GreyShuck

You can abuse your body a hell of a lot up to that age without too many issues. Those issues will start hitting home within the next decade or so though. Make a change for the better while you can.

I only accepted the invite from one friend, but did so a couple of times. They were a large and competitive family (I had been warned) who seemed to view family gatherings as part inquisition and part contact sport.

After the first time, I thought that it wouldn’t be as bad now that I had met them, but then discovered that they had been holding back out of politeness the first time. I realised the error of my ways after that and could see why my friend was in two minds about going at all.

Yes, a few times.

Why? Because I could. Various friends were spending time with their families. I was invited, but politely declined, having made the mistake of accepting in previous years.

It was glorious: pizza, pot noodles, mince pies, cheesecake and whatever I wanted to binge watch, read or listen to for about 4 days solid.

Sock, sock shoe, shoe.

Usually because I put my socks on in the bedroom, but my shoes are by the back door: i don’t put them on unless I am going outside.

I post between 3 and 5 a day. Is that ‘many’?

I am the mod of the sub that I post in. I didn’t expect to be the mod: the original mod has dropped off the radar, leaving me there. Since the I am only mod, I kinda think that I shouldn’t just leave it to die - and I like to keep up with the news in that field anyway, so…

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

– Blaise Pascal

Do you have any examples that would support that? I can’t say that I have seen any tendency myself. If anything, dark comedy tends to come from marginalised groups, I’d say.

UK - local authorities are busy un-declaring climate emergency, nationally they are blaming the wildfires on re-wilding done by lefties and anyway, they say, it is no worse than the summer of '76.

Brought up in the UK being expected to go to Sunday school etc - but Christianity seemed utter nonsense to me, and I was at a loss to understand why so many adults appeared to take it seriously.

Early 20s (still pre-internet)- I met someone who was involved with an evangelical church and I determined to give Christianity another proper ‘go’ and try to understand what people were finding in it. That eventually resulted in me crying in a heap in the corner of my room as I first felt that I could not even find ‘the door’ let alone open it and let Jesus in (as that church was keen on expressing it) and then realising that it had once and for all confirmed that there was no ‘door’ at all.

Shortly after that, I met a group of pagans and started reading some books about neopaganism, wicca and druidry. There was a lot of dross, of course (as there is in Christianity) but the underlaying ideas clicked immediately. I have been though several phases of how I express that and it is pretty low-key these days - but I have considered myself a pagan ever since. I changed career a couple of years after that and became a wildlife ranger for the next 20+ years and was a visiting pagan chaplain for some local prisons for several years as well.

Non-existant. However, my older brother did have Fanny Hill, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Portnoy’s Complaint & The Doors of Perception on his shelf - and we also had encyclopedias.

I hate to be that guy, but it should be Physiological needs at the bottom, not psychological.

‘Economical retribution’?

In the excitement of national pride

Read that as excrement at first. Then realised that it’s probably quite fitting.

Sweater, n. Garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.

― Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary