I totally agree, but it might be a pretty hard-to-argue Arts Council bid.

Also, if you’re into the empty feeling of nuclear sadness, check out When the Wind Blows (1986) - it’s from Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel - who did “The Snowman” and that Santa Claus one amongst other family favourites. Surely a lovely, fun cartoon to watch with the kids!

WARNING: DO NOT ACTUALLY WATCH WHEN THE WIND BLOWS WITH YOUR KIDS (unless your kids are adults)

The tone and scale is quite different, but the overall themes or message certainly have a lot in common. Both worth seeing.

I can’t remember The Day After as clearly as I can Threads, but I remember it was definitely worth seeing, though I feel like it had a little more of a film/plot/narrative/entertainment element to it, whereas Threads was just quietly bleak and undignified - a gritty soap-opera story in Sheffield, then everyone gets nuked and you see all your favourite characters as they piss themselves and their hair and teeth fall out from the radiation and then they slowly die from illness and starvation, then you watch a documentary style presentation of the tiny remainder of population, scrabbling in dirt, trying to find a still living plant.

Absolutely watch both - all humans should watch both at some point in their lives - but maybe not on a day where you want to have any fun or talk to anyone, or do much except stare into the distance in silence.

Ms Allen added that in general seagulls do not attack people for food, and that only happens when they are nesting.

Or if you’ve got something from Greggs. In our local city centre (miles from any sea), at least three people seem to get attacked or mugged for food by seagulls every lunchtime, and have done for a few years. I don’t think they nest all year round.

I swear they’ve been getting more aggressive over the last couple of years though - they’ve been killing pigeons in the city centre, and attacking people’s cats in their gardens, and on at least one occasion, killing and half-eating some kittens.

To be fair, these days they’re all at it. For instance, Dulux has ones like “Poisoned Apple” and “Treasured Memory”, and I’m pretty sure Wilkos used to have one called “Oaty Dreams”.

Me “Hi, is that, umm… Phones, number four, uhhhh?”

Phones4u “Haha, yes, but It’s pronounced ‘Phones For You’”

Me “Oh, it’s it a wrong number? I’ve got it written down here, it’s a number four, not a word ‘for’ f-o-r, and it’s not the word ‘you’, but just a letter U on its own, which is pronounced ‘uh’”

Phones4u “yes, that’s how we write it”

Me “Why? Why didn’t you do it properly? It’s just like that argument with the 90s boyband Fiveive all over again.”

Etc etc

From the 90s (in a small patch of Yorkshire), I remember Townies, Scallies, Kevs (seemingly a lot of them were called Kev where I lived), Carlings (a drink of choice, perhaps?), and Scrotes (i.e. ballbags). Neds was sometimes used as an alternative, but wasn’t common.

I don’t think I heard “Chavs” until the early 2000s. Never quite sure if they were actually the same thing - as the “Chav” thing seemed to have a class/wealth element, that “Chavs were poor/working class”, whereas the Townies/Scallies/Kevs of my teen years were certainly all from richer families than me and my friends, they just liked to rob people, smash up bus shelters and shops and attack people (especially those who were “gay looking” or “foreign looking”).

Without facial hair, he just looks like a thumb.

I thought the pull-string light switch inside the bathroom was the standard in the UK?

I’ve only seen switches outside bathrooms in the last 5 years, in recent “having the bathroom re-done” cases.

It might be an age of house or regional thing though.

Here they still exist - they just make you pay if you want a new one. I (and seemingly most people) use them all the time still, but I guess more people reuse them more times now. I’m quite happy to pay 30p for one when the old ones get used up. I think they’re a bit sturdier than they used to be too - so less likely for the handles to snap when you’ve still got a mile to walk home.

I guess it mostly cut down on unwanted ones getting littered etc. Now they’re valuable, all the more reason to hoard them in a cupboard in the kitchen.

Where you are it sounds like they stopped existing - what do you put your food shopping in? Do you still have a thousand left that you previously hoarded?

I think technically it’s both, but it’s mainly focused on the former - the shop and supermarket ones. You now pay 20 or 30p for them - previously when they were free, they would sometimes force a bag on you, even if you didn’t want one (I guess to walk around advertising their shop).

Throwing pretend milkshakes at a pretend Nigel Farridge is disrespectful.

