Turns out a nearby Turkish restaurant is open Xmas day. So takeaway! and we will be eating falafel like Mary and Joseph probably did! Yum yum.

As above, some parkrun locations don’t allow dogs to run for a variety of reasons, but the GENERAL rule is no more than one dog per runner on a short handheld lead.

OP might have a no-dogs-sorry parkrun, or his dog might just not suit running within those constraints. Mine was OK at parkrun, if not enthusiastic, but he was a menace at the cafe afterwards, as he tended to back round tables and overturn them…

A while ago now we used to take our dog to a care home under the Pets As Therapy umbrella. We got to know one particular resident who still had his marbles and had been in an overlapping line of work to us.

He said that when he went in, he thought he didn’t really have long left.

But through the miracle of being regularly and diligently fed and medicated, he was there four more years, and passed peacefully away one night when his heart packed up.

I do wonder if the less social older people get so used to loneliness they don’t even know they are lonely…

Well caffeine is a bugger, Lavazza decaf ground FTW.

As well as the Steve Peters famous “chimp” book, I learned a lot from Bessel van der Kok’s book “The body keeps the score” about the neurology of stress, memory, cognition and reaction (it is very clear and accessible and is neither the hippy woo that the title suggests, nor the dry science that “neurology” implies! Helpful stuff about why and how the brain pulls this shit on us.

I sometimes break a situation down into small chunks. Could you do this? e.g. instead of going into the restaurant to eat, how would you feel if you popped in to ask to see their menus and specials for a hypothetical later meal? What if you make back up plans for when the heart rate shoots up and you find your brain sprinting around like a fox trapped in a garage? Pretend your phone just vibrated and toddle off to a quiet corner to “check your messages” to see if your panicking brain will settle down.

I sometimes find that visualizing a low stress activity such as yoga, knitting, digging, even scrubbing, helps everything calm down. A version of the old “count to 100, deep breaths” I guess.

The other thing is the old “count 5 things I can see…5 things I can hear…5 things I can touch…” jobbie. Again, the equivalent of going, “LOOK, A DUCKIE!!” at a tantrumming toddler, except the toddler is my own mind. Whether it will be ENOUGH I can’t say but it has helped me a bit at times.

We’re with PetPlan. 11 year old large dog, ~£150/month now.
And that just pays out 80% of the bills after the excess.

NONETHELESS I reckon we’ve broken even over his lifetime, more or less. “Thanks to” (!) the last year :/

We did – at one time – take the “self insurance” route. Then came a year where vet bills would have paid for a reliable second hand hatchback and only one of the dogs we had then survived.

We now pay for good quality insurance, to divorce the pain of losing the money from the pain and worry of dog being ill. That’s our decision but YMMV.

Dog has had 2 major surgeries in a year (to remove 2 different tumours), plus supporting scans and tests (lots), and is currently going through chemo. £££ and I think we’re going to hit the 22-23 limit. Thank god the insurance year rolls over in a week or two.

Thing is – the treatment has kept him happy and well. He goes on his walks, he sleeps, he shakes us down for treats, he barks at the postie, he’s living his life. If we hadn’t treated, we would have had to put him to sleep, he was not a happy lad at all.

We didn’t want to be in the position where dog has something entirely treatable (if dear) and we dither because it’s £6k.

Prices have gone up and vets are thinner on the ground as well. Thanks to Brexit and the pandemic :/

https://www.gov.uk/inheritance-tax

^^^ leaving it to wife who then leaves it to kids, you DON’T lose out on IHT.

However the bit about spouse leaves it to spouse, they remarry and the kids go whistle, that *is* a big problem. So…yeah, sorry, solicitor:/

Ideally the beneficiaries should be executors – if they have capacity – they can hire AND FIRE solicitors but they are definitely motivated to get it done, unlike solicitors.

And FGS get LPAs done – don’t need a sol for that bit – we are all just one RTA away from really needing that.

I see the all of the GCN+ Breakaway presenters are in black!

That odd time where it’s not official but WE ALL KNOW

PS we didn’t have the luxury of a grieving period, as the remaining dog expressed his loneliness by widdling indoors! A powerful argument which we had to accept!

You’ve done everything your old dog needed. I *can* really see it would be a big adjustment to commit to having another dog immediately.

But, there are dogs that need fostering. And quite often broken-hearted dogs come up whose owners have died on them and now they’re confused and lonely in kennels.

You know, I’d let your missus send you “dogs needing homes” listings and let her arrange trips for you to local animal sanctuaries – let her “lead you to water”. Don’t promise her anything though. Just agree to look. Don’t force yourself to feel anything you don’t truly feel.

