#driving school near midland

[emmajonesrwr]

Searching for an indisputable driving school close to Midland, Mirrabooka, or Kelmscott? Look no further! Our BRILLIANDRIVINGSCHOOL first-class educators will make their adventure into the roads in no time flat. Our car driving instructors provide auto and manual car driving classes with one-to-one driving lessons. https://brilliantdrivingschool.com.au/

[toopeanutcrown]

YES2 Driving Academy

Our driving instructors are highly trained and certified professionals who will ensure you receive the best possible driving education. Our students have great pass rates on their driving tests, thanks to our experienced instructors and comprehensive driving education.

[littlequeenies]

Carmen Jane Plant

Carmen Jane Plant is the daughter of Maureen and Robert Plant. She works as a professional dancer and teaches belly-dancing and ethnic dancing. She produced the 2018 show ‘The Serpent Slayer’.

Early Years and Family

[Robert, Maureen, and little Carmen at the family's farmhouse near Kidderminster, Worcestershire, 1970]

Carmen Jane Plant is the eldest children and the only daughter of Led Zeppelin's frontman Robert Plant and his wife Maureen née Wilson. She was born on 21st October 1968 in Birmingham, England and has two younger brothers, Karac Pendra Plant and Logan Romero Plant. She has a younger half brother from her father's side, Jesse Lee Plant aka Jordan Plant.

Carmen is of Indian descent from her mother's side and of Romani descent from her father's. The 1972 Led Zeppelin song, “The Ocean,” actually references Carmen in one of the lyrics: "‘I’m singin’ all my songs to the girl who won my heart/She’s only three years old but it’s a real fine way to start".

[Robert with his children Karac and Carmen at their farm, filmed in 1973 and seen in Led Zeppelin film's "The Song Remains the Same", released on 1976.]

During the 1970s, she attended the Elmfield Rudolf Steiner School in Stourbridge, West Midlands.

On October 2007 Robert admitted he regrets staying on tour throughout the 1970’s because he feels his daughter grew up without knowing who he was. Robert claimed she once mistook him for a burglar after he came home from a particularly long tour: "What I recall for the first two years is my daughter not really knowing who I was and getting rather agitated when I came back off tour, as she thought I’d come to rob the house."

In an interview for the People magazine (December 20 1976) Robert explains: "Carmen used to think she had two fathers—the one whose singing she heard through the speakers and the one on whose knee she was sitting. They [Carmen and Karac] love it when I come back to tell them tales."

Car accident and Karac's death

[The Plants with Scarlet Page (C) in 1976]

Carmen was also a passenger in Robert and Maureen Plant's car involved in a road accident on the Greek island of Rhodes on 4 August 1975. Maureen was driving a hired Austin Mini with her husband and their children plus Scarlet Page. The Plant family were seriously injured when the car skidded off the road and collided with a tree but Scarlet Page was unhurt. In the back-seat, Carmen suffered a broken wrist, cuts and bruises. Scarlet's mum Charlotte Martin and Maureen's sister Shirley Wilson, who were following in the car behind managed to get medical help.

In 1977, Carmen also became ill with the same stomach enteritis which took the life of her younger brother Karac Plant, aged only 6.

Personal Life

[Carmen and Robert in 1988]

On 21 November 1989, Led Zeppelin reformed with Jason Bonham on drums, for Carmen's 21st birthday party at Hen & Chickens public house in Oldbury, West Midlands. They performed 'Trampled Under Foot', 'Misty Mountain Hop', and 'Rock and Roll', with Chris Blackwell and Phil Johnstone in support. The Nashville Teens and Jimmy Page's daughter Scarlet Page, were also in attendance.

[Carmen with Charlie Jones]

Carmen Plant got married to Jimmy Page and Robert Plant's bass player Stephen Charles "Charlie" Jones (born 13 Oct 1965), at St. Peter's Church, on 18 May 1991. Their wedding reception was held in a series of marquees at Robert's farm at Kidderminster. Roy Harper's song 'Evening Star' was written for Carmen for the occasion.

Carmen and Charlie Jones have three children, their eldest a daughter named Sunny Plant-Jones (born 1993). The family lives in Bath, Somerset.

Professional Career and Recent Years

Carmen Plant Jones works as a professional dancer and teaches belly-dancing and ethnic dancing. She was tutored in belly-dancing by Serena Ramzy, wife of Hossam Ramzy who performed in Page and Plant's "No Quarter Middle Eastern orchestra". Carmen Plant has appeared at the Rivermead Womad Music Festival, Glastonbury Festival, and with the Babylon Arabic Ensemble.Carmen continues to carry on the family’s musical legacy through Middle Eastern-inspired performing arts. In a 2018 article about her dance production ‘The Serpent Slayer’, Carmen Jane Plant acknowledges her fortunate upbringing: “I come from a musical family, obviously through my dad, my husband, and my children as well. Thanks to my dad, I grew up listening to an alternative and eclectic range from a young age and that really provided the inspiration for me to get involved with all kinds of music. It’s all that I’ve known really, so it’s great that I can put this all in to practice.”

*CHECK OUR CARMEN PLANT PHOTO ALBUM HOSTED AT GOOGLE PHOTOS*

[birminghammoneyman]

Tamworth, Birmingham, UK: A Great Place to Live

Tamworth, located in the West Midlands of England, is a historic town with a rich cultural heritage. It is a bustling market town that has grown into a popular residential area, with excellent transport links to nearby cities like Birmingham. In this article, we will look at why you should consider living in Tamworth, and how a mortgage broker in Tamworth can help you move home in the area.

Why Live in Tamworth?

Tamworth has a lot to offer its residents. Here are some of the top reasons why you should consider living in this beautiful town.

Affordable Housing

Tamworth has a range of properties available, from traditional period homes to modern apartments. Compared to neighboring cities like Birmingham, Tamworth's housing is affordable, making it an attractive option for first-time buyers and families looking to upgrade to a larger home. With a mortgage broker in Tamworth, you can easily navigate the local housing market and find the perfect property to suit your budget and lifestyle.

Excellent Transport Links

Tamworth is well-connected to nearby cities like Birmingham, Nottingham, and Leicester, making it an excellent location for commuters. The town has a train station that connects to Birmingham and London, as well as bus services that run regularly throughout the day. For those who prefer to drive, Tamworth is located near the M42 and M6 motorways, making it easy to access other parts of the UK.

Beautiful Surroundings

Tamworth is surrounded by beautiful countryside and is home to several parks and nature reserves. The town's castle, built in the 11th century, is a popular attraction and is set within the beautiful Tamworth Castle Grounds. The town is also home to the SnowDome, an indoor skiing and snowboarding center, and Drayton Manor Theme Park, one of the UK's top family attractions.

Great Local Amenities

Tamworth has a range of local amenities, including shops, restaurants, and cafes. The town center is home to several supermarkets, high street shops, and independent retailers, making it easy to find everything you need. There are also several excellent schools in the area, making Tamworth an ideal location for families.

How a Mortgage Broker in Tamworth Can Help You Move Home in Tamworth

Moving home can be a stressful and time-consuming process, but with the help of a mortgage broker in Tamworth, the process can be made much smoother. Here are some of the ways in which a mortgage broker can help you move home in Tamworth.

Access to a Wide Range of Mortgage Products

A mortgage broker in Tamworth has access to a wide range of mortgage products from various lenders. This means that they can help you find a mortgage that suits your specific needs and circumstances, whether you are a first-time buyer or looking to remortgage your existing property. With a mortgage broker's help, you can ensure that you get the best possible deal on your mortgage.

Expert Advice and Support

A mortgage broker in Tamworth is an expert in the local housing market and can provide you with valuable advice and support throughout the home buying process. They can help you understand the various mortgage products available to you and guide you through the application process. They can also help you understand the legal and financial implications of buying a property and provide you with advice on how to manage your finances.

Save Time and Money

One of the most significant benefits of working with a mortgage broker in Tamworth is that they can save you both time and money. With their expert knowledge of the local housing market and mortgage products, they can help you find the right mortgage quickly and efficiently. They can also help you negotiate the best possible deal with your lender, potentially saving you thousands of pounds over the lifetime of your mortgage.

Final Thoughts

Tamworth is a fantastic place to live, with its affordable housing, excellent transport links, beautiful surroundings, and great local amenities. With the help of a mortgage broker in Tamworth, you can make the process of moving home in the area much smoother and stress-free. From accessing a wide range of mortgage products to providing expert advice and support and saving you time and money, a mortgage broker can help you navigate the local housing market with ease. Whether you are a first-time buyer, looking to remortgage, or simply want to move home in Tamworth, working with a mortgage broker can make the process much more straightforward and hassle-free.

Why Choose us as Your Mortgage Broker in Tamworth?

With over two decades of experience in the mortgage industry, we have assisted a diverse range of clients throughout their mortgage journey. Our services cater to first-time buyers, home movers, buy-to-let landlords, self-employed individuals, those exploring help-to-buy and right-to-buy schemes, and those facing unique circumstances. As your mortgage broker in Tamworth, we strive to alleviate all the stress associated with the process and ensure that you feel confident and secure throughout the journey.

After scheduling your free mortgage appointment online, you will have the chance to converse with a dedicated mortgage advisor in Tamworth who specialises in your particular situation. The advisor will inquire about your personal and financial circumstances to determine the types of mortgage products that may be accessible to you. Subsequently, the mortgage advisor in Tamworth will conduct research to identify a product that is customized to your needs and will not recommend products that do not align with your requirements.

[wexlerkimberly]

REAL TALK how do adults make new friends!!!