We should be burning effigies of him on bonfires.

I miss lovely, earthy, warm, friendly chocolatey Brownbuntu.

I always felt purplebuntu was a bit vile.

As far as I’m aware, in English, the punctuation goes outside the quotes, unless it’s part of the original quote.

In American, the punctuation goes inside the quotes, even if it’s not part of the sentence being quoted.

I’m unsure of the habits of other English-speaking countries.

Please someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I think bourbons are past the point of having separate brands any more. We eat so many of them (nationally, not personally), that 40p “Happy Shopper” bourbons are basically the same as £2 Marks and Spencer ones, and are probably made in the same factory.

This is like when Kraft bought Cadbury’s and started to do mash ups nobody wanted.

Aha, that explains why every possible item of food has a new “Oreo” flavoured version.

In combination with the exercise it sounds like you’re doing anyway, have you tried a bit of Yoga and a bit of listening to meditative sounds before/during bed/sleep/end of day? You may have tried similar things already, but if not, maybe worth a go? It’s not going to pass/waste time as such, but might put you into a better position to stop your mind racing with negativity, especially in that crucial pre-sleep phase.

Particularly looking at “Yoga for Anxiety” or “Yoga for Mental Health” type things, moreso than general strength and fitness Yoga. You’ll find a bunch online. You might find something like this Yoga Healthcare Alliance 10 Week Course works for you (it’s promoted by the UK’s NHS for some conditions). It’s focusing on basic de-stressing, de-tensing muscles, breathing focus, and may help you feel calm and relaxed - which may give you a good nights sleep - which could potentially do wonders for beginning to recover.

I’d also suggest combining it with some “sleep headphones” - a fabric headband with some really flat headphone speakers inside it - then listen to a combination of “meditation for anxiety” or “8 hours deep sleep ambient soundscape” type things whilst you lie there.

Ideally you’d do the Yoga sat on your bed, then drop straight into something like “a nice man tells you you’re great and everything will be fine” followed by some sort of “inner peace meditation that lasts 8 hours or longer”. Obviously, you’ll find your own preferred voices/sounds. I’ve also used white noise style “starship engine sound” or “on a night train” audio.

If you watch them on your phone with “Newpipe”, you can save them as videos or just as audio files - which you can then set up as playlists in VLC. No point in downloading the same thing every night.

This whole set of things might not work for you at all, but if you’re up for hours anyway, what do you have to lose?

Personally, I found this process helped me massively on my way out of a similar patch (combined with exercising more, quitting caffeine for a while, CBT therapy - it was a multiple angle approach).

Regardless, I wish you luck and pass you my best wishes in your recovery.

I might be wrong, but wasn’t Movit just for timeline preview, and hadn’t worked properly for quite a few versions and now you just use the NVENC/VAAPI etc export profiles to export with GPU?

I’m sure it’s not possible for everyone - but I essentially did this some years back - though more with Premiere than Photoshop - and therefore more Cinelerra/Kdenlive than Gimp/Krita.

I ran a dual boot system from about 2008 until about 2015. If it could be done in Linux/FOSS, it was. If it couldn’t, it was done in Windows/Adobe software.

I was self-employed, though I often did subcontracting work for a handful of media/umbrella organisations - so sometimes I had to use Premiere or Sony Vegas to carry on half-done projects I was handed.

Bear in mind this was when you bought Adobe software and didn’t rent it - and you could also keep running an older version for years.

Anyway, over time I used the Windows partition less and less, until I got rid of it entirely when I got a new computer.

I had to work a bit harder one year, and I did miss out on a few projects - but mostly, I could do everything I could do previously, but it took a bit longer for a while until I adjusted to a different workflow.

After that, you’re just saying “That’s a £2000 job”, “That’s a £200 job”, and meeting a deadline. Nobody really cares if it took 7 minutes longer to do, and I saved a lot of time not using Windows any more.

Editing (and other design stuff) is a far smaller part of my overall work these days, but I still do a good chunk of projects over the year, and I’ve been 100% Linux for almost 10 years. No regrets.

To a lot of laptop manufacturers, it certainly seems that way as of late - that’s why I’m ever hopeful that a modular laptop, such as the framework, might give us the option of how we want to control a mouse cursor.