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    The "won't visit on a whim" was the key consideration among my crowd.

    I later learned that "but will visit when you are in the infirmary with mononucleosis" was a nice thing to have.

    Comment


      Originally posted by Toby Gymshorts View Post
      What I don't understand are people who wear long trousers (or worse, jeans) to sit around the house.

      I can't think of anything less comfortable.
      Try your heating bill this winter.

      Comment


        To add my own angle, I do very much enjoy taking the dogs out in winter without anything on my feet. People engage in a lot less conversation once they spot you shifting feet a little.

        Comment


          Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post

          I never said I was fashionable or in any way socially adroit. But I preferred crap pills at Slam on Friday to the fucking Garage on Thursday unlike most of the yahoos and stray hooray Henrys/Frasers in my halls in first year.
          For some reason, this has triggered a memory which has just caused me to have a little rethink.

          So, when I was at university I went to all sorts of different club nights depending on who I was going with. I went to the indie and rock nights with one of my friends who fancied herself as a little bit of a Goth and wore black corsets. I went to all the 70s/80s/90s retro nights with the lacrosse girls who liked wearing fancy dress. I went to dance to techno and trance in Fabric in London with my pre-university friends. I went to hip hop nights and R&B nights, I'd basically go out four to six nights a week, to anything, with anyone who was willing, so I could dance as much as possible (obviously this was during hypomania and there were also depressive periods where I didn't leave my college room for weeks on end).

          But what I absolutely loved more than anything at that time, was going to drum and bass nights. I had a couple of friends who would happily come with me, but none of them could keep up in terms of my ridiculously energetic dancing. There was one particular night we used to go to, I think in the cellar bar in Clare college, where I would occasionally bump into the same guy who liked dancing at the same pace as me. I don't even know what his name was, but whenever we bumped into each other at one of these nights we would squeal in delight and take over the dance floor throwing shapes together for hours. There'd often be a crowd of exhausted people cheering us on at the sidelines. I'm not the world's best dancer, but I trained in ballet, tap, jazz, modern and ballroom dance for 15 years, and where I really excel is in dancing to freestyle drum and bass with wild abandon.

          What was interesting was that as far as I can tell, neither me or the other guy had any interest in flirting or getting to know each other. We never talked, we never bothered to go and get drinks together, never exchanged contact details and never saw each other elsewhere, only at drum and bass nights. We just recognised kindred spirits who wanted a partner to dance with and fed off each other's energy and enthusiasm.

          Thinking back now, I've just wondered whether he also had something like bipolar and that is what we recognised in each other. I'm pretty sure that he was as sober as I was during these dance marathons (I used to drink a bit of alcohol but rarely got fully inebriated at that age, and certainly wasn't on any of the other club drugs that neurotypical people tend to need if they want to dance all night). I had a lot of friends who took a lot of drugs so I could recognise if people were coked up or had taken ecstasy or whatever, and he never seemed to have done anything more extreme than a couple of beers.

          I kind of wish I could sit down in a café with him now and find out what he's been doing since university, what his life has been like since then and whether my suspicions are correct. But as I don't even know his name, this is likely to be impossible.

          These days, I don't get to go clubbing at all sadly. And even if my kids grow up and I get the chance to, I've learned that it's not necessarily possible or desirable for me to dance through the night during hypomania because it will lead to a crash. Instead, I go to zumba classes sometimes, and for a while I went to "clubbercise" classes at the gym which were huge fun (structured dancing to club tunes in the dark during the day with glow sticks with other mums who grew up in the 90s/00s and mourn the fact that they can't go clubbing any more) but they stopped during Covid and haven't come back. Also, at weekends when I need to clean, I put the radio on at full volume and dance around the kitchen singing while putting the dishwasher on and cleaning the surfaces. I find it very therapeutic. My family are used to it and just leave me to it.

          Comment


            And on the sartorial questions, I have basically three categories of clothing which vary by season:

            1) home wear, to be worn only in the house or garden, or for taking the bins out, no further, or for days when I know for certain that I don't have to be on a video call.
            - summer, likely be just knickers and a t-shirt as that's what I sleep in when it's warm. Will shove pyjama bottoms on to take the bins out.
            - winter. Pyjamas extending to pyjamas plus woolly slippers plus huge fluffy hoody that goes over everything when I get cold. I absolutely hate being cold.