[gurudriving]

Driving school The-Vines - Guru Driving

Guru Driving School a car driving school that mainly focus on teaching students drive car safely on road. Not just focus on completing the driver knowledge test(DKT). Our services are available in Midland, The Vines, Ellenbrook, Beechboro, Ballajura, Mirrabooka

[watusichris]

You Oughta “Get Carter”

Another old Night Flight piece, tied to a Turner Classic Movies airing, about a movie I never tire of watching. (Unfortunately, the Krays film “Legend” turned out to be not so good.) ********** The English gangster movie has proven an enduring genre to this day. The 1971 picture that jumpstarted the long-lived cycle, Get Carter, Mike Hodges’ bracing, brutal tale of a mobster’s revenge, screens late Thursday on TCM as part of a day-long tribute to Michael Caine, who stars as the film’s titular anti-hero.

We won’t have to wait long for the next high-profile Brit-mob saga: October will see the premiere of Brian Helgeland’s Legend, a new feature starring Tom Hardy (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Dark Knight Rises, Locke) in a tour de force dual role as Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the legendarily murderous identical twin gangleaders who terrorized London in the ‘60s. The violent exploits of the Krays mesmerized Fleet Street’s journalists and the British populace until the brothers and most of the top members of their “firm” were arrested in 1968.

The siblings both died in prison after receiving life sentences. They’ve been the subjects of several English TV documentaries and a 1990 feature starring Martin and Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet. However, the Krays and their seamy milieu may have had their greatest impact in fictional form, via the durable figure of Jack Carter, the creation of a shy, alcoholic graphic artist, animator, and fiction writer named Ted Lewis, the man now recognized by many as “the father of British noir.”

Born in 1940 in a Manchester suburb, Lewis was raised in the small town of Barton-upon-Humber in the dank English midlands. A sickly child, he became engrossed with art, the movies, and writing. The product of an English art school in nearby Hull, he wrote his first, unsuccessful novel, a semi-autobiographical piece of “kitchen sink” realism called All the Way Home and All the Night Through, in 1965.

He soon moved sideways into movie animation, serving as clean-up supervisor on George Dunning’s Beatles feature Yellow Submarine (1968). However, now married with a couple of children, he decided to return to writing with an eye to crafting a commercial hit, and in 1970 he published a startling, ultra-hardboiled novel titled Jack’s Return Home.

British fiction had never produced anything quite like the book’s protagonist Jack Carter. He is the enforcer for a pair of London gangsters, Gerald and Les Fletcher, who bear more than a passing resemblance to the Krays. At the outset of the book, recounted in the first person, Carter travels by train to an unnamed city in the British midlands (modeled after the city of Scunthorpe near Lewis’ hometown) to bury his brother Frank, who has died in an alleged drunk driving accident.

Carter instantly susses that his brother was murdered, and he sets about sorting out a hierarchy of low-end midlands criminals (all of whom he knew in his early days as a budding hoodlum) responsible for the crime, investigating the act with a gun in his hand and a heart filled with hate. He’s no Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe bound by a moral code – in fact, he once bedded Frank’s wife, and is now sleeping with his boss Gerald’s spouse. He’s a sociopathic career criminal and professional killer – a “villain,” in the English term -- who will use any means at his disposal to secure his revenge.

Carter’s pursuit of rough justice for his brother, and for a despoiled niece, attracts the attention of the Fletchers, whose business relationships with the Northern mob are being disrupted by their lieutenant’s campaign of vengeance. As Carter leaves behind a trail of corpses and homes in on the last of his quarry, the hunter has become the hunted, and Jack’s Return Home climaxes with scenes of bloodletting worthy of a Jacobean tragedy, or of Grand Guignol.

Before its publication, Lewis’ grimy, violent book attracted the attention of Michael Klinger, who had produced Roman Polanski’s stunning ‘60s features Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac. Klinger acquired film rights to the novel before its publication in 1970, and sent a galley copy to Mike Hodges, then a U.K. TV director with no feature credits.

Hodges, who immediately signed on as director and screenwriter of Klinger’s feature – which was retitled Get Carter -- was not only drawn to the taut, fierce action, but also by the opportunity to peel away the veneer of propriety that still lingered in British society and culture. As he noted in his 2000 commentary for the U.S. DVD release of the film, “You cannot deny that [in England], like anywhere else, corruption is endemic.”

Casting was key to the potential box office prospects of the feature, and Klinger and Hodges’ masterstroke was securing Michael Caine to play Jack Carter. By 1970, Caine had become an international star, portraying spy novelist Len Deighton’s agent Harry Palmer in three pictures and garnering raves as the eponymous philanderer in Alfie.

Caine had himself known some hard cases in his London neighborhood; in his own DVD commentary, he says that his dead-eyed, terrifyingly reserved Carter was “an amalgam of people I grew up with – I’d known them all my life.” Hodges notes of Caine’s Carter, “There’s a ruthlessness about him, and I would have been foolish not to use it to the advantage of the film.”

Playing what he knew, Caine gave the performance of a lifetime – a study in steely cool, punctuated by sudden outbursts of unfettered fury. The actor summarizes his character on the DVD: “Here was a dastardly man coming as the savior of a lady’s honor. It’s the knight saving the damsel in distress, except this knight is not a very noble or gallant one. It’s the villain as hero.”

The supporting players were cast with equal skill. Ian Hendry, who was originally considered for the role of Carter, ultimately portrayed the hit man’s principal nemesis and target Eric Paice. Caine and Hendry’s first faceoff in the film, an economical conversation at a local racetrack, seethes with unfeigned tension and unease – Caine was wary of Hendry, whose deep alcoholism made the production a difficult one, while Hendry was jealous of the leading man’s greater success.

For Northern mob kingpin Cyril Kinnear, Hodges recruited John Osborne, then best known in Great Britain as the writer of the hugely successfully 1956 play Look Back in Anger, Laurence Olivier’s screen and stage triumph The Entertainer, and Tony Richardson’s period comedy Tom Jones, for which he won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Osborne, a skilled actor before he found fame as a writer, brings subdued, purring menace to the part.

Though her part was far smaller than those of such other supporting actresses as Geraldine Moffat, Rosemarie Dunham, and Dorothy White, Brit sex bomb Britt Ekland received third billing as Anna, Gerald Fletcher’s wife and Carter’s mistress. Her marquee prominence is somewhat justified by an eye-popping sequence in which she engages in a few minutes of steamy phone sex with Caine.

Some small roles were populated by real British villains. George Sewell, who plays the Fletchers’ minion Con McCarty, was a familiar of the Krays’ older brother Charlie, and introduced the elder mobster to Carry On comedy series actress Barbara Windsor, who subsequently married another member of the Kray firm. John Bindon, who appears briefly as the younger Fletcher sibling, was a hood and racketeer who later stood trial for murder; a notorious womanizer, he romanced Princess Margaret, whose clandestine relationship with Bindon later became a key plot turn in the 2008 Jason Strathan gangster vehicle The Bank Job.

Verisimilitude was everything for Hodges, who shot nearly all of the film on grimly realistic locations in Newcastle, the down-at-the-heel coal-mining town on England’s northeastern coast. The director vibrantly employs interiors of the city’s seedy pubs, rooming houses, nightclubs and betting parlors. In one inspired bit of local color, he uses an appearance by a local girl’s marching band, the Pelaw Hussars, to drolly enliven a scene in which a nude, shotgun-toting Carter backs down the Fletchers’ gunmen.

The film’s relentless action was perfectly framed by director of photography Wolfgang Suchitzky, whose experience as a cameraman for documentarian Paul Rotha is put to excellent use. Some sequences are masterfully shot with available light; the movie’s most brutal murder plays out at night by a car’s headlights. The breathtakingly staged final showdown between Carter and Paice is shot under lowering skies against the grey backdrop of a North Sea coal slag dump.

Tough, uncompromising, and utterly unprecedented in English cinema, Get Carter was a hit in the U.K. It fared poorly in the U.S., where its distributor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer dumped it on the market as the lower half of a double bill with the Frank Sinatra Western spoof Dirty Dingus Magee. In his DVD commentary, Caine notes that it was only after Ted Turner acquired MGM’s catalog and broadcast the film on his cable networks that the movie developed a cult audience in the States.

Get Carter has received two American remakes. The first, George Armitage’s oft-risible 1972 blaxploitation adaptation Hit Man, starred Bernie Casey as Carter’s African-American counterpart Tyrone Tackett. It is notable for a spectacularly undraped appearance by Pam Grier, whose character meets a hilarious demise that is somewhat spoiled by the picture’s amusing trailer. (Casey and Keenan Ivory Wayans later lampooned the film in the 1988 blaxploitation parody I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.)

Hodges’ film was drearily Americanized and relocated to Seattle in Stephen Kay’s like-titled 2000 Sylvester Stallone vehicle. It’s a sluggish, misbegotten venture, about which the less that is said the better. Michael Caine’s presence in the cast as villain Cliff Brumby (played in the original by Brian Mosley) only serves to remind viewers that they are watching a vastly inferior rendering of a classic.

Ted Lewis wrote seven more novels after Jack’s Return Home, and returned to Jack Carter for two prequels. The first of them, Jack Carter’s Law (1970), an almost equally intense installment in which Carter ferrets out a “grass” – an informer – in the Fletchers’ organization, is a deep passage through the London underworld of the ‘60s, full of warring gangsters and venal, dishonest coppers.

The final episode in the trilogy, Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (1977), was a sad swan song for British noir’s most memorable bad man. In it, Carter travels to the Mediterranean island of Majorca on a Fletchers-funded “holiday,” only to discover that he has actually been dispatched to guard a jittery American mobster hiding out at the gang’s villa. It’s a flabby, obvious, and needlessly discursive book; Lewis’ exhaustion is apparent in his desperate re-use of a plot point central to the action of the first Carter novel.

