❤️ #ShakespeareSunday Proceed, sweet Cupid: thou hast thumped him with thy bird-bolt under the left pap. LOVE'S LABOUR 'S LOST IV:3

The first thing Nigel Farage will introduce if he is elected is Health Insurance. The NHS correctly costs £200bn a year. In the USA Health Insurance is £14,000 a year per person £14,000 x 50m adults is £700bn a year. £500bn a year profit If you can't afford that you are dying

I cannot believe what I’m witnessing in Kyiv tonight. Priests at the Kyiv Lavra one of the holiest Christian sites in Europe are rushing to save crucifixes, icons and sacred artefacts while Russia attacks the city. This is what Moscow’s “Christian values” look like.

Maybe this is a hot take but as someone who lived in the US for 4 years before moving home to Norway, I think the US is a great country to visit, not to live in. You get all the benefits of how grand the experiences are in culture, weather, nature, food, sports etc but you don’t have to worry about healthcare, overpaid housing, taxes that fund wars instead of your well-being and a lacking infrastructure. I understand it’s a big country and I only lived in Los Angeles (which is worse than most other American cities) but you only need one small medical issue to realize how messed up the system is. Also Trump.

Evlenirsen pişman olursun. Evlenmezsen de pişman olursun. Çocuk yapsan da yapmasan da pişman olursun. Kierkegaard bunu 200 yıl önce şöyle söylemiştir: "Neyi seçersen seç pişman olursun. Çünkü sorun tercihlerinde değil yaşanmamış bir hayatı romantize etmendir. İnsan her daim gidilmemiş bir yolu cazibeli ve gizemli bulur. Bu yüzden mesele en doğru seçimi yapman değil. Hangi pişmanlıkla yaşayacağını seçip karar vermendir." Sen neye karar verdin?

Toad helps Frog reach the juiciest blackberries 🐸🐸🧺

A huge factor in the collapse of our collective mental health is the decline in reading for pleasure. Reading lessens loneliness, builds community, sharpens the intellect. It brings joy. You will be shocked at how much better you feel if you begin to read regularly.

Cymbeline [III, 2] Imogen. 🐎 'O, for a horse with wings!' #ShakespeareSunday

Nature teaches beasts to know their friends. (Coriolanus) #ShakespeareSunday

"My ashes, as the phoenix, may bring forth A bird that will revenge upon you all:" - Henry VI pt3 (A1, S4) #ShakespeareSunday

RICHARD Thine eyes, sweet lady, have infected mine. ANNE Would they were basilisks’ to strike thee dead. —RICHARD III #ShakespeareSunday

I will fetch you a toothpicker now from the furthest inch of Asia, bring you the length of Prester John’s foot, fetch you a hair off the great Cham’s beard, do you any embassage to the Pygmies, rather than hold 3 words' conference with this harpy. —MUCH ADO... #ShakespeareSunday

"Come not between the dragon and his wrath." —KING LEAR #ShakespeareSunday

"To tame the unicorn and lion wild..." —THE RAPE OF LUCRECE #ShakespeareSunday

The Church of St Edward, Stow-on-the-Wold in England is a medieval parish church originally built in the 11th–13th centuries 📹 bookedbyalice7

"Scarborough, yesterday. *Taken by Fred Brown."

The only thing you have real control over is what you focus your awareness on and how you breathe. ♥️

Big News this morning : The George Washington statue near Fenway Park in Boston has been given the Highest Honour By the 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scottish Fans. Someone has got up there God knows how and placed a traffic cone □on his heed. 😅🤣😂😂. This is a proud moment for 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland. 👍🏻

She was 57 years old. White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject. She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home. The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene. Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it. The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her. Most people would have gone quiet. Mary Beard went further in. She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation. And she found it had always been there. In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men. She goes. Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately. Not as ancient history. As a pattern. In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts. In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches. Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country. The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life. Mary Beard had found something important. In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening. Her argument was precise and devastating. The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years. The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like. She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it. The threats continued. But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked. They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them. The room had been designed without them in mind. That is not a personal failing. That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision. And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it. Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men. He was wrong then. He is still wrong now. And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it. via The Inspireist #FeministFriday #HERstory

Laughter is anti-inflammatory. Crying is regulating. Hugging is immunoprotective. Singing is vagal toning. Dancing is neurogenic. Joy is a biological necessity.

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