Andy Gaines

Photographer of Weddings | York | UK

[Andy Gaines @Andy_Gaines]

@VienneseStrudel … and those spaces/sports/activities de facto become male ones…

[Andy Gaines @Andy_Gaines]

@VienneseStrudel Same in the public spaces and parks that abigail and Make Space For Girls does their work in. Plenty of facilities girls ‘can’ use - but when they are always dominated by men (mugas, skate parks, basketball courts etc) then the girls don’t feel safe/comfortable there…

[Andy Gaines @Andy_Gaines]

@InkwellPaul You have selected…. No.

[Andy Gaines @Andy_Gaines]

@InkwellPaul What you said. Those opening bars of the wizard! Peak fuzz club vibes!

[Andy Gaines @Andy_Gaines]

@VienneseStrudel Ida’s school that.

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

Lots of over-the-top coverage right now about the £1m cap on inheritance tax agricultural property relief (APR).

Quick thread:

[Andy Gaines @Andy_Gaines]

Hey @royalairmaroc after you cancelled our outbound flights (twice!) - I’ve had to make alternative outbound arrangements to my destination. How can i ensure you don’t ‘no-show’ us and cancel our return flights which we still need due to not catching the re-arranged outbound flight?

[Andy Gaines @Andy_Gaines]

@VienneseStrudel When the fomo wears off and people realise they can’t go or have extra tickets to shift etc you’ll be able to get them on resale at reasonable/retail prices I reckon. Just not yet as the hype to too high. In the few months before the gig - worth keeping an eye on for sure 💪

[Naomi Fisher @naomicfisher]

What a strange thing we do to our young people in this culture and time.

We make them spend several years learning things which they often have no interest in, which they have not chosen and which they will in many cases never use again. We tell them that these things are vitally important.

Then we sit them in rows and make them write about the things they can remember for an intense few hours. We compare what they have written down with everyone else of the same age, and then we rank them.

We make them wait a couple of months and then we tell some that they are the successes, and others that they are the failures. We encourage them to hang their self-worth on how they performed. Newspapers publish pictures of the delighted, whilst the disappointed hide their heads in shame.

We tell them that these results will determine the rest of their lives – and then we set up systems that make this true. We provide fewer opportunities for those who did not succeed. Those who did well can take their pick of courses, whilst those who did not are made to take the same tests again and again, just to hammer it home.

We make sure that young people spend the majority of their adolescence focused on exams and pressure. Every summer, they sit in rows and try to remember. Each year, they’re told that their whole future rests on this.

Many of them inevitably cave in under the pressure. They become anxious and depressed. They show signs of burnout by the age of 16. They lose their spark, and just go through the motions. Some of them retreat altogether.

Then we pathologise them, say that they need mental health treatment or to become more resilient. We send them for therapy or give them medication. We say that they are the problem, whilst the system carries on unchanged.

What if instead we stopped to think about what we are doing to our young people?

Adolescence is a time of opportunity and vulnerability. It’s a one-off stage of life. What if we asked ourselves, should our young people really spend these years on a conveyor belt of high stakes exams?

Imagine we allowed ourselves to look beyond this time and place, and to see just how strange this really is. What would we offer our young people then?

[Aaron Smith @aaronsmith]

You probably know the start of this Olympic story, but do you know how it finished?

This photo is of Eric Moussambani, aka 'Eric the Eel' from Equatorial Guinea, competing in the 100m Freestyle event at the Sydney 2000 Olympics, alone.

Why?

/1

[Viennese Strudel @VienneseStrudel]

100% same. I was a staunch advocate but I see what's happened in Canada and it's appalling.

[Andy Gaines @Andy_Gaines]

@jordangodbey Community

[Emma 💛💙🇩🇰🇬🇧🇪🇺 @MonkEmma]

OMG 😱

Farage’s party came second in 120 constituencies

They got 12.6% of the votes - 3rd highest vote share

They got 2 MPs

While the winning party only got 36.9%

Oh no, wait a sec - that was UKIP in 2015!

