Well yeah obvs. I meant in the present and future. I was still a kid when we won last, and I’m old af now.

This is genuinely the closest we will ever get to a Eurovision win, ever.

Thank you for writing this out.

Nah I’m not a fan of advocating for rape as punishment. It’s pretty, erm, rapey.

My favourite place close to me is Hilbre Island, just off the coast of Wirral (Merseyside). When the tides are low you can walk out there, at high tide it’s cut off. It’s so close to Liverpool, and yet a world away. When I start walking from the beach towards it I feel like I’m leaving the world behind me and walking out into the wild. On a sunny day it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s a nature reserve and an SSSI, with loads of wild birds, butterflies etc, and there are small caves to explore at the beach level. It’s one of my favourite places in the world.

It’s a drinking city. People go out for a family meal, get pissed up, things get raucous, fights happen. It’s not everyone, but if you work in bars it’s one of the nights you dread, especially in the rougher places where the fights kick off. I worked in one of the roughest city centre bars many years back and the fights between women were way worse than the ones between men. Absolutely vicious… And I say that as a woman btw.

In Liverpool, which prides itself on its Liverpool roots, Paddy’s Day is one of the days to avoid town and most of the pubs for me. Absolute carnage. The other ones to avoid are Grand National weekend, particularly Ladies Day, and Mother’s Day.

Oh wow, TIL. Yeah I am not a fan of them. Urgh.

Sexist, much?

Oh no, someone who writes about gardening!! In a magazine for the elderly!!Look, it was just the first article I could find while I was in the middle of baking, that wasn’t an American health and wellbeing website. I’m not American so I don’t know those websites and I don’t know what they all are. I just wanted to help the person I was replying to. The article links to the charity that has done loads of research into it. Yes I could have found a better link and fucking hell I wish I hadn’t bothered even commenting now.

Yeah that’s my phone autocorrecting. I’m not sure why anyone would think I meant ‘restrain’, but oh well. I’ll edit, thanks for pointing it out.

I only realised I’d lost my smell completely when I smelled some perfume and thought it must be off, because it smelled of nothing. Then I realised that my other perfumes were ‘off’, and then went around my home smelling random things and finally realised it was me. I think it was the effect on my taste that was the hardest thing though. Onions and garlic especially made everything taste horrible.

Thank you. I should have realised that it needed more of an explanation. Shame that people don’t engage their brains before a trigger finger downvote in a science thread though.

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Apologies if you’ve already tried this or something similar, it doesn’t work for everyone, but I got mine back by using essential oils to retrain [edited as my phone autocorrected to ‘restrain’] my olfactory system. After over a year of my food tasting like trash, or like it was off, and a dangerous incident (with a trip to A&E) where my brain fog meant I left an unlit gas oven on all night and couldn’t smell it until I’d already got carbon monoxide poisoning (thankfully mild and temporary), I regained my smell and taste in about a week. Here’s an article about it, it links to a charity that works in the field of loss of smell : https://www.saga.co.uk/magazine/health-wellbeing/treatments/smell-training-for-anosmia

Edit: if the down votes are because people think this is alternative medicine or woo, it isn’t, it’s a technique used in conventional medicine clinics. Try reading before you down vote.

She was a vulnerable teenager who was groomed and trafficked into a religious cult. A white girl would not have been treated like this by the law, the press and the public.

The three things that stop me moving to another country are money (or ability to get a job for the money I need), family (I have an elderly mum who I need to be around for) and residency issues (thanks Brexit). I guess if I was super rich I would be able to get residency more easily, but in the absence of a teletransporter it wouldn’t fix the family issue.

How do you figure that?

I think every airport I’ve been to in Spain is connected to the rail network. Connection to rail and bus is pretty standard, in Western Europe at least.

My mum’s told me about putting newspaper on the seat of the outdoor toilet in the middle of winter if you absolutely had to go in the night, to make it bearable (1950s northern England). The warmth of someone else’s arsecheeks is much more preferable to that, thanks.