Happy Friday! I had a lot to read and say about it this week!

The wealth gap: How changing fortunes tear close friends apart Interesting

How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket

Fighting the tyranny of ‘niceness’: why we need difficult women

Building ‘resilience’ won’t stop traumatised social workers quitting. Social services suffers from a severe lack of joined up thinking generally, but as the funding gets less, it’s going to get worse. Some parents are just horrible and social services can help. They can talk to you about parenting and if you really care, you’ll listen. The problem is what if you’re not a horrible parent? What is you’re just if you’re just highly stressed because you’re in rubbish housing and having to use foodbanks because work doesn’t pay enough and you’re struggling for childcare anyway. Or your husband is a drinker and hits you and you’d like to move back to your mum’s but she’s given up her 3 bedroom council flat because of the bedroom tax and there is nowhere to go except temporary housing so a converted office block or a rubbish B&B which is over an hour away from your kids schools. Or you’ve lost respite care for your severely disabled child and the other kids are clambouring for attention that you can’t give so are acting out and you don’t have any money and your marriage is failing because you never get time together because you’re working opposite shifts because there aren’t enough carers.  Some of what I’m describing is my childhood, some is what I know is happening to people right now, one of the people I see on the bus in Ealing during term time is taking her kids to school in Fulham (my old primary school to be exact!) because they placed her in a B&B in Perivale when she fled domestic abuse and if the kids don’t go to school in Fulham, she doesn’t have any connection to the borough and loses her place on Hammersmith and Fulham’s housing list and she won’t get on Ealing’s because she’s not been in the borough long enough. Navigating this stuff is a bureaucratic minefield and what can a social worker do to help you with any of this? Almost nothing. Welcome to the Britain that was just re-elected because we’re taking back control…..

Flooding in the UK isn’t an act of God, it’s an act of government. I will confess that it did occur to me that all the flooding was happening in areas that voted leave, but co-incidence is not causation, however, how Johnson has your vote, you’re about to find out how much contempt he holds you in. No COBRA, no visits, and very little money. We all told you, you didn’t listen and now, well lets see how long it takes for you to get help with repairing your homes.

The people who matchmake their own parents: ‘Looking back, it was a rash thing to do’. I’m fairly sure that Ma doesn’t want a new life partner but even if she did, I would be staying well out of the way…

Ghost ship washes ashore in Ireland after more than a year at sea

The war between boomers and millennials benefits neither side

A cheery and helpful guide: How to be happy

This about vegetables for a bit – the are AMAZING! How can vegetables help you today?-How can you help vegetables? The road to happiness runs through a veggie patch. 

Why do we only care about incels when they are men? Because men make their problems, everyone’s problem and women aren’t encouraged to do that. Here’s an interesting thing. When Ma read through mine and my brother’s school reports about 20 years after we’d finished school, she was struck by how similar they were. The difference, when I wasn’t interested in something, I just quietly didn’t do it, when Ben wasn’t interested in something, he was disruptive. That right there is most of the difference between woman and men. I also think it’s why the rates of female to male transition is so high but the focus on trans issues seems always to be about male to female transition. Why are trans men not kicking off about being allowed in men’s only spaces. Partly men aren’t as threatened as women but no one seems to want to have a serious conversation about why women might be concerned about it the other way around. Trans women are women but they don’t have the same experience of being ignored and not listened to as CIS women, they can’t seem to get their heads around the idea that their freedom might or should be limited by other women’s rights or freedoms or fears. At the base of male incels rage is anger that they are ‘denied’ something they want. And the solution is to blame women rather than look at their behaviour or just lump it because that solution is only ever taught to women.

Whitehall’s take on Johnson’s reshuffle: this prime minister is insecure. I could have told you that!

The Long History of the Hand-Washing Gender Gap Interesting

Bloomberg Is the Crisis, Not the Cure. Because the answer to a millionaire riding roughshod over the US constitution is a billionaire riding roughshod over the Constitution in a more demure manner…