Helen

Whatever it is, I am sick of it. I've been there, done that. Seen it all before. Generation X and too long in the tooth for this bullshit #currentevents
XX 🇬🇧

[Helen @Scribberlings]

I have to agree with you. As far as food industries go, the milk industry has more than its fair share of cruelty. Intensive farming with animals as a whole is outright shameful.

That's an issue worth tackling. The argument not to drink milk bc it's "unnatural" though, is just plain dumb.

[Helen @Scribberlings]

Birds, on the other hand, go mad for suet!

No one has told them that fat is "bad" for them.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Ask anyone under forty what suet is, and enjoy the silence.

It is the hard, crumbly fat from around the kidneys of beef, and for centuries it was the backbone of British cooking. Shredded into flour it made the steamed crust of a steak and kidney pudding, the dumplings on a stew, the jam roly-poly and spotted dick that sent children to bed warm on the coldest nights of a wet island. Cheap, filling, and the obvious use for a fat the butcher could barely give away.

Then steaming fell out of fashion, suet was recast as something faintly horrifying, and the puddings slid off the nation's tables. Now try finding the real thing. Many supermarkets stock only vegetable suet, a tub of palm oil doing an impression of the article. Ask a butcher for raw beef suet to render down yourself and you will get a pause and a trip out the back. The genuine steamed, suet-crusted pudding has all but vanished from British kitchens.

What sits on the shelf in its place is an abomination. A pallid factory pudding in a tin or a plastic dome, the crust gone to glue, a few cubes of reconstituted something afloat in brown sludge, ready to be microwaved into a grey, steaming apology in minutes. They kept the name and binned everything the name ever meant.

The real thing still asks for next to nothing. Beef suet from a butcher who will fetch it, a basin, a cloth and a couple of hours. The cold and the wet have not gone anywhere. We just stopped answering them, and let a factory sell us a parody instead.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

135 British MPs are fighting guidance that would deny ‘Paula’ the right to enter women’s and girls’ changing rooms.

[Helen @Scribberlings]

@moriah_bridges Omg I just saw something on YouTube from an ex CIA guy saying the same sort of thing! He said to get people to do something, don't tell them what they're doing wrong, speak to them in a way that frames their thinking the way you want them to think!

[Jill Foster @JournalistJill]

Can I suggest that people screenshot this image.
And every time an MP posts about rejecting the EHRC guidance into single sex spaces, you reply with it and ask if ‘Paula’ should be allowed in women-only spaces.
They won’t answer. But their silence will also speak volumes.

[Helen @Scribberlings]

❤️

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A horse is built to run. A donkey is built to stand and think about it. You have met Hector. This is the other half of his field.

Here is the thing nobody warns you about a parade horse. Hector stood through the King's Troop and the massed bands and a nation's worst day without shifting a hoof, and he will still, in a quiet Welsh field, levitate sideways at a pheasant coming out of a hedge. A carrier bag on the wind is, to a horse, a clear and present danger. The guns were a job, and the job had rules. The hedge has a pheasant in it and no rules at all, and so the flight animal underneath the seventeen years of training remains, on the matter of pheasants, entirely undefeated.

Nelson does not look up.

Nelson has never looked up. A donkey does not flee, it assesses, and it assessed the pheasant long ago and found it beneath comment. People call that stubbornness. It is an animal declining to spend adrenaline it sees no reason to spend.

And here is the domestic arrangement, which anyone who has kept the two together will know on sight. Nelson is a third of Hector's size and entirely in charge. He eats first. He picks the dry spot. He decides when they move. The black charger who carried the weight of the state stands by, with enormous patience, while a small grey donkey finishes the good hay.

The one thing that reliably undoes Hector is Nelson leaving the field. Five minutes, a foot trim, a vet down the lane, and the great composed horse comes apart at the gate, calling and calling, because a horse is herd to its bones and has decided that its herd is one unbothered donkey.

Nelson, for his part, despises rain. A desert animal washed up in Denbighshire, he stands in the shelter looking martyred while Hector grazes out in the wet, waterproof and serene.

Two opposite natures, each propping up the other exactly where it is weak. The horse who fears small things and the donkey who fears nothing at all. It works. It was always going to.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There is a new field in this universe, and standing in it, at last at ease, is an old soldier. His name is Hector.

He is a Cavalry Black, a big Irish-bred gelding the better part of seventeen hands, and for seventeen years he served with the Household Cavalry in London, on State and Ceremonial duty, which is a polite phrase for the hardest thing you can ask of a horse.

Understand what that means. A horse is a flight animal. Every instinct in it, refined across millions of years of being prey, says one word in the face of sudden noise and pressing crowds: run. Hector was trained, over years, to do the opposite. To stand. To carry a rider in a steel breastplate down the Mall through a wall of sound, past the bands and the cheering and the saluting guns of the King's Troop, and not move a muscle. To hold himself still on a state occasion while every nerve in his body screamed at him to bolt, and to do it again, and again, faultlessly, because the man on his back and the crowd at his shoulder were trusting half a tonne of flight animal to master its own nature on command.

He walked behind a gun carriage at a state funeral once, at the slow march, the drum beating the step, a nation watching through its tears, and he never put a hoof wrong.