Curiously, the locale and setup of Mafia Pigeon appear to be derived from Pulp, the 1975 film that reunited director Hodges and actor Caine. In it, the actor plays a writer of sleazy paperback thrillers who travels to the Mediterranean isle of Malta to pen the memoirs of Preston Gilbert (Mickey Rooney), a Hollywood actor with gangland connections. Hilarity and mayhem ensue.

All of Lewis’ characters consume enough alcohol to put down an elephant, and Lewis himself succumbed to alcoholism in 1982, at the age of 42. Virtually unemployable, he had moved back home to Barton-upon-Humber, where lived with his parents.

He went out with a bang, however: In 1980, he published his final and finest book, the truly explosive mob thriller GBH (the British abbreviation for “grievous bodily harm”). The novel focuses on the last days of vice lord George Fowler, a sadist in the grand Krays manner, whose empire is being toppled by internal treachery. Using a unique time-shifting structure that darts back and forth between “the smoke” (London) and “the sea” (Fowler’s oceanside hideout), it reaches a finale of infernal, hallucinatory intensity.

After Lewis’ death, his work fell into obscurity, and his novels were unavailable in America for decades. Happily, Soho Press reissued the Carter trilogy in paperback in 2014 and republished GBH in hardback earlier this year. Now U.S. readers have the opportunity to read the books that influenced an entire school of English noir writers, including such Lewis disciples and venerators as Derek Raymond, David Peace, and Jake Arnott.

Echoes of GBH can be heard in The Long Good Friday, another esteemed English gangster film starring Bob Hoskins as the arrogant and impetuous chief of a collapsing London firm. Released the same year as Lewis’ last novel, the John Mackenzie-directed feature is only one of a succession of outstanding movies – The Limey, The Hit, Layer Cake, Sexy Beast, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels among them – that owe a debt to Get Carter, the daddy of them all.

[pocketmosaic]

Who am I and why this blog?

What a good question, I am so glad you asked.  I am a 45 year old, mother of three, who has fibromyalgia, cfs/me and arthritis.  I guess I should also say that I am single as that is usually one of the first questions people ask when you meet them.

My children are aged 26 (yes, I know I was young when I had him), 20 and 18.  My eldest lives in the Midlands (UK) which is where his Dad and his family are, I don’t see him very often but I have been fortunate (in some ways) to have been able to spend 2 months with him this year.  I say fortunate in some ways because the reason he stayed with me for so long was because he was having a bit of a crisis and needed to get away.  Thankfully while he was here he helped me almost, if not more than I helped him.

The younger two live with me in East Anglia (UK), their father (who is a different man to my eldest’s dad) lives 10 minutes away.  My 20 year old is my main carer, he also helps with the 18 year old who has autism and social anxiety.  My 20 year old has been my rock through the years and I don’t believe that I would be sat here today if it hadn’t been for him and his support (and yes I do make sure that he knows that he is a very amazing person, even if he doesn’t always believe it).  Sadly he lost his job in the hospitality industry during the COVID-19 epidemic, as did so many others.  He didn’t work full-time but I do think that it was important for him to have that outlet, where he could make friends and do things that were not related to helping me and his sister.  We are trying to do thinhgs to help him rejoin the working world when the shielding is over.

As I mentioned my daughter has autism and severe social anxiety.  Around Oct 2017 she had total meltdown and refused to go to school, leave the house or even go near a door that was open to the outside.  She was in mainstream school before that, she is very clever and quite talented when it comes to anime drawings.  Sadly we did have quite a few problems with bullying, which the school did try and help with, even getting the police involved when the situation called for it.  Unfortunately, despite my asking for help several times, everything going on in the outside world just became too much for her and she put on the brakes.  We have had a little bit of help and after a lot of hard work on our part we managed to get her to leave the house.  She would go down to the local shop and the chip shop next door (about a 5 minute round trip), and we managed to get a volunteer to come and take her to a cat sanctuary once a week.  Two weeks after she had started doing this the cattery shut its doors to all non-necessary staff and then we went into lockdown mark 1.  Since then she has taken several steps backwards (although she does still do the shop trip if she has to).  I have been trying to encourage her to come out of her room and she refused to speak to me for 8 weeks, she wouldn’t even look at me.  We are now talking but she doesn’t come and search me out as she did before.  I am sure we will be okay and once the pandemic has some solution then we will work again at getting her out there.

I started by telling you about the children because it does tie in with what I am about to say in a few.  I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and CFS/ME about 15 years ago, gosh that was a long road to get the diagnosis.  It took about 4 more years to get my arthritis diagnosis because whenever I mentioned the pains they automatically put it down to the fibro/ME no matter how hard I tried to convince them that this pain was different.  Thankfully someone eventually listened and that meant that I could learn to do things that could help.  I do have other problems which impact my life slightly less than these, but we could be here a while if I went to deep into that and I am sure you don’t want that lol.

Long story short, I put on a lot of weight (about 6 stone or 84 pounds or 38.1kg), I was struggling to stay awake long enough to cook a meal and so I would just grab easy convenient snacks which we all know are not great substitutes but if I hadn’t done that then I probably wouldn’t have eaten anything.  I also wasn’t moving around anywhere near as much as I used to do, I had always been doing something before and although my diet wasn’t great I was burning up a lot of those calories so while I have never been skinny I wasn’t a big girl,

Up to the present(ish), I have battled with depression and anxiety for a long time, some of it because of how I looked a lot of it because of what I couldn’t do.  I forgot to focus on what I could do, what I did have.  A few weeks ago I went for a short walk by the quay (all my walks are short because it hurts so much and after a short time I struggle to pick up my feet).  I was watching the water, which I find very peaceful, and I saw a branch floating by on the current.  I was taken by an major urge to jump in and float off with it, which I am sure you will be glad to hear I managed to resist.  I thought about just getting into my car and driving until everything and everyone I knew were far behind me.  I felt like they would be better without me in their lives.

Somehow I managed to get back home and I tried to figure out how I had got to this point in my life.  I know I was missing my eldest, I was pleased I had managed to help him out but it had left a big hole when he went back home.  While he was with me we managed to sort out my house and threw away most of the clutter, which was great I felt like things were starting to move the right way.  So why had I spent weeks crying night and day?  I was awful to be around, even the woman who comes in to help me with the things I struggle to do wasn’t able to help with how I was feeling.

I knew I was lonely, although I have two children living at home they spend the majority of the time in their rooms, my daughter was ignoring me (even looking at the wall when she came to a room I was in so she didn’t have to look at me).  Every time I watched the television I would hear stories on how the lockdown had brought families together and how they were doing more as a family.  I couldn’t relate to that at all.  There was also so much talk about how people were keeping in touch over zoom or the like, I hadn’t even had one talk like that.  I don’t have a lot of friends, I am not good at keeping in touch and after you have had to cancel last minute so many times people stop asking you to do things.

I hated the way I looked but I had no clue on how to change it, every time I have tried to do any exercise I have suffered for days afterwards, even having a conversation with someone would leave me drained.  I had managed to lose 3 stone before the first lockdown but, after struggling to get deliveries and when I did it seemed that the things they couldn’t provide were all the healthy options I tried to get, I put back on 2 stone.  My face was starting to show the ravages of time, the worst being the hooded eyes I now have. I have always liked my eyes so it is sad they are not as noticeable as they used to be.

I think I might be coming up to the menopause, my period was over two weeks late at that point (it took another week before it said hello).  Any of you women out there will know that when your period is late it causes your hormones to go out of whack.  Looking back I know that had something to do with how I was feeling.

I remembered something my Dad had told me, “If you can do something about it then do so, if you can’t then all the worrying in the world won’t do anything”.  I decided that I had to try and do something to fix the problem areas I saw in my life.  I couldn’t do much about my hormones, expecially as it is the first time in over a year that it has taken so long which means the doctor wouldn’t do anything.  That meant I just had to let that one sort itself out.

I knew that if I listened to some Toby Keith or Kellie Pickler I always felt better (well Kellie does have two songs which make me cry because they cut so close to home but in a strange way even that makes me feel less alone), so I decided I was going to start listening to them, amongst others, more and if I could I would dance to them, that would at least get me started with moving.  It helped because I did lose 6 pounds in the two weeks leading up to this second lockdown.

Facing another month of lockdown I wanted to do something that would help me and also stop me from worrying about the fact that I couldn’t go for a cuppa with my carer and her partner on a tuesday morning.  So I decided to set myself a challenge.  I want to leave lock down looking better than I did when I entered it.  This meant looking for exercises that I could realisticaly do, I can’t see squats ever being a big part of any exercise routine I ever do.  I found some arm exercises that could be done sitting down, then I learnt about the wall push or standing push-up, I tried it and found that I could manage that so I added that one in.  I also looked at loads of videos for slimming down the stomach, the one exercise they all included was the plank.  Now I didn’t think I would be able to manage that, especially getting down and back up again, but I am pretty stubborn so I figured that I would try it.  The first time I thought I was going to die by the fifth second but I managed it and I am now going to try and do it as often as I can, after all no-one is about to see the crazy ways I have to use to pick myself up afterwards.

I also decided that I needed to lay down some house rules.  I drew up contracts for the two children who live with me (by drew up I mean I found some templates online and adapted them to suit).  Part of the contract stipulates that they need to spend some time with me while they are both home full-time.  That has stopped me from feeling so isolated even though they are here.  I have been making plans on what I want to do when the world returns to some sort of normality.  My life has basically been on hold for the past 15 years, I don’t even know how that happened, but it did and I am determined that I am going to put myself out there when I can (I might change my mind later, but at least for now it is giving me something positive to look forward to).

