Happy Friday! This week has felt about 1000 times longer than it actually was, the power of having to write technical minutes….

Here are this week’s links…

Food Labelling differences in the US v. the EU. I found this really interesting

Decorated cakes. The cake I can do, the decoration, not so much!

It’s really hard to get a smear test if you’re unmarried in China. Whereas my doctor was telling me to get it done as soon as he knew I was having sex but the idea that it’s easier to get an abortion than a smear is just boggling..

I loved the Victorian era so much I decided to live it. I pretty much ‘noped’ my way through this. Lady, how did you write this article, how do you write your blog? I appreciate that your lifestyle makes sense to you but this is an example of privilege, you don’t live as a Victorian, you have all the advantages of living in this time and none of disadvantages of Victorian living. I grew up in the 1980’s in a city that has a lot of Victorian era stuff around it, I went to school in a building built in 1883, the church I was baptised in was Victorian, so for that matter was the flat I grew up in (1887). There were good things about the Victorian era, lots of good design but they are outweighed by the horror of poverty, disease and awfulness, oh and the ability to read and write, lack of poor houses, public health, right to vote, lack of smog and not sending small children up chimneys or to work as infants, conception, clean streets, women’s rights and a whole heap of other things that Victorians didn’t have. In comparison mockery for you choice to wear a corset seems like a fair price to pay…

The Toast has a better more mocking response. I love 2012, so I decided to live in it.

Chile is trying to create a marine park around Easter Island. I am  fascinated by Easter Island, it’s so far away from anywhere else.

Hannah Betts gave up drinking and because she was an alcoholic, it was a good thing. She also wrote something for The Pool about this and while I’m pleased that she’s better for giving up booze, I worry about the slew of articles I’m seeing whereby someone with a pathology explains that it’s a problem for society. Betts didn’t do AA and she doesn’t actually say that she is an alcoholic but she is. She describes blackouts and “UDIs (A&E code for unidentified drinking injuries); a litany of unremembered sexual encounters; sleeping rough after losing bag, phone and keys; episodes in which they soiled themselves”, things that happened to her and her friends. As someone who lives in fear of becoming an alcoholic (addiction runs through my father’s family like words through a stick of rock) I’m hyper aware of dangerous drinking and also aware of how this could sound like ‘the lady doth protest too much’ but even knowing that I probably go over the recommended amount but I have never experienced any of those things and am plenty aware that I don’t actually need to drink. If she thinks that maybe society needs to look at how it enables alcoholic drinking (I think it probably does), she needs to say that, rather than say that because she has a drinking problem everyone has one.

Jeremy Corbyn and the National Anthem. I don’t sing the National Anthem. I’m a republican, I don’t believe in the monarchy. It’s possible to love your country without loving Head of State and if you don’t believe in the monarchy then singing ‘God Save the Queen’ is hypocritical.

The things that Jay Rayner is now too old to bother learning. This…

When I turned 40 I realised that one of the pleasures of seniority was all the things I no longer had to apologise for: if I want to drink rosé instead of beer I can. Likewise, if I never see another production of King Lear ever again that will be just fine by me. (If I want to hear about old people losing their marbles and bugging their grown-up kids, I can ask my middle-aged friends round for dinner and get them to talk about their elderly parents.)