Thread 15 - TalkLair: “I Can't Lie To You About Your Chances, But... You Have My Sympathies.”

[Kucinghitam]

(Previous thread 14).

Autumn seems to have gone straight into winter. It's cold, wet and windy. In the TalkLair, the hearth is glowing, the walls covered in dubious artwork, books by non-approved authors line the shelves, rugs are down on the floors (and assorted pets curled up on them). The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch though, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics.

We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

My (very small) freezer is full of hops. I don't like Sainsburys. Too orange.

Today’s were from quite a big jar but as a main meal half a jar works and I’ll have the rest tomorrow or the next day. I do have some small jars too though. I think the ones in jars are just much tastier than tinned pulses. I like pretty much all beans, I think.

I tend to turn half a big jar of chickpeas into hummus every few days and I can’t remember the last time any went to waste.

It’s entirely possible I’m just very greedy!

I use a lot of chickpeas, and I do try to use other beans and pulses too.

Is it just me, or is almost every early reply on this thread by madly uptight people with bizarre made-up rules?

www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5187617-partners-occasional-criticismculture-differences?

dunno, I think I must be an arbitrary made-up rules person because in my head she was rude to point and wrong to take the book round the shop in order to read from it, but also that he was wrong to scold her.

But I know that societies vary a lot regarding tolerance of pointing with a finger, and my bookshop etiquette was formed a very very long time ago, before bookshops had chairs and encouraged customers to sit down and read.

Incidentally, do they still do that or was it a brief 1990s blip?

From that thread:

I was taught that books are inspected near their original shelves, as are clothes. You can take items with you to try them on, but I wouldn’t go around showing a skirt to someone in the next aisle - I would call them to where the skirt was for them to see, if that makes sense.

But what if the person you're with is also holding an item they like? Do they put it back on the rail to traipse over to see your skirt? And what if you then want to look at the trouser section? Do you put the skirt back? How do you take anything to the till?

Those seem like odd rules to me. Surely as long as you put things back where you found them, that's enough?

Obviously you're right,@Vegemiteandhoneyontoast and @Kucinghitam but some of us are old people and set in archaic ways that make no objective sense. Mumsnet is constantly throwing up occasions for people to pile on and scold other posters.

That's exactly what I was wondering! And how would you go about finding a matching top, etc? In fact, how would you collect a range of items to go to the fitting room? Do you just take one at a time?

I don't think there's anything wrong with the responses at all, I think they're quite reasonable. But it's all such minor stuff! I agree with Dean, but these 'rules' I think of more as 'best practice', it's not the end of the world if you don't comply.

Actually, I was going to say something this morning about the impact of other threads. Do you guys sometimes feel, as I do, the sheer blunt force of some threads really hit hard, leaving the reader almost dazed. I'm not expressing myself very well, but yesterday was such a day. It started, of course, with the Sara Sharif. How do you even begin to parse such brutality? What can you say about people who do that? Then the Maine girl attacked by a trans student, whilst the Principal stood idly by and watched. And tried to stop the bus-driver from helping her. WTAF, Principal? And the day was topped off with the NHS and their appalling treatment of the nurse in Fife. And, of course, other threads are available.😛It seems we're going backwards, towards a bleak future, and the government (and governments in general, world-wide), are nowhere near getting to grips with it. In fact they are not even trying.

I've just looked up the Maine attack. WTF are those two people doing just standing there and watching. Why did the principal try to stop the bus driver from intervening?

That video took me back to when I was 16 and similarly attacked, but by an actual female who was much larger and heavier than I was and mentally unwell. I was walking past her in a corridor and she suddenly grabbed me, threw me onto the floor and straddled me. She pinned me down and started ripping out huge clumps of my hair. The next thing I knew a man was dragging her off me and I was taken into a side room where someone locked the door while she was outside shouting. My scalp was raw and bleeding and I had bald patches. I had to wear a neck brace for a few days. To have had your head repeatedly smashed against concrete and your eye gnawed on top of that, JFC. That poor girl.