I had always said that when my youngest reached 18 (which happened during the first lockdown) I was going to start travelling.  This is definitely something I plan to keep to when travel plans can be a little more stable.  I used to be an active member of the theatre when I was in the Midlands but I didn’t even know we had one here until last lock down.  I want to look into joining them and doing some theatre stuff, that was the job I always wanted a far cry from what I ended up doing which was mechanical engineering.  I have a couple more things in the “to-do” bank but they are just the ones I am going to mention for now.

I don’t want to get back to that place where I want to disappear, to keep me on track I started this blog.  I want a record of where I started and how I am progressing, and it kinda gives me some sort of accountability.  It also makes me write something every day which is going to help me with another dream.  That, however, is a story for another time.

Take care and believe in yourself, you CAN do it, whatever IT may be.

[skiphirenearme6]

Everything You Want To Know About Skip Hire

As far as waste removal goes, nothing beats the all-reliable and available skip. As the United Kingdom battles a waste issue and a pandemic, skip hires have been the beck and call of homeowners and DIY home improvement enthusiasts. Indeed, even gardeners are appreciative of the help a cheap and reliable skip hire gives. 

Many companies in the nation have skips for hire. Regardless of whether you need garden waste or domestic waste eliminated, a cheap skip hire administration near you can ease the weight of any house clearing or DIY project. 

Reading this, many customers such as yourself may have several inquiries regarding skips. In this article, we answer some of the most widely recognized inquiries regarding skips-from the expenses of skips to skip sizes and past.Why Choose A Skip Hire?

With the number of ways to have your waste hauled off, you might be wondering why you ought to go with a skip.

Not all waste removal methods were created equal.

The following are some reasons why you ought to choose a skip hire near you:

Skips Allow You To Dispose Of Many Kinds Of Rubbish

Garden clearing, home renovation, and house cleaning are all activities that lead to waste. Such projects inevitably lead to ceramic, wood, green, and concrete waste.

A skip is ideal for these materials, especially when there is too much of them for you to drive to the local landfill yourself.

If you are unsure, you can place the following materials in a skip:

●     Furniture ●     Cardboard ●     Grass cuttings ●     Soil ●     Paper ●     Bricks ●     Tiling ●     Stones ●     Clay

Later on, we will go into a skip's possible contents in greater detail.

Skip Hires Are Easily Within Your Reach

Nearly every major area in the United Kingdom has at least 20 skip hire companies. In the West Midlands alone, there are an estimated 454 skip hires. In excess of 200 skip hire companies are in the Southern parts of the country. Manchester has the second-most noteworthy number of skip hires.

Need proof? Use our tool to find a cheap and experienced skip hire in your council.

Hire A Skip, Save the Environment

In the United Kingdom, fly-tipping is on the rise. This has resulted in high amounts of rubbish in landfills and on the sides of major motorways.

In the event that you wish to add to the environment and the UK's sanitation emphatically, hire a skip. The hire of skips can go far in guaranteeing your waste's mindful and legal disposal. Thus, you can breathe a sigh of relief realizing that you won't be penalized for discarding your garbage on roads or motorways.  Additionally, a skip hire can be an environmentally-stable way to dispose of your recyclable and dry refuse. The United Kingdom has laws on the disposal of waste in landfills. Although not illegal, disposal into landfills can cause robust taxes for a waste removal company. At the time of composing, £90 is the landfill tax for each huge load of refuse arranged.  To save cash, skip hire companies take a minimalist approach to waste disposal. All the more specifically, skip hires go to reusing. They reuse whatever they can so they would not have to dump an excess of trash. This allows them to maximize their benefits and save the environment at the same time.Choose an affordable skip hire, and you will be making a significant contribution as well.

What You Might Need To Arrange Before Hiring A Skip

You may not need any paperwork if you just intend on placing your skip somewhere in your property.

On the other hand, in the United Kingdom, using a skip may require you to sort out a few things before your waste removal operation. Documents like a skip permit and parking bay suspension are a must if the skip will be on an area outside your property.

Skip Hire Permit

A skip hire grant is a document that allows you to place a skip on a "limited area". Many places can be viewed as limited areas. A decent general guideline is to consider public places and motorways places where you cannot place a skip.

Here is a list of some places where you might need a skip permit:

A sidewalk

A park

The side of the road or motorway

Near a school or playground

There are other places. All you need to remember is that these places allow public access and are not your property.

Securing a skip permit or licence from your local council can be quite inconvenient. This is one more reason to choose a skip hire. Skips hires not only offer competitive rates for waste collection. They also process the licence or permit on your behalf.

Parking Bay Suspension

In the event that you expect to place your skip in a parking area, you will require a parking bay suspension. 

A parking bay suspension is a document that will allow you to utilize a parking spot for your skip. Obviously, you probably won't require one if the parking area is yours. 

Not at all like a skip grant or permit, a parking bay suspension should be arranged by the skip hirer. That means you. No skip hire, reusing and waste management company can arrange this on your behalf.How Large Can Skips Be?

Depending on your waste removal needs, you can choose from a range of skips. Skips come in many sizes. The costs of skips differ from one part of the country to another. However, the primary determinant seems to be the size.

The larger the skip, the more expensive it might be.

2-Yard Skip

A 2-yard skip is otherwise known as a mini-skip. It is the smallest available skip you can rent. With its 25 to 35 bin bag capacity, it takes care of most of your small home improvement waste. The mini-skip is the most compact.

For this reason, a mini skip hire can be the most affordable option for you.

4-Yard Skip

The midi-skip or the 4-yard skip is a size above the mini-skip and can hold about 30 to 45 bin bags. Being larger than a mini-skip, it can even hold small pieces of furniture. It can also accommodate rubble from small-scale DIY projects.

6-Yard Skip- Builders Skip

Manufacturers skip sizes start at six yards and is a popular decision for commercial customers. This size of skip gets its name because of its capacity to hold waste from small-scale development projects. The skip can hold around 50 to 70 container bags. 

It is also covered. In this way, you need not stress over anyone fly-tipping into your skip. Simply keep the cover shut. 

8-Yard Builders Skip 

This skip can hold 75 to 85 container bags. It is an ideal decision for building and development projects. You can even choose it on the off chance that you are accomplishing some major work on your home. 

12-Yard Skip-Commercial And Industrial Maxi-Skip 

For many homeowners, this is the largest skip that can be leased much of the time. It holds at least 120 container bags, and its size makes it incredible for massive furniture removal.If you plan on hiring a skip this large, there are a few things you may want to consider.

One is lorry access. A skip this size will require a large are for skip delivery and skip collection. Also, its size makes it the most expensive skip for homeowners.

What Can Go Into A Skip?

Not all waste can be placed in a skip.

Skip hires will in general focus on waste that can be reused and reused. This has something to do with landfill taxes. For each huge load of waste, skip hire companies need to pay £90. To be sure, this may not seem like a lot. In any case, when you factor in the amount of waste a company discards in a landfill, it adds up. 

In fact, a skip hire company can wind up paying more than £1,000 for discarding a lot of garbage in a day!hhTo avoid this, skip hire companies gather recyclable and biodegradable material. Recyclable waste can be reused or transferred to a recycling facility. Dry biodegradable waste from gardens or homes can be taken to a facility for composting. You can place the following materials in your skip:

●     Furniture

●     Cardboard

●     Grass cuttings

●     Soil

●     Paper

●     Bricks

●     Tiling

●     Stones

●     Clay

On the other hand, the following cannot go into your skip:

●     Food waste

●     Animal excrement

●     Medical waste like used syringes and catheters

●     Discarded nappies or diapers

●     Paint tins

●     Asbestos

●     Plasterboard

●     Batteries

●     Hazardous chemicals

●     Light bulbs

If you really need to dispose of these, you need to call a different waste removal service for your business or home.

How To Hire A Skip

Hiring a mini-skip to a commercial skip can be easier if you follow these simple steps:

Step One: Determine The Size Of Your Skip

You can only do this after determining how much waste you have. Doing this allows you to predict how much space you need for the skip and lorry. It will also give you an idea of how expensive the waste removal service will be.

Overestimating the size of a skip has lead to many overloaded skips. When the skip hire sees a skip filled above level, it can refuse to collect the skip. Hence, you need to assess how much waste you have before calling your skip hire.

Step Two: Determine Whether Or Not You Have An Area To Place A Skip

Why? Because if you do not, you might need to have a skip permit. Luckily, Skip Search can help you find a first-class skip hire service that can sort this out on your behalf.

If you need to place the skip in a parking area, you might need to arrange a parking bay suspension with your local council.

Final Step: Call Your Local Skip Hire

With Skip Search, you can choose a cheap skip hire, as well as one that is reliable and near you.

What Not To Do With A Skip

As per waste disposal laws and the regulations your skip hire will have, you cannot do the following:

Fill Your Skip "Above Level"

If you look inside a skip, you will see a line close to the top that reads "level loads only". Filling the skip above this level means that you have overfilled it.

Skip hires do not collect overloaded skips. Overloaded skips are a safety hazard on the road. A skip full of rubbish bags can spill waste onto the street. This can cause traffic, and worse, accidents.

Placing Prohibited Waste

Skip waste is often anything dry, biodegradable, and recyclable. Prohibited waste is the opposite. Also, prohibited waste contains toxic and harmful substances. This is why a skip hire team does not collect items like paint tins, asbestos, and plasterboard.

Disposing of prohibited waste into your skip can lead to the skip hire not collecting it. You may even be charged more for doing this.

Hiring A Skip Without A Permit Or Licence

You do not need a skip licence if you are placing the skip in your property. You will need one if you are putting it in a restricted area like the side of a road or a public space like a park.

To place your skip in a parking area, you will also need a parking bay suspension.