#GeneralElection2024

1/5

[Savan Qadir @savanQadir]

Gosh this is brutal 🔥

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

USA media dishes brutal truth about Brexit Britain

“Every decision taken by Tory (and @LibDems) governments was a political decision—it did not need to happen that way. Austerity was never the hard logic of dutiful caretakers; it was a political calculation to rescue rich friends and dump the burdensome price on those least able to endure the cost.”

“There is mold in the walls and shit in the rivers, posh butter in the supermarkets has anti-theft tags stuck to it, the trains run on schedule about half the time, the average pub-poured pint of lager—the blood of the nation—is nearing the criminal price of 5 pounds ($6.34), and on May 22 a new general election was announced to the people of Great Britain by a prime minister who is richer than the king. 

“Should the polls prove correct—short of a 2016-scale error—the annihilation will be justified. Wage growth is at its lowest level since the Napoleonic Wars. What the Financial Timescalls the “rental market” and what the rest of us call “How much of your money someone richer than you takes every month” is stratospherically inflated; rent is about half a person’s average salary in London. Chain stores on British high streets close permanently at a rate of 14 per day, leaving most shopping areas a procession of corrugated shutters, uncollected rubbish, and the sleeping bags of the homeless.

“The precious marvel that is the National Health Service is cracking at the seams; at the current rate, waiting lists will not be cleared for another 685 years. The union for junior doctors, the BMA, has organised 10 strikes and walkouts in the past year for a pay deal that would only bring wages up to the current level of inflation. The city of Birmingham was the first to tip over into bankruptcy; more will follow.

“In 2022, at least 3% of all families in Britain—around two million people—could not afford to eat. Like a revenant from Dickens, Victorian diseases like scurvy, rickets, and scabies are back to blight children.

“Life expectancy has dropped to the lowest level since 2010—tellingly, the year the Conservatives took power, at the height of the recession.”

“These are the bitter fruits of austerity: an experiment in sado-monetarist economics and financial barbarism. Not much unites those five PMs other than the constant ritual tribute in blood to their coiffed icon, Margaret Thatcher. Yet Thatcher, back in the 1980s, did not lie about how brutal the first shock of neoliberalism was going to be. She coldly promised torture before riches.

“Its sequel, however, was pitched by its architect George Osborne, chancellor under David Cameron, as a bit of belt-tightening resembling that most prized memory in the national canon: the Blitz Spirit. Come on, chaps, buck up and give it some welly. The shattering of society into thinner fragments was supposed to be a hardy adventure. 

“Midway through this downhill plummet, Britain bumbled backward out of the EU. The wreckage of this four-year disaster can now best be seen as an attempt to escape the harsh bite of austerity.

“Brexit was a retreat from hunger into myth: an embrace of antique fables about British pluck and derring-do, a belief that even without an empire and an industrial base this archipelago might reclaim past glory. Faced with profound turmoil, much of the nation turned to a half-remembered falsehood about their grandfather’s generation, marching along with Churchill. This election is the reckoning Brexit postponed.

https://t.co/PRKpMibIqR

[Lewis Goodall @lewis_goodall]

A sobering and highly disturbing piece everyone should read. Europe remains in a deep, stupid slumber.

https://t.co/tZpeqTCgAG

[Andy Gaines @Andy_Gaines]

@Mat_LB Nice! Where did you put in?!

[Andy Gaines @Andy_Gaines]

Pretty accurate thread…

[Andy Gaines @Andy_Gaines]

@NordicaPhoto Mavic mini 3. Or if you want to save some $$$ - mini 2. Would be my shout. X

[• dave ellis • @fullback03]

Jenny Jones from the Green Party knocking the top off the rice pudding here. Whatever your political views are she just nailed the state of this country and what’s wrong with it in 5 minutes.