When the time is right, which may be sooner than you think, you will see a particular dog and think, “I bet you and I would do very well together, Spot!” and it will all happen naturally.

T’other half had epididymis years ago – we were about to go out to a gig and he came into the living room, dropped his trousers and pants and went,
“This isn’t right, is it?!!!!!!”
Poor sod’s balls had doubled in size. Yikes.

Cue swift visit to out of hours. Dr just said, “if it doesn’t get better in a day or so, here’s a prescription for some antibiotics”, but it did and we even got to the second half of the gig (Smiths cover band iirc).

13thfloormonk and the arse hammer FTW – 29 pootling miles this morning and the problem seems to be 99% gone.
Thanks to all, as I could compare your experiences with my own and see what did and didn’t match – very helpful!!

Hmm that’s interesting 13thfloormonk – on the basis that sports massage has extricated me from a whole bunch of problems in the past, I have bought a massage gun off Amazon and have been applying it to my arse while thinking grateful thoughts about the planner who ensured you’d have to stand in the middle of the road to get a good sightline into our living room.
Certainly the piriformis on the affected side was tight so maybe it isn’t bursitis but everything being a bit snarled up.
We shall see…

Rent a pedalo.
Work on year core stability.

Like ^^^ I’ve had great results with just googling local florists and then ringing them up to check they can deliver in time. The flowers are always an obvious step up (like getting veg from the market rather than the supermarket).

Also, Boris should eff off out of there NOW. His disgrace is getting close to Nixon levels of bad behaviour. It’s not just “well, you’re not taking the country in the right direction”, it’s a rich fruitcake style mix of Clinton(Bill)-levels of disgrace, outright lies to his own party, breaking laws that he had only just made himself, corruption, and hobnobbing with unfriendly foreign powers.

It’s cringeworthy hearing him express sympathy for Shinzo Abe’s death. We need a national leader with at least a few crumbs of dignity.

The candidates have to be Conservative MPs, so you have a group of no more than a few hundred people, all of whom work together, many of whom have being PM as their lifetime ambition.

Put them all on the ballot unless they opt OUT.
Get the voters to list the top ten in order of preference.single transferable vote to knock it down to 5 candidates, then have a run-off.
Could do it in a week even allowing for a bit of time for horsetrading, I mean they all have WhatsApp now so don’t even have to be in the same country.

I’m not exactly eye to eye with the Brexit Gollum on all things, but I wouldn’t argue with his view that lack of real-world experience and expertise makes politics and Whitehall stupidly slow and inefficient.

And clearly it’s not as if they have high standards for party leader!!!!!!

A couple of days ago someone on Twitter was discussing a rumour that Boris
a) had a hairdresser (!)
b) who was Canadian and
c) pregnant with a baby Boris back in Canada
Although as far as I could see, no evidence whatsoever was put forward for this, so quite frankly it could just be someone experimenting with how fast fictional rumours travel, workshopping a variety of stories…

To change the subject, May volunteers every year at the Maidenhead 10 on Good Friday, so to that extent at least she does have a genuine public service ethos. When Boris was Henley MP he opened the odd thing near where my OH works, but afaik you would never see him inconveniencing himself to stand on a corner in a hiviz tabard in the cold for hours on end.

Speaking of flying turds :-
Bagged up dog poo hurled to an inaccessible place in the hedgerow.
FFS just drop it neatly at the side of the path so that the dog shit fairy can take it away (I think my best “score” was well over 10 bags in one walk, on a path where clearly no other Dog Poo Fairy had passed for a week or two).

The beauty of the countryside can be the sole nice thing in some people’s day, it’s just so egregiously thoughtless to leave these decaying monstrosities in everyone’s sight but nobody’s reach.

Also, people who don’t bother to read the last 12 pages of the thread to find that their gripe was covered in detail 5 pages ago…;)

I like Wiggo, just the sheer relief he exudes at all times that it’s not him having to do this sh*t anymore is quite heartwarming.
I wonder if he buys doughnuts and eats them in a leisurely fashion in front of former teammates….

The OH came home with a sore throat Tues last week, didn’t think anything of it until I said I’d been wiped out most of the day, then tested and lo! A faint line. I tested negative then, but retested on Sunday when my throat felt scratchy, and my oh my, the T line appeared so fast and so dark that I had to double check that C was the control line, not T!

It hasn’t been worse than a normal winter virus – headache, body aches, general weakness and lack of appetite. Just stayed in bed, necked ibuprofen and paracetamol and rejoiced that I was retired! OH was off work for a few days but is back WFH now.