Using a skip without the necessary paperwork can incur a penalty from your local council. The fines can go as high as £1,000.

Place The Skip On An Unstable Surface

If the skip will be in your property, your surface has to be stable. Filled, a skip can weigh as much as two tonnes. Hence, placing it in your yard where the ground may be soft might not be a good idea.

A skip that tilts can spill your rubbish onto your lot or garden. This can set you and the skip hire team back in time.

If You Need A Skip, Look No Further Than Skip Search UK!

With Skip Search UK, you can locate the ideal domestic or commercial skip hire for your waste removal needs. We associate you to a skip hire near your location. Skip Search also encourages you locate an ideal skip hire with serious prices.

[mvdipetsch]

Outside of London; A Guide.

Hello, friends! I think there’s a semi-substantial amount of roleplays based around England, but honestly 90% of them are in London and while that’s great, England is made up of a lot of cities and I figured I’d show some #representation. 

In this guide we cover: Housing in England, location and travel! 

Disclaimer: This is based off of my experience and the experience of those around me. Most of my knowledge is concentrated around Birmingham, as that is where I grew up, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Stoke-on-Trent, Blackpool and Liverpool so I feel that I have a semi-decent shot at helping out. 

If you found this guide helpful, please reblog this as it helps to show me that there is interest and I’m not just shouting into a void. If you have any suggestions or comments about things I could/should cover in these guides please let me know! Any specific questions? Shoot me an ask and I’ll do my best to help you out. 

Location, Location, Location. 

England is divided into counties. There many of them, and realistically they don’t affect anything. All it really means is that your resources (police, fire, ambulance, charities, etc.) are organised by that one area. For instance - the buses in my city are all organised by Network West Midlands. They deal with every bus service (if it’s an NXBus) in the West Midlands. Ultimately, it doesn’t really affect anything. 

From my city to my university, it’s a 3-ish hour drive. That is a long drive. I know some people regard that as nothing, but when everything is so close together, it’s a lot. It’s not really a drive that people would make a lot - this is why train transport (while not that big) tends to be used to get from city to city. 

Only really in the inner cities are things that expensive. When you move away from the main city, things can get pretty affordable, but the inner city is still often really accessible via bus, driving or even train. When I’m at my boyfriend’s I’ll get the bus into the city centre, but when I’m at my mom’s sometimes it’s quicker to just jump on a train. Train tickets are also pretty inexpensive if you’re moving within the city. It’s when you’re heading to smaller cities that the problems arise. For instance, I can get to London for under £10, and to Liverpool for not much more. However, for me to get from Birmingham (a major city) to my University (a not-so-major city of about 200k) it’s £60+ with a change. On coach, it’s £14 with a change + it takes 5-ish hours (there are direct coaches that cost £30~ which is still significantly cheaper than the train) University students will commonly take a coach to and from their university to their hometown if it’s ridiculously priced. 

The higher north you go, typically the cheaper it is. This is dependent upon where in that city you are, but the general consensus is that north = cheaper. Obviously if you’re in Manchester city centre then it’s going to be a bit more pricey, but the general cost of living / food / etc. is seen to be cheaper the more north you go. A good way to judge how expensive a place is, is by how much the bus fare is. Birmingham bus fare is £4.00 for a daysaver (one ticket, on the bus as much as you like) but when I was in Liverpool I paid something like £1.20 for an U18 ticket. That’s a big difference. (For reference - Birmingham is the smack-bang middle of England. Liverpool is about 2 hours north, near Manchester.) 

Typically, when it comes to travelling; 

Driving

Cars in the UK are predominantly manual (with a gear stick) but we can still get automatic cars. Manual cars are also cheaper than automatic and you can drive an automatic with a manual license but you cannot drive a manual with an automatic license. 

My mom lives seven minutes from her work (she timed it, she’s got no life) but there are people who live up to thirty minutes away and have to take the motorway. This means that if there’s a massive accident, you can sit there for six hours, bored out of your skull

It’s also worth saying that if you live in a/the city centre, you’re not taking your car to work. It’s ridiculously expensive and parking is so few and far between, it’s really not worth it. People can and do drive, but plenty of people will also opt for a train or bus.

Buses

If you don’t drive the bus is often a very viable option. Buses will commonly run from 6:30/7 until 11:30/12 (at least where I am) but you can get night buses or buses that run later, they’re just a bit rare. 

Students (in college or secondary school, typically) are VERY common on buses. As in public buses. Unless someone has an impairment and go to a special school suited to their needs, you make your own way. Which often means that you jump on that bus with every man and his dog. 

Sunday service is real and it’s a pain in the arse. Buses that run every 10-ish minutes during the week drop to 20 between 9 and 5 and then drop to every 30 minutes after that (sometimes even every hour.) This means that if you miss your bus... you can be waiting for a very long time. 

Trains

Train’s are far more common for longer commutes. Also trains aren’t really that common for secondary school students (they either get dropped off in a car, walk or take the bus) but college students can and do take the train. My best friend takes an hour’s train ride to and from her college every day, and a lot of my teachers will get the train to college (my college is in the city centre, so it’s pretty logical.) Regardless, trains aren’t as common. 

Housing

Houses in England are attached. It is rare that you will see detached (stand alone) houses. Most houses will share their walls with their neighbours, unless they’re the end house in which case they’re called “semi-detached” cause... only half of them is attached. That tends to mean that if your neighbours have a baby, you can hear them crying. You can hear when the tv is too loud and all that kind of stuff. 

When you move out, there tends to be a few options in terms of who actually owns where you live. The options normally are:

Council. 

You sign up on the website, the council give you a priority rating and a set amount of points. These points are determined by the people in your household and your needs. A single mother with two kids will get more points than a single person with no dependants.

There is also a ‘bedroom’ tax, which states that you have to pay a tax if you live in a council property and are seen as having more bedrooms than you need. If, for instance you have two children of opposite genders that are aged seven and three, you have to pay extra tax for that third bedroom because it’s deemed as unnecessary. However if you have two children and they’re of different genders and one of them is over the age of ten (10) then you do not have to pay the tax. If they are of the same gender, then it is until one of them is sixteen (16).

Council and Housing Associations are most beneficial to those who are receiving benefits or are not working enough to cover rent by themselves. 

Housing Association

The way a housing association works is effectively the same as a landlord and the council. You apply on the council website for the aforementioned points and begin to bid on properties. When this happens, you may bid on a property that happens to be owned by a HA. The HA then acts as your landlord. HAs are pretty okay, dependent upon the area + such. When you live in a HA, any housing benefit you receive will immediately be paid from the council to the HA. This can cause issues if your money gets fucked up (which is more common than not because the housing system in the UK is BROKEN.) 

Private Rent

Private is when you have a landlord. I mean, that’s pretty self-explanatory really. You have an issue? Call the landlord. I’ve never had a landlord so I can’t really comment much on this. I will say that most landlords likely won’t accept housing benefit as a form of payment.

Private own. 

This is just the whole mortgage, thing. You know how this goes. 

There are a few different types of housing options when it comes to England and I’d imagine that this is pretty true for up and down the city.

Blocks of flats.

Blocks of flats are huge high-rises. They’re not as common anymore but there are still quite a few knocking about. If you remember the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, that was a high-rise. 

Blocks of flats can be owned by the local council or be privately rented. I’ve never lived in a flat, so my knowledge isn’t the best. They all tend to have names and there’s normally at least two together. 

A ‘flat’ is basically an apartment. So it’s a bunch of different flats (which, in high rises, commonly have two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and a bathroom) High rises have a lot of flats in them. Commonly there’s at least 13 floors, with between around four and six flats per floor. So you can get a lot of people in a high rise. 

Maisonette. 

A maisonette looks like a wide house. It’s normally one to two floors, with flats that have three (or more) bedrooms. Maisonettes are considerably bigger, in terms of the flats inside, and consist of maybe two flats per floor. Maisonettes can also be council, privately rented or housing association. 

Bungalow.

A bungalow is a home without any stairs. They can be council, privately rented or privately owned. Bungalows aren’t that common anymore, but they’re great for people who have difficulty with stairs and such. Also most bungalows are actually pretty decent sizes too. 

Houses.

Houses in the UK are broken down into one of three categories:

Detached

Semi-Detached

Attached

This is literally just based upon how many of your walls are shared with your neighbour. Detached houses are really uncommon in the UK and are usually found in richer areas. Semi-detached is mainly just the house at the end of your street, so semi-detached and attached are the main two. 

Also it’s pretty common that you only have windows of two of the four house walls. Even if you’re in a semi-detached house, you’ll only have front and back windows. 

Houses can be privately owned, privately rented, housing association or council.

Most houses follow a similar layout. Typically three bedrooms, with either one bathroom or a room just for the toilet + then the bathroom (with a bath + sink + such.) It’s also super common for one room to be a ‘box room’ which is normally pretty small. My room at my mom’s house is the ‘box room’ and it fits a 3/4 bed, a chest of draws, and a metal rack that I use as a bookshelf. There is not a lot of room in there. 

And there you have it! I think I covered most things regarding transport and housing in the UK, and I really hope that it was as informative as possible. Stay groovy, my dudes. 

[fuckblizzardbearlover]

--------------------------------------------

What i wanted people to see was the scope of this shooting as well as the fact that it was mostly unpreventable without removing guns from the hands of citizens.

Now my information is inaccurate, my searches mostly talk about the scope of events with no detailed lists or maps so i’ve had to piece everything together, despite my horribly triggered boyfriend(who knew a half dozen people in locked down stores) spending hours watching the news ( i suppose we are more informed than most). But i’ve tried to detail a map to show the scope of this

This is odessa tx (i guess the red line is the city limits). It takes about 20 minutes to drive across it , 20 minutes to drive to midland. it takes me about 15 minutes to use the loop to get to work (which now has a bullet hole in it). 42nd street, which most of the red dots are on, is the biggest and busiest street in Odessa, as it goes straight through and merges with 191 leading to midland.

