mum of 2, trying to be kind (& patient) to everyone - always - but blimey ... it can take some doing.

[Sarah @SarahDa45576607]

@MartinSLewis In a different vein - email from my motor insurers about a no fault accident last year. Had all my details, followed by 1 from their 'solicitors. Haven't clicked anywhere and have alerted my insurer via their scam-line. Looks so professional but alarm bells are ringing.

[helen warlow @helen_warlow]

THE PERSON WHO HAS HACKED ME ON MY OLD SITE IS NOW ASKING FOR MONEY
🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
BEWARE.
IT ISNT ME
🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩❌❌❌❌⭕️❌❌❌❌❌🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘🆘❌❌❌❌❌❌❌

[helen warlow @helen_warlow]

PLEASE DONT FALL FOR THE SCAMS ON my @H Warloww ACCOUNT IT ISNT ME. I CANT GET INTO THAT ACCOUNT
ITS BEEN HACKED AND LOCKED TO ME. IM REALLY DISTRESSED. THE B*****DS
I WOULDN’T DO THIS. IT WILL BE MONEY NEXT

[Sarah @SarahDa45576607]

@jimbobbats @80s90sJukebox I see 'FLM' in relation to Mel and Kim ❤️❤️ and immediately go to the song line 'boyfriends are boring, wait till the right one comes around'....when most days I can't even remember my children's names 😂.

[Care Champions Ireland @CareChampions2]

This is 79-year-old Robert Thompson from Bray. Robert is completely blind, but until recently, he has managed to live a highly independent life with the help of his brilliant guide dog, Rhona.

But right now, Wicklow County Council is failing him, and the entire visually impaired community.

For years, the audible signals at pedestrian crossings across Bray have been faulty. Recently, things have gone from bad to worse. The critical audio signals that tell Robert where the crossing pole is (the "wait" sound) and when it is actually safe to cross (the "go" sound) have stopped working entirely on busy routes near his home.

"There’s no way I would cross that road without the sound," Robert says. "It’s just too dangerous."

To make matters worse, recent changes to the local Dublin bus network (replacing the old 145 route with the E1 spine) mean his usual handy bus stops are gone. Because the council has left the nearby pedestrian signals broken, Robert can no longer cross the street safely at his local stop.

Robert is now forced to get off the bus early and walk a massive, grueling 1.5 kilometers EACH WAY along a highly dangerous, busy stretch of road just to find a single working crossing.

Robert has contacted Wicklow County Council repeatedly. They have acknowledged his complaints, but they have met him with absolute silence regarding any actual repairs.

Basic mobility and safety should be a right, not a luxury. By ignoring these broken signals for years, the council is effectively trapping vulnerable residents in their own towns and actively stripping away their independence.

Please SHARE this post! Let’s get the word out and force Wicklow County Council to do their job, fix the audio signals in Bray, and restore safety and freedom to Robert and others who rely on them!

#WicklowCountyCouncil #AccessibilityMatters #Bray #Inclusion #GuideDogsIreland #RobertThompson

https://t.co/2x43RYro4E

[helen warlow @helen_warlow]

John McNulty
‘Nocturne’
Love this one …more sheep. These ones are ready for bed
https://t.co/W2HWFOqCVt Irish Gallery

[helen warlow @helen_warlow]

Finally today
‘Dinnertime’
Francisco Fonsca artist
I suspect that as follower numbers here haven’t risen today my old followers are being prevented from accessing this site
Utter scullduggery. Unscrupulous behaviour
Thanks my new XTwitterarty
Helen😤🌷📚Max🐶❤️

[Sarah @SarahDa45576607]

@helen_warlow I've have 'The Feast' as a jigsaw and this one looks a bit different. This is in no way a criticism Helen, only that I know you're having a bit of a time of it on Twitter at the moment and I'm hoping your new account is secure. ❤️❤️

[Sarah @SarahDa45576607]

@helen_warlow Always remind me of Dorset and Cornwall, the 1st is the 'back' road to Cranborne, the 2nd the lane to Lerryn from Lostwithiel, or at least in my head. Glad you're okay Helen, what a time you're having ❤️-we'll get your follower numbers back up, by hook or by crook! All blessings.