Bloody hell, Vic, that's awful. Good job that someone stepped up.How fucked up are schools there, that this could happen? It beggars belief.

Actually, I was also going to say, having read the whole thread on poor Sara

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5187432-jesus-christ-will-this-never-end?page=4

the testimonies on that that thread by Mumsnetters who had been treated so appallingly by the Family Courts showed just how easily this can happen, with children being handed over their abusers. And the is a MNHQ thread about family courts, which looks like an urgent area for reform. The country faces so many problems, that even the best governments won't fix. But all these failing can be fixed. And it wouldn't cost a fortune either, it's just policy.

And breathe...

God @VictorianBigot that sounds utterly horrific! Thank goodness there were adults there to help.

@duc748 I struggle a lot with the harder threads on here. So many small (and sometimes huge) personal tragedies and struggles. Same with the news too. Often, I just avoid, because I know there's nothing I can do but despair.

I seldom read past the first page of a lot of threads (so often, all that can usefully be said in a terrible situation has been nailed by the first few posters), just yesterday happened to read a few, including the Sara Sharif and the family courts one. Same as you with the news, Kuc.

I can't read the Sara Sharif stories, I'm like that with quite a few, where there is too much horrible detail. I look at the headlines and then skip them. I'd hate to be on a jury for a similar case.

The Maine story is reported in The Maine Wire, which is a right-wing paper (think Daily Mail or similar). The main newspaper here, the Portland Press Herald, hasn't reported it that I can find on the app, but there isn't a search button on that. I will check that on my desktop later, on the actual website. PPH, and our governor, are fairly sold on the whole trans thing though.

I hadn't seen the Sara Sharif story and when I followed the link I couldn't bear to read all the way through. How could anybody do something like that to a child?

I've just read the Maine school story and listened to the father of the girl being interviewed on the radio. The school Principal is sneaky, gutless sack of piss.

Bloody hell, @VictorianBigot that sounds terrifying, thank goodness the girl was pulled off. What a horrible thing to happen. I had a similar run in but was rescued by a teacher in the nick of time, just as the girl was raising her fist for the first punch. She was much bigger than me and quite a scrapper. A couple of weeks previously the same girl had got hold of a smaller girl and done the same to her as happened to you, though I don't know how badly injured she was.

The brutality in the news at the moment is horrific. What is happening to our society?

I know; it's all horrible.

It seems murder rose sharply in the 1960s, and then fell back

https://www.murdermap.co.uk/statistics/homicide-england-wales-statistics-historical/

I know that is just looking at murder, and the stats for child cruelty may be different.

But we do see so many stories about violence in the media - I am sure there are more stories published than there were in the past, with photos showing dead bodies that wouldn't have been shown before, and with more of the gruesome details about violence.

This has gone hand in hand with the increasing number of police dramas on TV, often featuring the deaths of pretty young women that we've had recently rather than the more varied dramas there were in the past (IIRC).

I don't want to pretend there are no troubles in the world but still, there is a limit. MrPSB still reads the Guardian (I know...) and even he complains about the depressing pictures they feature in their round of of photos of the world, every day. The Times has some photos of Bad Things in their equivalent, but they are usually interesting and/or beautiful.

Oh, and the girl who made my life a misery at Junior School in the late 1960s, including getting on top of me to hit me, as described upthread - my mum heard much later that her grandfather interfered with her.

Makes you wonder how many bullies have had stuff happen earlier in life. One of my bully's henchmen was a nasty boy who I'd known since we began infant school and I'd always avoided him. After I was rescued from that girl, she got the cane and he came up to me in the corridor the next day, held his fist to my face and screamed 'Your face is fucking splattered!'. It later turned out that he'd been horribly neglected by his parents and passed over in favour of his younger brother, who was deaf. This was despite the boy having learned sign language and doing everything he could to help his brother. Once I knew that I felt really sorry for him

Oof, so many awful stories.