The red unfilled dot up north is where the main intersection that leads from my house to the middle of the city is blocked off as a crime scene. Allegedly one of the shootings happened here. this is also where Ratliff stadium (from Friday Night Lights, the movie. Where all our football (college and highschool) happen). I couldnt verify this so idk if my boyfriend is wrong, if it was a different shooting or an accident for sure.

The orange unfilled Dot is the cbs news station in the mall. As we watched the news they were evacuated twice. the whole mall was on lockdown. The newscaster shops at my store frequently and my bf’s associate and my brother in law work there. I dont know if the police were worried the shooter was going there, i believe a mall security cop was shot in our dillards.

The Red filled dots are what i’ve heard repeatedly for sure were attacks. the bottom left is Twinpeaks were one of the teenagers were shot and there are two cars i saw this morning blocked off by police tape.. the next three are the car dealership (now taped off) and Home depot , The small dot is Logans Roadhouse which is blocked off by one of the shot up cars. And then there was shots at UTPB across the street. I understand that out to the west several blocks away someone was shot at starbucks. The far right red dot is Best Buy where someone else was shot.

The black X is cinergy where the killer was killed. Over 21 ppl were shot, some on the highway so maybe i’ll keep this map and fill it in as more details come out.

My point is that alot of the discussion is about how these happen at events. that even if a shooting happens in your town that it will be condensed into one area like Ariana’s concert, or a parade. However this guy literally drove around our busiest street shooting random people. Luckily i’m going on vacation because otherwise i’d be having to take a 5 or 10 minute detour to get to work because the main street ppl in north odessa use to get to odessa is blocked off.  Almost every store from starbucks to home depot was closed yesterday afterwords(not my work or walmart of course, HEB was closed so that meant more customers, yay capitalism). The school, 2 of peoples favorite restaurants. the starbucks is very popular and right in front of the petstore our family goes to all the time.

Thats the power of guns. A single man can drive around and terrorize HALF a city, murder over 20 people by himself, terrorize hundreds (how many do you think were in the mall on a saturaday? ). This wasnt a single place attacked it was 1/3 of  a city of 90k. and all of us were impacted. If you dont know someone who was killed you know at least several people who were huddled in a locked store afraid of it. Me and my boyfriend love playing the Dorothy game at Cinergy. that area of the city is basically the heart of odessa with some of the biggest sources of education, food, and entertainment. Over the course of writing this i’ve had to X out this map and reupload it as i remember “oh yea someone was shot THERE too”

--------------------------------------

But that’s not all.

The evil people of america are already going “we HAVE to have guns” “good guy with a gun” ‘thoughts and prayers”

the 17 month old and the 15 year old killed were waiting with their family when they got shot. A stray bullet hit my work with a good 2 hundred workers and customers inside. one of the victims was a Fed Ex worker doing her job when she was shot in the head. multiple of the victims were just driving.

it wouldnt have mattered if EVERY person was armed. You have to know a gunman is there and that he’s intent to kill you before the possibilty of killing them in self defense comes up. These were driveby’s most of these people didnt see it coming. A car was driving up, maybe recklessly and BAMF someone has a hole in their body.

More cops wouldnt have stopped this, security at every establishment (like the companies would pay for that) wouldnt have stopped it. body armor in all our fashion wouldnt stop it (shot in the head, remember?), “A good guy with a gun” wouldnt have stopped it. Our entire police force and the state troopers were after this guy for a good 2 hours. Understandably we thought that there were 2 gunment when he murdered the mail carrier and stole her truck.

As big as this country is I knew this would keep happening but wiht 500 million people i never thought it would happen here, But it did and it will happen in a town near every American.

Every other country with a better economy and more civil government has stricter gunlaws or no guns at all. It doesnt matter if we get rid of all of them or some of them, if we make it harder to buy guns or ammo.  But the fact is that all the things the Gun Cultist say did not help, would not help and will never help. Everyone in our town was effected in some way and there was no way to prevent this other than making sure ppl like this asshole cant have a gun, let alone one that can can carry more than a few bullets.

------------------------------------------------------------------

[arlenenewbrand]

25K reward issued after young woman killed in drive

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Please see ourPrivacy Noticefor details of your data protection rightsThank you for subscribingWe have more newslettersShow meSee our privacy noticeCould not subscribe, try again laterInvalid EmailA new lagoon complete with a surf school which could create hundreds of new jobs is to be built in Cheap Fake Yeezys landlocked Birmingham.Audacious plans for the new development have been unveiled by London based Emerge Surf which is hoping to win back from planning chiefs for its 25 fake yeezys for kids million project.If given the green light, the complex would be built on 15 acres of land west of Coleshill town centre and would house a wave generating system which would allow people to enjoy surfing just seven miles from the city centre.Called Emerge Surf Birmingham, it will also have an outdoor heated swimming pool, hub building, skateboard track, shop, caf and fitness studio.(Image: Sunday Mirror)West Midlands Growth Company said it expected the facility to attract 250,000 visitors a year, inject up to 21 million into the local economy annually and create the equivalent of 100 full time jobs.The project has the backing of pro surfers and former Olympic javelin thrower Tessa Sanderson and it is hoped that interest in the sport will be increased by surfing inclusion in the Olympics for the first time next year.UK and fastest water park slides opened near Birmingham by strongman Eddie Hall2 swimming pools and other fantastic reasons to join Ladywood Leisure CentreSubject to planning approval by North Warwickshire Borough Council, construction is set to start this year and be finished by spring 2021.Steve Price, founder and chief executive of Emerge Surf, said: "It an incredibly exciting time in the development of surfing."The mental and physical benefits of the sport are increasingly understood and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will hugely increase levels of interest and participation."In parallel, the significant strides made in wave pool technologies have the potential to make the sport accessible to all."Our vision is to not only provide a world class surfing experience for surfers of all levels but also a wide range of complementary activities."We are proud to be developing the UK most landlocked wave park.Read MoreSwimming in BirminghamBirmingham AirportBrits travelling to Spain issued with alarming warning by Foreign OfficeTourists will routinely head abroad to the sun kissed European holiday hotspot, with Brummies favouring resorts like Benidorm, Alicante and the Canary IslandsNational ExpressCouple had sex on National Express booze fuelled coach journey from hellPassengers banned from travelling with National Express after claims brazen young couple engaged in sex while a large gang boarded with open beer cans and hurled abuseCrimePolice shooting of armed man fleeing in underpants was 'reasonable and proportionate'Duane Thomas has been sentenced to six years and four months in prison. I never thought about who I was hurting. Foot strike patterns and collision forces in habitually barefoot versus shod runners. Ben Woodburn has been out of the team on loan at Sheffield United this season (Image: Liverpool FC via Getty Images)Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by emailSubscribe We will use your email address only for the purpose of sending you newsletters. Kluber is the first to earn five opening day assignments with the Indians since CC Sabathia from 2003 08. Consumers associate and identify with these stars much more easily."Nike will, meanwhile, take over from Adidas as NBA's official apparel supplier from the 2016 17 season.From then, Adidas will reallocate the $10 million a year it paid to the league to individual players, said Rossi, explaining the value of Harden's contract."We must not forget that it is for about 13 years. The NBA opposition to Jordans only fuels their demand and they go on to be one of the most sought after sneakers.. Use code Reddit15 for 15% off any order at Rope Lace Supply. The only caveat to this is the style layout. BlackBerry launched the Passport in late September, and brought it to India the same month for Rs. The Dare County C D Landfill, Manteo Transfer Station and Buxton Transfer Station, the Manteo Recycle Yard and the Rodanthe Recycle Center will be closed on Monday, September 2 in observance of Labor Day.

[near-mississauga-on-blog]

Near Mississauga ON

Events

Do you want to know the things to do in Mississauga, ON lately? Are you curious with the events in the city? Let me share with you amazing activities there. On December 11, 2018, there is an activity relating to Santa Claus. The next day, there is a recurring registration for Little Kids Soccer Programming at Applewood Heights Secondary School. At around 9:00 am, there is a free hearing test at Hear for Life. There will be a free hearing test and ear wax screening with hearing experts on site at Hear for Life healthcare to answer questions of those who will attend the event. Just take note that space is limited for registration.

GT Locksmith is really a favourite company of many people in Mississauga, ON when it comes to locksmith service provider. Many people wonder why they’re so popular in the area. Perhaps, we can investigate about the way they handle the problems of their customers. Basically, the company employees are proud that they understand their customers and their issues when it comes to security. Obviously, the standard operating procedure of the company is absolutely in line with modern technology. To know more about them, you can search for videos about them, too. Lastly, GT Locksmith has complete facilities and amenities to help their customers.

Woman killed in Mississauga marks third pedestrian death in GTA on Tuesday

the third pedestrian fatality of the day in the Greater Toronto Area. Just minutes before, a man in his 60s died after being struck by a vehicle at Midland and Dorcot Aves., near Donwood Park Public School in Scarborough. His death pushed the city of Toronto past a recent high for pedestrian and cyclist fatalities. And just hours earlier, emergency services were called to the area of Dorcas St. and Minotola Ave. in Mississauga for a report of a collision involving a pedestrian. Peel police say a 79-year-old woman was struck by a vehicle around 2 p.m. and was pronounced dead shortly after. Read more here

We know that any accident in a pedestrian is a form of violence and negligence on the part of the offender. Since it is considered an accident, we still think about what really happened at the time of the accident. On Tuesday evening in Mississauga, a woman has died after being struck by a vehicle in the said place. The specific location of the accident is outside Erindale Station, on Dundas St. W. and Old Carriage Rd. Based on the news report, the victim was pronounced dead at the scene. In the Greater Toronto Area, it was the third pedestrian fatality of the day.