[helen warlow @helen_warlow]

If you want to see my proper site and don’t know me put my name into your search engine and go into
@HWarlow on XTwitter

[helen warlow @helen_warlow]

Kaoru Yamada.
What a stressful time it’s been here. Everyone knows my life and the other day it took a turn for the worse ….
I started another site. I was half hacked but I’ve been terrified.
I knew I’d start again but hopefully things might be ok soon

[helen warlow @helen_warlow]

Good Morning Everyone
Thanks to all new followers.
Welcome to my second XTwitterarty site. Still trying to retrieve the original
@HWarlow
Had to post these today as The Bayeux Tapestry is now in the UK .

[helen warlow @helen_warlow]

My old followers will know this is me. From my old account I’m locked out of

[Sarah @SarahDa45576607]

@HWarlow @sthompsonart1 Top right on your fridge - the hare with wings - I have one of those sewn on my denim jacket (along with the greyhound with wings) 😉😊!! Your very talented son's art I believe ❤️❤️❤️.

[Sarah @SarahDa45576607]

@HWarlow The 2nd looks very similar to the lane that takes you into the village of Morden, Dorset. My grandparents lived in a tiny hamlet called Bloxworth, many years ago and their tel. no. was Morden 132. I can remember that but often not my children's names 😂. All blessings Helen ❤️❤️.

[Sarah @SarahDa45576607]

@HWarlow Morning Helen. Always loved the heat, helps with my RA. Since I've been diagnosed with an additional health issue it seems the heat no longer likes me🔥! Sat in my dark bedroom, draped in a wet towel with my fan on full blast, hoping 24° isn't that far away now 😁. All blessings.

[Sarah @SarahDa45576607]

@John_Dabell @stormangel777 'Rewritten the itinerary but not cancelled the journey' puts into words exactly how I feel about my life since a diagnosis, (and now slightly more rapidly declining health), some 15 years ago. All blessings to you and yours John. Go well.

[𝖬𝖺𝗍𝗍 𝖲𝗍𝖺𝗆𝗉𝖾𝗋 🐍 @Sneketoshi]

I want to introduce you to Steve. He’s 83. His wife died a few months ago and he comes to this lodge in Spring Mill, Indiana and draws. He taught art in Terre Haute, IN his whole life. He also did courtroom sketches in court cases. In the comments I’ll share some pics from his sketchbook. He was excited when I said I was going to share his sketches with the world.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

This year the Home Office moved to stop expert sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand coming to shear British sheep.

The people who keep the animals comfortable were declared surplus to requirements.

For over a decade, around 75 of the best shearers on earth have flown in each spring on a simple visa concession. In a few brutal weeks they take the wool off up to two million sheep.

A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes. Hundreds a day. Calm hands, no panic in the animal. It is a global trade and a young body's game, and Britain has never grown enough of its own.

The official line? Fourteen years to train Britons, so the door is closing.

Here is what that tidy sentence ignores. A sheep must be shorn every year or she overheats, cannot move properly, and gets eaten alive by flies and maggots. Shearing on time is welfare, plain and simple, written into law and into the animal's own skin.

So a government that lectures farmers without pause about welfare has quietly made the most basic welfare task harder to carry out. After the outcry they allowed one "final" year. Then the experts are gone for good.

A sector already losing money on every fleece, already burning wool it cannot sell, now told it cannot even get the people in to take the wool off.

You could be forgiven for thinking somebody wants the British sheep gone.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

On the twenty-ninth of March, 2020, a ten-year-old boy named Max Woosey set up a tent in the back garden of his family's house in Braunton, North Devon, and climbed inside.

The tent had belonged to his next-door neighbour, a seventy-four-year-old man named Rick Abbott who had died of terminal cancer six weeks earlier. Rick had given Max the tent before he died. He had told Max to use it for an adventure.

Rick had not asked Max to raise money.

The translation of the personal token into a fundraising mechanism for the institution that had cared for Rick in his final months was Max's own institutional invention.

By the time he was thirteen years old, he had funded fifteen nurse-years of hospice care.

Rick Abbott had been a kayaker, a paddleboarder, and a gym-goer. He was a close neighbour of the Woosey family. When he received his terminal cancer diagnosis at the age of seventy-four, the North Devon Hospice arranged the palliative care that allowed him to die at home rather than in a hospital ward.

The Woosey family — Max, his mother Rachael, and his father Mark (a serving Royal Marine) — were close to Rick throughout the final months. They observed the hospice care directly. They saw what the institutional infrastructure of community palliative care could do for a man who wanted to die in his own house surrounded by the things he loved.