He is retired now. The shoes are off. The clipped parade coat has been let go woolly and unmilitary, the first sign the people who tend old service horses look for that one is finally letting down. He shares a green field with a small unbothered donkey called Nelson, because a horse should never be alone, and the black charger who stood behind kings and the donkey who has never had a worry in his life are now inseparable. When his old groom visits, Hector lifts his head and nickers across the field before the man has said a word.

And here is the part that undoes everyone who knows what they are seeing. One afternoon they found Hector lying flat out on his side in the grass, dead still, and a heart stopped, the way every horseman's does at that sight, because a horse down and flat looks like the worst news there is. Then an ear flicked at a fly, and the breath went out of them in relief. He was simply, deeply asleep. A horse only sleeps like that when it feels entirely safe, because flat on the ground is the one place a prey animal cannot flee from, and most never dare it. For seventeen years Hector stood, awake to every danger, holding everyone else's nerve so they could rely on him. Now, in a quiet field, he has decided it is finally safe to lie down and close his eyes.

He gave his courage to the rest of us for seventeen years. He has earned the grass. He is taking it lying down, in the sun, with the donkey keeping watch.

[Helen @Scribberlings]

Dog whistling

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Gut wrenching to see four young people jailed for direct action against an arms supplier to Israel.

Years in prison for protesting to save lives in Gaza, with 'terrorism' used despite no jury convicting them of it.

A truly dangerous attack on the right to protest.

[Michael Foran @michaelpforan]

My next book, 'Sex, Gender Identity and the Law' will be published on April 30th with Cambridge University Press.

It will shortly be available to pre-order here: https://t.co/eDXScwy7IQ

[1976 Live @50YearsAgoLive]

Dame Sybil Thorndike, who has been perhaps Britain’s most famous stage actress of the 20th century, dies at her home in Chelsea, London. She was 93.

[Daniel ShenSmith (BlackBeltBarrister) @dshensmith]

Well done 👏👏👏

[Shambo of Luxembourg @BradfemlyWalsh]

Why has the BBC got incels writing its headlines? This huge man, already a known stalker, grabbed this young woman by the hair, tried to sit on her, said gross things and tried to force her to kiss him, for 15 minutes until stopped. He absolutely does deserve this sentence.

[Claire Coutinho @ClaireCoutinho]

🚨NEW: South Wales Police has just SCRAPPED their Islamic blasphemy law.

No religion should be protected from criticism in this country.

Now it's on the Government to repeal their Islamophobia definition and stop this happening again.

[Khan Krum Gaming @KhanKrumGaming]

lol a Muslim is talking about needing heads after a beheading...

Um. You are too stupid to be speaking in public, Zara.

[Adam Moczar @AdamMoczar]

⚡🇬🇧🇺🇸 JD Vance: “Defending your culture isn’t radical. It’s reasonable.”

“To everybody in the UK who rejects that idea, I’d encourage them to just keep on going

It’s okay to want to defend your culture. It’s okay to want to live in a safe neighborhood. It isn’t radical.”

[Granny Moon @GrannyMooninVA]

TODAY’S AFFIRMATION ✨✨✨
Read it or keep scrolling — either way, it’s here for you.

[Helen @Scribberlings]

I'm not always correct about things - no, honestly, i'm not humble signalling, it's true! - but I was correct about statins. Many moons again, my doc said you need to go on statins, I was like:

* puzzle face * why would I take a pill for something that's not making me ill?

The awful stories ive read about what statins have done to people since then....

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

"Safe and effective."

A statin works by blocking a single enzyme, HMG-CoA reductase, the tap at the very top of what biochemists call the mevalonate pathway.

The trouble is what else runs off that pathway. Turn the tap down and you turn all of this down with it:

- Cholesterol, the stuff of every cell membrane, every steroid hormone, and the raw material for vitamin D
- CoQ10, the spark plug your mitochondria use to make energy, packed most densely into the heart and the muscles
- Dolichols, which your cells need to build and tag their proteins correctly
- Heme A, a working part of the machinery that lets your cells use oxygen at all
- The prenylated proteins that run cell signalling, internal traffic, and repair

Choking that one enzyme is less a precision strike on a rogue molecule than a hand laid on the master valve, with everything downstream getting less.

They took the one product on that list they'd been taught to fear, built a drug to throttle the whole pathway that makes it, and printed "safe and effective" on the box.

The cholesterol goes down. So does everything it was sharing the pipe with.

Nobody put that on the leaflet.

[Cambridge Circus Research @cambridgecircre]

It comes as no surprise that these organisations have many common funders. As per usual, “civil society organisations” have been used to push a political programme — in this case, an incredibly harmful anti-racism agenda, which directly led to the death of a young white man.

[Helen @Scribberlings]

Oh I remember seeing her work years ago! Left a real impression. Never forgot it. Was thinking just the other day about the women once putting petals in their bras to smell sweet. Bit random, I know, but the film was touching in so many ways. Never looked up the creator behind it, but now I know. RiP Marjane Satrapi x

[StudiocanalUK @StudiocanalUK]

Remembering the brilliant Marjane Satrapi, the extraordinary artist and filmmaker behind Persepolis.

Through this deeply personal and powerful film, she gave audiences a story of identity, freedom, exile and resistance that continues to resonate across the world.

[Slarty Bartfast @Poppy_yyyyyyyy]

Well, summer was nice I guess.