I had an itchy scalp and would try various menthol shampoos and treatments throughout my teens. It was a nightmare. Then I read an article on just washing your hair with warm water every day. I shower daily anyway, and I’m a pretty hygienic guy, but this felt wrong and somehow uncleanly, but I gave it a shot.
Anyway, to this day, some 30 years later, I have a full head of clean hair. It’s something my former partners and my wife have complimented me on.
While, to be honest, I don’t really agree with you, I think there’s definitely a biological element around fertility and maturity that’s worth discussing.
However, it’s difficult to discuss this stuff in generalities. Plus, there’s a tendency to overcorrect when discussing age gaps as a natural reaction to the countless scandals regarding old, powerful men exploiting young, vulnerable people.
It feels like there’s an instinctive reaction, especially online, to any perceived imbalance in age, and that generally the senior figure is viewed with suspicion.
I find it slightly hypocritical that some of those who fall over themselves to rightly defend the freedom of consenting adults to identify how they like, and encourage people to embrace all facets of their sexuality, baulk at any significant age discrepancies between heterosexual couples like puritans clutching pearls.
My favourite right-wing trope is that the US can’t have socialised healthcare because they spend so much on defending Europeans so that they can.
How odd. Its almost as if the insanely wealthy are getting richer at the expense of everyone else. Not to worry, they earned and deserve it through knuckling down. It’ll trickle down anyway. It’s not their fault. If anything it’s the brown people risking their lives on unseaworthy craft that are to blame for everything being so expensive.
When I was in Malaysia years ago the street cafes would sell you a sort of cold gulash/curry. It was a shock at first, but quite delicious. However, back home in Scotland I am not eating cold curry.
Sure—folks sometimes share their lived experience, and sometimes they’re insensitive. I tried not to be and had shared a genuine opinion, based on my own life.
But remember, I also had no desire or interest in having children until I did. I’ve been on that side of the fence, and therefore felt comfortable sharing my experience of the other.
To some folks, it certainly stings when they face clumsy (but likely not malicious) questions about having a family.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s a foolish question to ask, as you never know someone’s circumstances. But if it’s a decision you’ve got agency over, then is being asked about your choice really such a big deal?
After all, everyone is just trying to figure out their own lives, and being curious about other people’s choices is only natural. How we interpret and perceive the question is key.
Personally, I’ve always been interested in people, how we form opinions, and if someone shares a viewpoint I once held that my lived experience changed, I don’t really see the harm in mentioning my own perspective.
On the flip side, I make an effort not to get irritated by people who by definition do not have that lived experience and make sweeping, negative generalizations about having kids.
In a funny way, it reminds me of the folk who go out of their way to comment on the EV I drive and tell me why they would never, ever get one, despite having never driven one. I have experienced both, and feel I can comment honestly on the pros and cons. If the person opining how bad they are doesn’t like my answers or finds them condescending, that’s a shame, but it’s not intentional.
I think you’re absolutely right, but I think the point still stands that it depends broadly on what stage you’re at in life. I can certainly envisage a time when I’m older (touch wood), where I’d want a different type of vacation from either of the ones I mentioned.
It’s funny how it changes at different times in your life. We have an all-inclusive holiday with my wife, sprogs and extended family booked in Lanzarote this October.
Exactly the kind of thing I’d have thought of as a living hell when I was a young man, backpacking solo through SE Asia.
But honestly I’m looking forward to it having done my first package holiday a few years back. Decent and varied food, booze and sun by the beach with plenty of activities for the Little People, leaving me to read by the pool. Bliss.
Mate, calm down. It was absolutely not my intention to condesend - quite the opposite. However, your reaction has shown me your true character and, like you, I am now absolutely convinced that fatherhood is not for you.
Child-free for 35 years, then had 2 within 2 years. Entirely a personal decision and nobody should dictate to anyone else how they live their lives.
Needless to say my entire perspective has shifted. Its given me a purpose and an outlook I never dreamed I could have. Your mileage may vary.
So, I lit the fire…
I’m reminded of the first time I saw Citizen Kane. I was a teen back in the 90s, and I thought it was pretty bad. But that’s because a lot of the cinematography that it pioneered became commonplace in everything from adverts to training videos. It was groundbreaking to such an extent that it redefined the fundamental techniques of filmmaking.