Kariya Park in Mississauga ON

There are many people who write articles about Kariya Park in Mississauga, ON. Some of these individuals are frequent travellers who really love the place. The place is specifically located at Kariya Drive, just off Burnhamthorpe Road, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Based on the reviews shared by travellers, the area has beautiful cherry blossoms. It is also a quite nice park that is perfect for those who want to take a break from the sights and sounds of the city. Due to its beautiful Japanese garden, you can truly have a relaxing visit at the place. Sometimes it is a little bit busy so expect a lot of people going there.

Link to map

Driving Direction

36 min (27.2 km)

via Gardiner Expy E

Fastest route, despite the usual traffic

Kariya Park

3620 Kariya Dr, Mississauga, ON L5B 3J2, Canada

Get on Queen Elizabeth Way from Hurontario St

8 min (4.5 km)

Take Gardiner Expy E to Harbour St in Old Toronto, Toronto. Take the Bay Street exit from

Gardiner Expy E

16 min (20.9 km)

Take York St and University Ave to Centre Ave

8 min (1.8 km)

[jennylamb2006]

Decline 45th High School Reunion

I cannot attend the reunion for reasons cited below but rest assured that my spirit will be there.

I remember attending 9th grade home room in the fall of 1969 as a skinny 14 year old not knowing what my future will be at East Paterson High School. Well I am 63 years old and the results are nearly in.

I had just finished 8 years at St. Anne's Parochial School. I had a good friend named George Wolfe who had dated Rhonda Frattolillo. He attended Fair Lawn High School so I felt lost in the new environment.

Growing up on 18th Avenue I had also known Tommy Moriarty. I spoke to a childhood friend the other day. She told me about the passing of Tommy who died at the age of 62. Tommy had down syndrome. He lived with his rather large family on 16th Avenue. My memory is hazy but some of the details of my childhood have stayed with me. We grew up together for the period of roughly 1965-1968. Many hours were spent sleigh riding on the small hill located near Tommy's house on 16th Avenue. One day my family's dog ran out the door and it seemed like at least 20 children including Tommy tried to catch him. Pepper ran into the woods near the Garfield Water Works. Eventually despite the snow and other dangers Pepper was returned. I asked my Mom about Tommy being different and at the time the term retarded was used. My Mom who was generally soft spoken told me that God made all children in his likeness. Soon after this I was standing on top of 16th Avenue hill waiting to sleigh down it. Tommy was there and asked me if I was his friend. We rode down the hill on the sleigh together. Rest in peace Tommy.

At East Paterson High School I remember being called to Dr Varese the Principal's office in 1972. I was nervous but he congratulated me on receiving a New Jersey State Scholarship. I believe my father who was a Veteran of World War II at Pearl Harbor had something to do with it. I did not serve in the military the draft had ended when I became eligible. Besides I had seen enough fighting outside the third wing of the high school to realize that it was just plain stupid.

I was interested in sports especially baseball throughout my high school years. I am enclosing a picture of my high  school jacket. I was too nervous to ask any girls to the proms but if I had the nerve I would have asked Roberta Fisher. Please hug her for me at the reunion. She is a good friend and a wonderful lady. I remember wrestling with you and realizing that you were a skilled wrestler. I remember playing one on one Basketball with Tony Zappala and losing but I was not intimidated by his New Jersey All State superior skills. I remember pitching my first inning in Varsity baseball and realizing that my 80 MPH fastball was not enough to win a ticket to the Major Leagues. But I loved the competition and had some meager success to build on.

After high school I attended College and continued to play baseball. In 1974 I pitched a three hitter against the 11th ranked community college in the nation putting our team in first place. I remember Dennis Walling hitting a double off me in the first inning. When I walked back to the bench my coach told me he was a really good hitter and somehow I got him out the next three times I faced him. Walling went on to have a Hall of fame career in the major leagues. But my ego grew really large that day. I wanted to pitch the 2nd game of the doubleheader but the coach thought otherwise.

In 1974 I heard Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run and my life was changed. If you are ever in a bad mood play this song and you will know what I mean.

In 1976 I dated the first love of my life named Linda Lane. Her father was a wealthy businessman from Paterson New Jersey. Linda attended College in Pennsylvania. I remember driving down to see her and wondering what the future holds for me. In 1977 I proposed to Linda at Valley Forge State Park. She said yes if we could resolve our religious differences. This was true love only encumbered by my Roman Catholic faith vs. her born again Christian beliefs despite the fact that her father was Jewish and her mother was Roman Catholic.

I broke up with Linda and decided to take my 1968 Chevy Nova (I had rebuilt the engine in the snow of the 1977 winter) and move to California. I lost the opportunity for inherited wealth for the California dream by humming the Beach boys songs of the 60's as my friend Lamont and I drove to Long Beach California. I also had an Accounting degree from William Paterson College and $5,000.00. I planned to retire by age 40 with $100,000.00. I remember saying that I had no intention of reading another book until I have some fun. While we looked for apartments I found one but when Lamont turned up to sign the papers it was rented. I found another and made sure Lamont was not there to sign papers. There are bigots apparently all of the country. I really hate bigots.

In late 1978 I met a California girl with a golden smile named Laura Lambert that has graced my life for 40 years. That year I also met Ron Beaman from Nebraska. We have been friends all these years which I consider myself lucky. The next 8 years were spent living in a two bedroom apartment one block from the beach playing basketball with about 40 friends every weekend. I owned a small accounting business.

In 1980 I cried when John Lennon died.

In 1986, Laura and I bought our first piece of Real Estate, a one bedroom condo. It was a bit intimidating. By 2008 we bought/sold over 100 properties, so much for being nervous.

In the late 80’s I met the first of two attorneys that I am also friends with. Gene Goldman is a good attorney whose only deficiency is being weak in billable hours. I believe his calming disposition helped me in dealing with homeowners associations.

By 1994 Laura and I had accumulated 10 pieces of real estate and I had obtained real estate Brokers licenses in California and Nevada. My first real estate sale was to a single mom. She cried when I gave her the keys and I did too when I received a check for $2,200.00 for about 4 hours of work. It seemed so easy. At the loan signing her parents apologized for her being gay. I did not know what to say to the assholes. I wanted the deal to go through so I kept my mouth shut. In 1996 my daughter Rhiannon was born (named after the Fleetwood Mac song of 1977).

In 2002 I attended two concerts, Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen in Las Vegas. This makes up for not seeing Bruce Springsteen at Mr. D’s on the corner of Market Street and Midland Avenue. I realized that Paul McCartney and the Beatles were God’s gift to mankind. How lucky were we to experience this?

By 2004 I had a million dollars in the bank and 8 properties. I would go down to the Las Vegas courthouse to buy foreclosures. One property I did not have any information on started bidding at $30,000. I knew the people bidding were attorneys who regularly bought so when the bidding reached $400,000 I started chirping in. I bought it sight unseen for $425,000.00. As I paid the lady one of the attorneys said he was upset and wanted it. I drove my Lexus quickly to the property which was in a gated community. It was a fixer upper that I hoped to sell $575,000.00 and make $30,000.00 on. Well in 4 months after remodeling the price had soared to $675,000.00. I had made $100,000.00 on a house bought sight unseen. My ego grew again.

In 2005 at Christmas time I walked into Wells Fargo Bank in Henderson Nevada with my daughter Rhiannon and asked the teller how much the Wells Fargo Stuffed Stagecoach was. She responded by giving it to my daughter telling her that I was their biggest customer. My ego expanded again.

In 2006 Laura and I met Lon and Mary Searle and their fine family. They are mormons that have great values. Of course we do not agree on Joseph Smith.

By 2008 my material wealth had diminished considerably but luck would have it I found out that my ancestors arrived at Jamestown Virginia in 1629 and I was the 12th generation. I decided to take Laura and Rhiannon and move to Williamsburg Virginia. There was no stopping my love for United States History which began reading about Ethan Allen and the Green mountain Boys at St. Anne's in 2nd grade. Sure Kennedy was shot that same year but if the truth be known it wasn't Oswald who did it. There was a severe recession on except I did not notice it because of my families history unfolded before my eyes. I found the original family cemetery and plantation and a historical figure named Dred Scott who did not have his birthplace recognized. I fixed that in a couple of years by connecting two documents 40 years and 700 miles apart. Isn’t history grand?

In 2009 I met Richard Lincoln Francis, clerk of the Southampton County Court in Virginia. He is descended from Abraham Lincoln and I consider him a good friend who is qualified to be President of the United States. He is my East coast attorney, we have had more fun than should be allowed. To give you an example we had a trial over a Hines lucky rock that rivals the OJ Simpson trial of the century. I have taught Rick the 8 things to drive a golf ball successfully. He is a terrible student who has a tendency to make phone calls while teeing off. I believe this violates some rules.

Since moving to Williamsburg Virginia I have written five books. My disdain for reading that occurred after college was over. The second book involving the research to discover Dred Scott's birthplace is being converted into a movie. It is entitled Walk With You, the story of Dred Scott and the Blow Family of Virginia. It is about 8 children 6 white and 2 black that grew up and bonded together to take on the President and Chief Justice of the United States. I have met Hollywood stars including Ed Asner. My time is currently possessed in seeing this venture is completed to fruition.