Annoyingly I feel more human now but tested today and still positive. I’m now well enough to miss social interaction!

Down to the last 6 LFT tests (we managed to order some just before they stopped giving them away).

It seems rampant here, at least six people we know tested positive since my OH did. A lot of them like us, never had it before and have been fairly careful.

Interestingly, north of the border, Canada has no laws about abortion; it is a private matter between doctor and patient.

The reality is that mid or late term abortions arise from tragic and exceptional circumstances, from horrific home lives of control, abuse and lack of support, through pregnancy-related life threatening illness, to severe abnormalities discovered late on.

With unbridled cunning I got the OH a top level ice cream maker for a big birthday. I am vegan … 😈 … it turned out not to be too hard to reverse engineer and improve on commercial vegan ice-cream, and then the rhubarb ice-cream and sorbet came along (chef’s kiss) – suffice to say ice cream making has to be banned regularly as I get too fat!

Apologies for this not being a direct answer…Have you read The Body Keeps The Score? It explains (in a very clear and accessible way) how trauma affects the brain, how this influences emotions and behaviour following that, and how to approach treatment to literally achieve a better state of mind.

It sounds like it might be all woo and crystals from the title but that couldn’t be less the case.

Anyway it might be useful for giving you ideas about what sort of therapeutic approaches you could be interested in.

Oh good *IdleJohn*, not just me then!
MD/late 50s so remember listening to punk on the radio in the bath and grumbling because it wasn’t Abba ;)

The Hynde/Jones stuff has been literally sexed up, I understand.

What drives me nuts is it’s not as if there isn’t HOURS AND HOURS of footage showing what they all looked and acted like!

I was thoroughly put off golf by endless years of my Dad wittering on about it (to be fair he was Scottish, albeit 2nd gen, but OMG he killed any interest I might ever have had in it). A lot in my family played, not all blokes either, my ancient Auntie was a terror on the links.
Their milieu definitely leant towards Gammon Central though, which didn’t help.

Ironically though Mum hated Dad she too took up golf, as did her partner (a much happier relationship!). Yet again though there were always tales of bitchiness, cliques and skulduggery down their (much cheaper) club which put me right off.

The golf club next to the vets, though, opens their cafe to all, and the people we’ve seen come and go there (while we’re indulging a hobby more expensive than either cycling or golf!!) seem like normal folk doing a sport. That (and the fact that a perfectly nice retired colleague does it) make me cautiously open to the concept that it’s not the worst thing ever after all.

Ironically if you wanted to schmooze at my old firm, golf wouldn’t have done it. Cycling and running! That’s how you rubbed shoulders with the big higher ups! At one time the work branded-goods shop offered an £11k Pinarello (!)

Watching it but mainly through my fingers. Am I older than you lot or just more picky?

Enjoying the archive footage though, and the opportunity to go look up all the “Did so and so REALLY…?!” questions that arise…

Handfeeding canned dog food to the family dog and cleaning up the mix of drool and “food” afterwards, day after day, without gloves or complaint!

I do wonder whether there is more of the underlying problem around these days. I mean – it seems so? Have I just blanked out all the kids having meltdowns in my own classes? We’re talking 40-50 years ago.
Has there been something going on that triggers problems in kids, or, were there the same number and if so what happened to the kids with those issues in the 70s, 80s, 90s?
ETA genuinely asking for other oldies’ thoughts – it’s a bit harder to tell as not coping with school AT ALL means more likely to lose touch with people – by contrast, although being gay was not encouraged in the 70s, enough of my classmates from middle school are gay NOW that it does indeed seem that it was always about how well you bearded up.

Congratulations! Join the club!

Who wants them?

Me, in 25 years time, when my eyesight, cognition and reactions aren’t good enough for driving, but I want to keep as much independence as possible and not rely on strangers, some of whom may be keen to fleece the elderly and vulnerable.

My mate who’s just had a mahoosive stroke aged 50 could do with them right now TBH.

My elderly relative could have done with them last week when I spent about 6 hours ferrying them to and from a specialist medical centre for some treatment. It was nice spending time together! But a lucky thing I’m retired!.

Who else?

At least 3 friends who lost their licences for a couple of years or more after having seizures.

All the under 17s who live out in the sticks and don’t want to cycle back from town in the dark in the winter.

The young woman two streets along who lost her sight in her teens.

The diehard city lover who never learned to drive and who now has a sick mother 2h drive away (but 3-4 h by public transport, and God help you if you have a load of stuff to carry).

