Good morning all, no drive yesterday at Ryan's daycentre because the minibus wasn't working, but today they have a replacement minibus so Ryan's sitting up front with a fairly new member of staff and Ryan's navigating, for anyone new to our page Ryan absolutely loves routes and maps and can direct you anywhere in the UK from memory , great if you need directions , but Ryan's super cheeky super mischievous and will direct someone the wrong way to stay out longer because he loves being out in the minibus, new minibus, fairly new member of staff, highly intelligent autistic young man whose special interest is maps....what could possibly go wrong. Have a great day everyone.
The government tell us to turn our heating down and eat less red meat for net zero. Yet they ram through gigantic hyperscale data centres that consume as much electricity in 24 hours as roughly 89 average streets use over an entire year. We are being treated like suckers.
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.
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Sainsbury's boss eyes bumper £7.3m payday as shoppers reel from higher food prices.
Up from £5.4m last year – 200 times average employee pay.
Govts preach pay restraint to workers, silence on exec pay, shareholder returns.
Let workers vote on exec pay.
https://t.co/S0tClkOEur
What the bloody hell is wrong with people? 😡
'No signs of life' in River Lugg after John Price destruction
An ECOLOGIST has warned that it could take up to 30 years for a river that has no "signs of life" to recover after it was "obliterated" by a local farmer.
Although then and now photos show that the landscape around the River Lugg near Kingsland has been drastically transformed, an ecologist has warned it could take decades to fully recover after farmer John Price used an 18-tonne digger to dredge a section.
Price also stripped a mile-long stretch of the bank of trees back in 2020.
He was jailed for 12 months in 2023 by a judge who told him he had committed "ecological vandalism on an industrial scale" along a section of one of Britain's most important salmon rivers.
He had claimed he had carried out the work to help protect locals in the nearby hamlet whose homes were devastated by flooding and to help fix riverbed erosion.
But the Environment Agency said the damage was one of the worst cases of riverside destruction it had ever seen, leading to a "devastating" effect on local wildlife - which has still not recovered six years on.
Although trees, bushes, and greenery are growing back around the river, a leading ecologist believes there are "no signs of life" in the river itself.
Environmental designer Richard Fishbourne said: "It is quite disturbing to see how much damage one person can cause in just a couple of days.
"When I went down recently there was no sign of any fish where you would usually expect to see minnows, graylings, trout and salmon.
"There's just no sign of life - there's nothing in the water here now and it has become an impoverished landscape.
"It can take decades to build up this wonderful community of species and habitat but it can all be destroyed in a moment of insanity."
More here:https://t.co/1MH3mRDo4A
WELL DONE @superdrug 👏👏👏
Superdrug have removed ALL Ahava products due to their link with illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Thank you for having a moral compass!
Let’s hope more companies follow suit….
Nobody asked them to do it. Nobody trained them for it. They were just two teenage boys — the kind you pass on the sidewalk and barely notice — leaning on their bikes in the summer heat when they saw something no child should ever have to experience.
A man walked away with 5-year-old Jocelyn Rojas. She was supposed to be playing outside. She was supposed to be safe.
And in that single, awful second — while most of us would have been paralyzed, reaching for a phone, waiting for someone with a uniform and a badge to show up — these two boys made a choice.
They got on their bikes and they went after him.
No hesitation. No waiting for permission. No "someone else will handle it." Just two pairs of legs pumping hard through the streets of Lancaster, eyes locked on a stranger who had a little girl that wasn't his.
They tracked him. They stayed close. They didn't let him disappear into the afternoon like something that was never going to be found.
And then they confronted him.
Two teenagers. On bikes. Against a grown man who had already done the unthinkable. They forced him to stop.
He let Jocelyn go.
"The entire thing lasted only minutes." — Lancaster Police
Minutes. Because two boys closed the distance fast enough to interrupt it. Because they were raised — by someone, somehow — to believe that other people's emergencies are your business too.
When reporters asked one of them afterward why they did it, he gave the most deflating, most beautiful, most teenage answer imaginable.
He shrugged.
"I just felt like it was the right thing to do."
No speech. No GoFundMe. No press conference. Just a kid who saw a little girl in danger and couldn't make himself look away.
Jocelyn went home. She was reunited with her family. She got to grow up.
Because of two boys on bikes who hadn't been asked, hadn't been trained, hadn't been paid — and did it anyway.
They told you the planet is dying… and you’re the problem.
Your food.
Your habits.
Your existence.
Meanwhile, behind closed doors, something else is growing.
AI data centres in the UK alone could pump out 123 million tonnes of carbon emissions — the equivalent of millions of human lives over a decade.
But where’s the outrage?
Instead, they blame cows… tax farmers… and squeeze the people who actually feed you.
While tech giants expand quietly… signing deals… building systems that never sleep… and never get questioned.
Different rules.
Different targets.
Same script.
So let me ask you…
Why are everyday people being punished…
while the biggest emitters keep getting rewarded?
Is this really about saving the planet…
or controlling who pays the price?
Drop your thoughts below — I want to hear what you think.
And if this made you stop and think for even a second… share it.
More people need to see this.
Lady in glasses, "I'd just like to say that if there should be any cold rage that is happening, it should be directed towards the politicians"
Fiona Bruce, "What, all of them?"
Lady in glasses, "No, the ones trying to sow the seeds of division between us"
"Because we're basically being manipulated by billionaires at this point"
"And it shouldn't be like that"
One of the grimmest political tricks of the last 15 years has been convincing the public that disabled people are a bigger economic threat than tax avoidance, private outsourcing failures, or housing costs.