            2) casual outdoor wear, for everything from the school run to internal work video calls on WFH days and standard weekends.
            - summer, denim shorts and t-shirts or casual summer dresses, plus sandals - winter, jeans, t-shirts and jumpers, plus adding more and more layers as it gets colder until we get to the point where I'm wearing thermal underwear underneath my clothes and a warm coat, scarf, hat and gloves on top, sometimes even inside the house (it's not that we don't heat the house, but it can be at a level where everyone else is happily wandering around in short sleeve t-shirts and I might still want to be fully togged up)

            If I've done the school run and I'm already dressed, I won't ever bother to go back to casual wear until bedtime. This is very different from my husband. The first thing he does when he comes home is take off any uncomfortable clothes. If he's been in a business suit, he'll strip entirely, have a shower and put his casual clothes on. If he's been in casual clothing, he'll still take his jeans off as soon as he steps through the door and switch to shorts or jogging bottoms, or sometimes just his pants.

            3) smart clothes, for external video calls, physically going to the office and events like weddings or funerals
            - generally smart work dresses plus jackets
            In summer they're worn with my sandals. In winter they're worn with tights and my comfortable knee-high boots.

            The only other category is yoga / gym kit. I have a couple of actual designated pieces of gymwear and then a pile of black leggings which I wear with any old t-shirts. If I've gone to yoga or the gym I might well not bother to change out of this until bedtime unless there's a reason I need to (like an external work call).


            Comment


              I'm wearing 'jogging bottoms' and hoody top right now.

              Anyway, isn't England's mess, the UKs mess? Has this already been pointed out, or discussed?

              I mean, personally, I'm seeing the same all over the UK.

              Having said that, I've been using trains a lot the past 6/7 months and they have all been on time, if on occasion, overcrowded.

              Comment


                Yeah without proper revenue raising and borrowing powers (which Labour in their useless wisdom have Staunchly been against for Scotland), none of the devolved statelets are exempt from the needless austerity of the past decade.

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                  Balderdasha - you might want to keep an eye out for Big Fish Little Fish events. Basically a crowd of party people who are now self proclaimed 2-4 hour party people. They get big DJs to play kid centric dance music events.

                  Comment


                    Originally posted by anton pulisov View Post
                    Shinty looks like what happens when a kid at a Dutch school who spent every minute of every summer in Cork is asked to play field hockey during PE class.

                    The teacher took the hockey stick off me after five minutes and shouted at me that I was a danger to everyone.

                    Stupid sport. I'm not even allowed to be left-handed in it, ffs.
                    Hahhahaha.

                    If you'll forgive me for going on a tangent, about British infrastructure. I remember being struck on my first visit to belfast in 1997, just how different it was to dublin, in that there was evidence of continuous building. There was building going on all the time, and given what happened to belfast during the blitz, there was plenty of room to throw up buildings from the 40's, 50s, 60's, 70's 80's and a few from the 90's. This is in stark contrast with Dublin where everthing dated from late 18th century, or the second half of the nineteenth century, up until world war I. And then very little up until the start of the celtic tiger. That made it feel like a very different city.

                    This by and large was also true of the various towns I went to in northern ireland. Something else that really stood out was the quality of the surface of the local roads, and how neatly they were maintained. It seemed in the late 90's that northern ireland showed all the signs of a well maintained infrastructure that you generally got from the Uk. Jump forward to the last time I was up there (2016) and I couldn't help noticing that very little had changed. There wasn't a lot of new stuff. The roads were still the same, and now, I couldn't help but notice, that the motorway goes as far as the border, and the dual carraigeway past newry might have passed muster in 1997, but in 2016...,,,,,, any time I've spent in the UK since then reinforces this impression of "Was miles ahead, but hasn't done anything in 25 years, though in reality it might be longer"

                    Comment


                      Originally posted by caja-dglh View Post
                      Balderdasha - you might want to keep an eye out for Big Fish Little Fish events. Basically a crowd of party people who are now self proclaimed 2-4 hour party people. They get big DJs to play kid centric dance music events.
                      Yeah I know of them. Unfortunately way too much sensory overload for my son to handle. He'd go absolutely off the wall. I've taken him to children's discos occasionally and he absolutely loves them until he goes completely feral.