My life has been blessed by God and living in the greatest country in  the world. I have lived the American dream which consists of association with all ethnic groups. My first twenty two years living in New Jersey were great. My next twenty three years in California were better. My next 8 years in Henderson Nevada were living the dream. The next 5 years in Williamsburg were amazing. And the last few years touring the United States with Laura are the best ever. Opportunities if you use education to  advance yourself. If these members of our class are among the living: Robert Motta, Robert Hurley, and Joseph Lasica, please give them my best.

Our democracy is currently under attack by a greedy lying moron who has no business occupying the world's beacon of freedom head office. This will change soon. If any of the morons who voted for this clown have issue I will be happy to meet them outside the 3rd wing at EPHS and give them a taste of true Democracy from someone who has lived it. I have had only two fights in my life. I am undefeated and plan to stay that way.

Warmest Regards,

Jeffrey Allen Hines

Class of 1973

#walkwithyou

#neveragain

#bluewave2018

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Finding car driving school in your area for your child or want to clear car driving test. Just check our service and our packages. We cover major areas in Cannington, Queens Park, also include Mirrabooka, Beechboro, Balga.

[cabiba]

“That strange revolution which sees the sons of the bourgeois throw cobblestones at the sons of proletarians.” So observed the French writer Jean Cau of Paris in 1968, when student protests about living conditions at the university erupted into a historic rebellion against the old guard.

That year, the United States was rocked by riots, assassinations and political crisis, and half a century later, history seems to be, if not repeating itself, then certainly rhyming. Yet while there are huge differences between the 1968 and 2020 disturbances, the one continuous theme running through both uprisings, and indeed all revolutions down the years, is the prominent role of the middle class. In particular, the upper-middle-class, the haute bourgeoise, are the driving force behind revolt and disorder throughout history, especially — as with today — when they feel they have no future.

Today’s unrest involves two sections of US society, African-Americans and upper-middle-class whites, who together form the axis of the Democratic Party, but it is the latter who are far more engaged in racial activism. The “Great Awokening”, the mass movement focused on eradicating racism in America and with a quasi-religious, almost hysterical feel to it, is dominated by the upper middle class.

Of course, when journalists say that any group of protesters are ‘middle class’ (in the British, rather than American, sense) they often mean to downplay their grievances or the value of their argument. Political debate, in British life in particular, is often about who genuinely represents the mystical proletariat, or ‘real people’, and opinion formers are obsessed with class and elitism. Most discourse goes something along the lines of ‘you’re the elite’, ‘no, YOU’RE the elite’, an endless, tedious game played by both Right and Left. I don’t think the composition of a group gives it any more moral weight, but it is true that revolutions and protests, even those ostensibly about the working class or other downtrodden groups, have historically been a bourgeois thing — and 2020 is no different.

The rich have always paradoxically been radical, something G.K. Chesterton observed over a hundred years ago when he wrote “You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists: they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.”

Before the industrial age established a political divide in which a middle-class conservative/liberal alliance opposed a working-class socialist movement, radicalism was usually an elite or at least bourgeois concern. The Reformation was disproportionately popular among the urban educated; later, while the Whigs were dominant among the wealthy London merchants, Toryism was much more common in the country as a whole.

When the French Revolution degenerated into violence a few intellectuals and aristocrats based in what is now Notting Hill sympathised with the Jacobins, but the English poor were largely unsympathetic, and showed their feelings with the brutal Priestley riots in Birmingham.

That revolution was itself largely a bourgeois affair, most of its leaders being lawyers, journalists or similar. The sans-culottes were idolised as an almost sacred group everyone had to pay lip service to, but they were often preferred in the abstract. Jean-Paul Marat called his newspaper L’Ami du peuple but in reality he despised them, partly because ‘the people’ are not that radical.

This the revolutionaries learned when they tried to overturn the old order and build the world anew, met with fierce resistance by the conservative peasantry in the Vendée region. In southern Italy French Jacobins invaders intent on liberating the country from religious oppression faced the Sanfedismo (‘Holy Faith’), a rural army fighting to defend the faith and king.

Likewise, the Russian Communist movement. While Karl Marx made endless references to the proletariat, he made very little effort to actually deal with them in the flesh, and when he did, he was disappointed by their moderation; when Marx’s comrades formed the First International they made sure that working-class socialists weren’t allowed anywhere near the important positions.

Marx had one proletarian colleague, Wilhelm Weitling, who he ended up putting through a ‘quasi-trial’, in Paul Johnson’s words, because he didn’t agree with all of Marx’s doctrine. The great communist intellectual believed that workers had to be instructed with a “body of doctrine and clear scientific ideas”, and because Weitling had his own opinions, he was cancelled — although Marx’s followers had a more permanent way of cancelling people.

Lenin’s Bolsheviks followed in this fashion, radicalised by their experience at universities, not factories. The Russian revolutionaries were so bourgeois that, as Daniel Kalder observed in Dictator Literature: “Only one solitary worker ever sat on the executive board of Lenin’s party, and he turned out to be a police spy.”

That noble tradition of haute bourgeoisie revolution continues today, especially in the US. The Occupy movement, for example, is deeply opposed to the 1% but largely because they come from the 2-5%; Amy Chua cited figures suggesting that in New York, more than half it members earned $75,000 or more while only 8% were on low incomes, compared to 30% of the city. They also have hugely disproportionate numbers of graduates and post-grads among their members.

The wider Great Awokening, of which the 2020 disturbances are a part, is a very elite phenomenon, with progressive activists nearly twice as likely as the average American to make more than $100,000 a year, nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree, and only one-quarter as likely to be black. Likewise with the radicalisation of American academia, with the safe spaces movement most prevalent at elite colleges, where students were much more likely to disinvite speakers or express more extreme views.

This indicates a significant radicalisation of the rich, a process that began in the 1960s when the heavily class-based politics of the 20th century began to shift. That social revolution, referred to in Britain as the permissive society, was entirely led by from above, a conflict epitomised in Britain by Midlands housewife Mary Whitehouse and her hopeless crusade against the public school liberal Hugh Greene.

In France, while Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy made huge headway among students of philosophy and future Cambodian mass murderers, it was less successful when he turned up at a Paris car factory to proclaim revolution. In 1968 the workers of Paris famously refused to side with the students, while in the US, as Christopher Caldwell noted in The Age of Entitlement, that year’s protests and the wider political conflict was partly about social status, with Ivy League students fighting working-class cops, many of whom had sons or brothers in Vietnam fighting a war they still believed in.

“When 135 students affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society occupied Harvard’s University Hall,” Caldwell writes: “the Harvard professor of Irish literature John Kelleher, a working-class Irishman from Lawrence, Massachusetts, called them ‘spoiled brats with an underdeveloped sense of history and a flair for self-protection’”. After 1968, “privileged Americans took out of the Vietnam era a sense of their own moral authority that was not battered but strangely enhanced.” The new class war had begun.

This trend would only accelerate, driven by a combination of media, expanding education and globalisation. In his highly prophetic The Revolt of the Elites, published after his death in 1994, Christopher Lasch argued that the new ruling class was becoming far more radicalised as its values diverged from a more parochial lumpen bourgeois. This more global-minded elite, used to seeing the world at 30,000ft, now embraced diversity as a mark of status but also a faith, with identity politics a replacement for religion — “or at least for the feeling of self-righteousness that is so commonly confused with religion”.

The Great Awokening certainly draws on America’s sectarian religious tradition, in a country formed by Calvinists, Quakers, Baptists and a dozen other Christian sects, but there are also materialist causes, in particular the expansion of the university system and runaway housing costs.

High house prices, in particular caused by planning restrictions, make it harder for the urban elite to settle down and have families — something likely to have a civilizing effect — and also pushes them radically to the Left.

Meanwhile, the expansion of the university system has created what Russian-American academic Peter Turchin called ‘elite overproduction’, the socially dangerous situation where too many people are chasing too few elite places in society, creating “a large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable… denied access to elite positions”.

So while around half of 18-year-olds are going onto college, only a far smaller number of jobs actually require a degree. Many of those graduates, under the impression they were joining the higher tier in society, will not even reach managerial level and will be left disappointed and hugely indebted. Many will have studied various activist-based subjects collectively referred to as ‘grievance studies’, so-called because they rest on a priori assumptions about power and oppression. Whether these disciplines push students towards the Left, or if it is just attending university that has this effect, people are coming out of university far more politically agitated.

While the evidence on that is not clear, it’s arguable that a tiny number of very intelligent people being taught the theories of Marcuse or Foucault is probably going to have a limited social impact; when these ideas are disseminated among huge numbers of the young, many of them conformists sensitive to the social cues around them, then quite extreme ideas about dismantling society become normalised.

This has been bubbling up for years — and then along came the coronavirus, throwing millions of people out of work, many from exactly the sort of sections most likely to cause trouble. And what makes it slightly spooky is that a few years back Turchin predicted that there would be a violent flashpoint in American politics — in 2020.

History teaches us that disaffected and bored members of the elite can become a destabilising influence on society. In medieval Europe, the younger sons of lords, destined to never inherit land, were at the centre of numerous rebellions and wars, with the crusades acting as a pressure valve for their violent impulses. In China the term ‘bare branches’ is used to describe those excess males unable to find mates and who then went on to cause trouble, and modern America has record numbers of single people.

Perhaps the most famous example of elite overproduction is the War of the Roses. Edward III’s seven surviving children married into the most powerful families in the realm, helping to stabilise politics during his reign, but this fecund group produced huge numbers of grandchildren and great-grandchildren chasing a limited number of baronial positions, during a period when post-pandemic population decline had hugely decreased the wealth of the landowning class. When the king descended into listless insanity the rival factions turned English politics into a Shakespearean bloodbath.

The lesson of that crisis, as of every crises since, is that discontent and boredom among the rich and powerful can quickly descend into violence; it is they, in the words of the Beatles’ 1968 hit, who usually want to change the world.