Rick Abbott died in February of 2020.

Before he died, he gave Max his camping tent. He asked Max to use it for an adventure.

Six weeks later, on the twenty-third of March, 2020, the United Kingdom entered its first national lockdown under the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. All in-person fundraising activities for UK charities were cancelled overnight. UK hospices — which are not part of the National Health Service and are largely charity-funded, with the average UK hospice receiving only approximately thirty percent of its operating budget from the NHS — were among the worst affected. Their fundraising infrastructure depended on community events, charity shops, and in-person gatherings that were no longer permitted.

The North Devon Hospice — the institution that had just cared for Rick Abbott — was, by late March of 2020, looking at the loss of substantially all of its normal fundraising revenue for the foreseeable future.

On the twenty-ninth of March, 2020, six days into the national lockdown, Max Woosey set up Rick's tent in his back garden and posted a fundraising page online.

The page set a goal of one hundred pounds.

The page text explained that his friend Rick had given him a tent before he died and had asked him to have an adventure, and that an adventure was what Max was doing.

He did not come back inside that night. Or the next. Or the night after that.

He continued sleeping in the tent for the next three years.

The fundraising page raised one hundred pounds. Then five hundred. Then five thousand. Then fifty thousand. Then five hundred thousand. By the time Max ended the challenge on the twenty-ninth of March, 2023 — exactly three years after the first night — the page had raised more than seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds for the North Devon Hospice.

Through the three years, he slept outside in storms, in snow, in hail, in torrential rain, in baking summer heat, in freezing winter cold. He slept outside on his birthdays. He slept outside on three consecutive Christmases. He slept outside when he had COVID-19. He went through approximately fifteen separate tents as the weather destroyed them one after another. On one documented night, his tent collapsed in heavy rain and high winds at midnight; he stayed inside the collapsed shelter because he could not find a replacement tent in time.

He camped in places other than the back garden when the schedule permitted. He spent a night on a hotel balcony at London Zoo. He pitched the tent in the garden of Number Ten Downing Street and met the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson. He camped at the Sandy Park stadium of the Exeter Chiefs rugby club. On the one-year anniversary of his challenge, he organized a worldwide children's camp-out called Max's Big Camp Out, which inspired approximately two thousand other young people to raise money for their own local charities through their own backyard camp-outs.

In the 2022 New Year Honours List, Max was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to fundraising for the North Devon Hospice during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was twelve years old at the time of presentation. The medal was presented to him by the Lord Lieutenant of Devon, David Fursdon, at the Royal Marines base at Lympstone in May of 2022. He was among the youngest BEM recipients in the country. He was also recognized with a Pride of Britain Award, a Spirit of Adventure Award, and the Bear Grylls Chief Scout Unsung Hero Award.

On the twenty-ninth of March, 2023, Max ended the challenge. He held a final celebratory festival at the Broomhill Estate in North Devon on the first of April. He then slept in his own bedroom for the first time since the lockdown began. He was thirteen years old.

Guinness World Records confirmed Max as the holder of the world record for the most money raised by camping by an individual.

The North Devon Hospice translated the seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-pound total into the institutional terms that mattered. The chief executive, Stephen Roberts, said publicly that Max's fundraising had directly funded fifteen nurses for a whole year. The hospice estimated, in its own subsequent statements, that those fifteen nurse-years had supported the at-home palliative care of approximately five hundred patients — patients who, like Rick Abbott, had been able to die at home rather than in hospital wards because the institutional infrastructure was funded to be in their houses.

The structural reading of Max Woosey's three years in the back garden is that the promise Rick Abbott extracted from him in February of 2020 was personal. It was a promise from a dying older man to a ten-year-old neighbour to use a tent for an adventure.

Max's translation of that personal promise into a three-year institutional fundraising operation for the hospice that had cared for Rick was not in the original promise.

The translation was Max's own work.

The fifteen nurse-years and the approximately five hundred at-home palliative patients were the institutional yield of a ten-year-old converting a personal token into community infrastructure.

Rick had asked for an adventure.

Max delivered an institution.

If his story moved you, drop one word in the comments — Max, Rick, tent, anything that comes to mind. Tap the like button so more people find this story. The page is small. Every reaction helps us keep telling the stories where a ten-year-old converted a personal promise into community infrastructure.