Anyone getting a taxi who’s ever been taken the loooong way to their destination (this happened to me in *Canada* FFS).

if they can get it working it will be absolutely **** awesome.

My first dog appeared to be able to identify Julian Cope tracks (fx: Alan Partridge shrug) but the rest of ’em seem to not notice music at all.

Best of luck.
Fwiw the happiest families I see are where both parents went a little part time – so both of them know what work is like and both of them know what looking after the kid(s) is like. Dunno whether that’s a cause (keeps you both in similar worlds so communication is easier) or a symptom (the arrangement is a natural consequence of having similar goals and working as a team).

I am with nostrils, Ewan McG was doing his best but the rest looked like it was hoiked from a crappy Dr who episode.

Such that, having cut Ep1 short to see if Ep2 was any better, I ended up starting to watch Solo – which, I was surprised to find, is actually moderately entertaining(!!!). Though I am only half way through so I haven’t yet found out how they explain Han Solo’s change in eye colour !

Pragmatically, you can basically set up your own charitable trust through CAF so that you can put money into it when tax-efficient and donate it onwards to charities etc whenever you like (i.e. later on in life when you may be paying only basic rate tax or none at all).

Bung some in pensions & ISAs for the kids.
Make sure you have enough of a slush fund/insurance for everything hitting the skids (say nasty car crash which leaves you & the Mrs unable to work and needing a lot of care).

Once you have these bases covered you’ll most likely be more relaxed about spending the leftover moolah on things to make life easier, to make happy memories, to make life fuller. What those are – very personal – while you’re still working, a lot will be “buying quality time”.

One open-water swimmer friend has had a couple of episodes of Transient Global Amnesia connected with it.
Used to do ice baths and tbh quite fancy giving open water swimming a go, but definitely going to do it organized…

I’ve had occasions where a complete stranger was an egregious dick to me and been shaken up and upset for a while after – it’s the fight/flight response, sort of, as you realise how powerless you are in those moments.

I am guessing, OP, that if you had been driving an unmarked cop car with cameras on your way to a meeting of chief constables, you’d be feeling rather different about this incident.

The feeling does eventually pass.
Paradoxically the going over it in your head sometimes “wears out” the emotional impact and is helpful!

Still sucks until you do get over it, but you are not alone, if that helps.

I’ve got a clubmate who’s working in Shanghai & heard from them yesterday….fwiw

Stuck in a house with Panorama-worthy Neighbours From Hell due to negative equity in the late 80s & early 90s, we took in lodgers as we desperately needed to make up the shortfall to get out. We went away for the weekend and I never did find out QUITE what they did but every crevice in the bloody kitchen seemed to have crumbs of Spam in…

I am not an AI but would be interested to know what Mr teacake is running!

rigidly dropping to 2nd and 15mph for every roundabout even when clearly clear

I still shudder at the near miss I had when driving up to a local roundabout and only at the last second seeing a road cyclist crossing it at exactly the right speed that meant the road sign was always between my eyes and them… Yikes yikes yikes.

I like 20mph zones (as a car driver) – so much less stress! because it gives you that extra buffer to see things and react before your paths cross. I know this is not a universal attitude :D

We’ve just come back from a holiday in Jordan, and although the driving was random and casual to a fault – the hour’s drive round the outskirts of Amman was taxing and I was the passenger! – you just could not drop attention ever ever ever – it wasn’t aggressive.
Quite a lot of people drove very slowly and would move over to let others pass as a matter of course. People didn’t seem fixated on speed or prone to tailgating and although there weren’t pedestrian crossings, you could just sort of launch yourself into traffic when an opportunity arose and the cars would accept that and let you through.

Canary Islands as well, drivers just seemed more mellow.

I ♥️ the HC but would love to see a cultural change here to a more chill, co-operative attitude to road use.

The OH had to do the “naughty step” course once – I was gobsmacked as a very calm safe driver – like so many here, the old “caught doing 38 – thought it was 40 zone – this was not correct” story. Said was a good interesting course.

Why do we not do good quality drivers Ed as part of the mandatory curriculum? Teach the “naughty step” course to 10 year olds. Get simulators in primary schools. Establish good habits before the hell of puberty kicks in.

I wonder if the plan is to get a bunch of civilians to leg it, kill most of the rest, and then move their own people in? A time honoured method – think of all the (then) German towns that became Polish after WWII, the ex-Greek and ex-Turkish towns, the Jewish towns and districts all over Europe, and, well, lots of the Americas…