                      Comment


                        Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
                        Yeah without proper revenue raising and borrowing powers (which Labour in their useless wisdom have Staunchly been against for Scotland), none of the devolved statelets are exempt from the needless austerity of the past decade.
                        I honestly don't think that would benefit scotland in its push for independence. Having revenue raising and borrowing powers is a useful tool for an independent country, when used in conjunction with the various other powers that comes from being an independent country. Using these two powers to try and limit the negative impacts of being shackled to london would just lead to bad practices, and take you to bad places. It would effectively be a trap.

                        The only way to avoid 'austerity' would be to have an economy that is growing considerably faster than the 0-1% the UK grows at.

                        Comment


                          Originally posted by NickSTFU View Post
                          I'm wearing 'jogging bottoms' and hoody top right now.

                          Anyway, isn't England's mess, the UKs mess? Has this already been pointed out, or discussed?

                          I mean, personally, I'm seeing the same all over the UK.

                          Having said that, I've been using trains a lot the past 6/7 months and they have all been on time, if on occasion, overcrowded.
                          That does surprise me given the regular rail strikes of late.

                          Comment


                            Originally posted by NickSTFU View Post
                            I'm wearing 'jogging bottoms' and hoody top right now.

                            Anyway, isn't England's mess, the UKs mess? Has this already been pointed out, or discussed?

                            I mean, personally, I'm seeing the same all over the UK.

                            Having said that, I've been using trains a lot the past 6/7 months and they have all been on time, if on occasion, overcrowded.
                            I referred to England because we didn’t get beyond England this time around.

                            Comment


                              Originally posted by Fussbudget View Post

                              On the other hand we have loads of Norwegian students locally and they're all mega stylish. Not 'timeless French/Italian chic' stylish, more like very cool hackers and architects. Unnervingly confident and well-adjusted as well
                              That's interesting - we used to get lots of Norwegian students (some I'm still in touch with, eg 2 are in the department fantasy league) but the flow stopped, I always assumed cos the ferries and many direct flights to Ncl stopped. Any ideas why they still do Teesside?

                              Comment


                                Originally posted by Uncle Ethan View Post

                                I referred to England because we didn’t get beyond England this time around.
                                Yes, I get that.

                                Also, there's lots of hidden problems, such as lack of funding for NEETS, and young people's wellbeing.

                                Comment


                                  Originally posted by Felicity, I guess so View Post

                                  That's interesting - we used to get lots of Norwegian students (some I'm still in touch with, eg 2 are in the department fantasy league) but the flow stopped, I always assumed cos the ferries and many direct flights to Ncl stopped. Any ideas why they still do Teesside?
                                  Yes it's because the university has a partnership programme with Noroff college so their students on some courses can transfer straight into third year

                                  Comment


                                    Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post

                                    I honestly don't think that would benefit scotland in its push for independence. Having revenue raising and borrowing powers is a useful tool for an independent country, when used in conjunction with the various other powers that comes from being an independent country. Using these two powers to try and limit the negative impacts of being shackled to london would just lead to bad practices, and take you to bad places. It would effectively be a trap.

                                    The only way to avoid 'austerity' would be to have an economy that is growing considerably faster than the 0-1% the UK grows at.
                                    Well this is precisely.the issue isn't it. Every time people question whether Wales can afford to be independent I ask whether Wales can afford to be in the UK. Because we look fucking poor already.

                                    Comment


                                      Originally posted by Fussbudget View Post

                                      Yes it's because the university has a partnership programme with Noroff college so their students on some courses can transfer straight into third year
                                      Ah, thanks

                                      Comment


                                        Originally posted by NickSTFU View Post

                                        Yes, I get that.

                                        Also, there's lots of hidden problems, such as lack of funding for NEETS, and young people's wellbeing.
                                        Hard agree. I think there will be serious social unrest in England/theUK in the not too distant future.

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