That said, Twin Peaks has always fascinated me. The weird, unsettling, menacing, cryptic, and darkly sexual undercurrents that typify most things Lynch touches just struck an instant chord with me.
I think you’re taking a single, disputed incident and presenting it as if it’s how the UK normally works.
I agree this video is a disgrace, but the issue wasn’t simply “an old lady was arrested for saying she opposed genocide.” The circumstances are more complicated than that, and there are ongoing legal and factual disputes about why the police intervened. Reducing it to “you get arrested in Britain for criticising Israel” isn’t an accurate description of UK law.
People in the UK publicly criticise Israel, the UK government, and the police every single day. There have been countless pro-Palestinian demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people. If merely saying “I oppose what Israel is doing” were grounds for arrest, our prisons would be overflowing.
The same applies to facial recognition. There are legitimate debates about police use of the technology, but saying “you can’t refuse it” or implying people are routinely detained because the computer thinks they look like someone else leaves out a lot of important legal safeguards and oversight.
The US and the UK both have genuine issues around policing and civil liberties, but it’s not helpful to compare the worst anecdote from one country with the worst anecdote from the other and then claim one is fundamentally free while the other isn’t. Reality is more nuanced than that.
My own 48 years of lived experience in the UK is not remotely like that. Honestly, the hate train for the UK makes me wonder if my own pre-conceptions about life in the US, formed through the British media and platforms like this, is as way off the mark as you guys genuinely are in regard to what it’s actually like living here.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that most of our governments from Thatcher onwards have been various of flavours of dreadful, but from my perspective the US political landscape is the rock bottom-end to a path we’re essentially locked into as the billionaire backed psueodo-facist parties gain increasing foothold.
I don’t know why they didn’t just take a timeless classic Ferrari shell, stick a powerful as fuck EV ‘engine’ in it, maybe tweak the exterior very slightly, and go to town on the interior. Win.
I dont think i’d survive the American hustle life, where everything is a potential sale and money is all your ever taught to create.
The value of a single goal in football is immense. You just need to recalibrate and appreciate the skill and teamwork. Each goal is the cumulative result of an intense battle involving skill, teamwork, and athleticism. Conversely, some of the most boring football games are when the teams aren’t evenly matched and one team dominates, scoring several goals.
Of course that’s what I meant.
That doesn’t address the argument being made.
It’s entirely reasonable to worry about privacy, data collection, and government overreach. Any age-verification system creates new infrastructure for proving identity or age online, and people are right to scrutinise that. But it also doesn’t follow that every attempt at age restriction is therefore equivalent to mass surveillance or should be dismissed out of hand.
Likewise, pointing out that children will find ways around restrictions isn’t, by itself, an argument against having restrictions. Kids have always circumvented rules. The relevant question is whether a measure meaningfully reduces access or harm, not whether it is perfectly enforceable.
I also don’t think it’s accurate to frame support for these measures as inherently “dangerously stupid”. Many supporters are responding to concerns about addictive platform design, bullying, self-harm content, algorithmic recommendation systems, and the amount of time children spend on these services. You can disagree with their proposed solution without assuming bad motives or indifference to civil liberties.
Where I think the debate should focus is on effectiveness and proportionality. If age-verification systems are ineffective, easily bypassed, or require unacceptable levels of data collection, then that’s a strong argument against them.
But that’s different from arguing that any attempt to restrict children’s access is necessarily an attack on privacy or freedom.
And if we agree that major platforms have not done a particularly good job of protecting children, then “people will just use something else” doesn’t fully answer the policy question. It simply shifts the discussion to what, if anything, should be done instead.
During the World Cup, I got frustrated with switching between BBC iPlayer and ITV’s app. I usually use IPTV, and it’s great, but for some of the matches, it was kinda flaky.
Anyway, we used to have Sky years ago, and I ditched that for various subscriptions and IPTV, but never bothered getting Freeview as we had a shoddy old aerial and poor signal.
However, after speaking to a guy at work, I picked up a new USB-powered aerial on Amazon for £29 and gave Freeview a try. I ended up watching all the games in HD, with no buffering and without the 30-second delay all the streaming services had. I was delighted!