Yes! I’ve really gotten into actually making use of my freezer recently. It’s also great for spices and herbs that you use less frequently.
The experiences trans men and women have with misogyny will never not be fascinating to me. Like, for the first time ever we have this huge sample size of people who have experienced how their gender presentation affects how people interact with them, giving tangible proof of misogyny in action. And it can’t just be swept aside with ‘MaYbE tHe wOmEn JuSt miSuNDerStOoD’ or ‘mAYbe tHe mAN diDN’t MeAn iT LiKE tHaT’. I mean idiots will still make idiot arguments but at least it chips away at them a little bit.
I love ‘dreich’ (rhymes with ‘greek’) because it perfectly sums up British weather most of the time.
Also a fan of ‘banging’, as in top, class, right good.
This made me think of an article I read today about the Nazi occupation of Rome during WWII:
Marjorie Scaretti, my great-aunt, lived in Rome for much of her life. She was in the Apennines after the armistice talks of July 1943 and returned to Rome on 20 October, two days after the remaining Jews of the Roman ghetto were sent by train to Auschwitz. Her husband, Enrico, was a banker, some of whose property and businesses were appropriated by Mussolini after he refused to join the Fascist Party. Aunt Marjorie kept a diary, and in its pages she writes about the furtive lives Romans led during the occupation: the ceaseless speculation about where the Allies were; whether the Nazis would destroy Rome by defending it from an Allied attack, turning it into another Stalingrad; at which prison or police station someone was being held and how to get them out – many arrests in the months of the occupation were entirely arbitrary.
[…] She wrote of ‘the hair’s-breadth escapes, the adventures, the amazing and often fantastic existence of thousands of fugitives, coupled with the fear, the secret anxiety, the danger and the want, the heroic, the ludicrous and the vile – all packed into the daily life of the harassed citizen’. Josette Bruccoleri, an interviewee in Trevelyan’s book, spoke of the same unease: ‘Everyone seemed to be in possession of some great secret which they did not dare reveal. People hardly spoke to each other and if they did it was only for a moment. I myself felt like a time bomb ready to explode, but like everybody else I did my best to look as innocent as possible.’
Not exactly the same, but every day it feels like there are more and more echoes of the past.
The actual article, in case anyone’s interested: https://archive.is/qfunJ
I havn’t used Amazon for a few years and honestly, it just takes discounting it as a possibility. There’s no one website equivalent but the more you search for places to buy things, the more you build up a repertoire of sites for specific things.
I recommend Ethical Book Search for finding cheap second-hand books. Bookshop.org for new books.
Argos can be good if you need an assortment of random things, although it doesn’t always have everything.
Cass Art for art supplies and Love Crafts for knitting and sewing.
B&Q and Screwfix for DIY and home stuff.
There’s probably more places I use semi-regularly that I can’t think of right now. You often end up paying slightly more but I think it’s worth it to not support Bezos and I buy less stuff than I would otherwise which is good in the end anyway.