Happy Friday!

I generally start collecting links for this the weekend before it’s published and last weekend, they were looking for Sarah Everard. This week they may have found her body and they have arrested two people (one of them a serving police officer). She was just trying to walk home. This week the hashtag #notallmen started trending as women started to talk about being harassed and assaulted.

I have dealt with men approaching me at night to tell me I’m pretty and then been called a bitch for asking to be left alone, more than once. At school when all the girls started to wear bras, the boys in class pulled our bra straps and I remember a bunch of them trying to look up our skirts with mirrors (upskirting was a thing before digital cameras). I didn’t mention it to my parents, girls are conditioned not to complain about this behaviour, we’re told that it’s just boys being boys.

When I was 13 or 14, I was punched in school by a boy who’d been bullying me because, in a very typical Nic move, I told him that if he was going to call my names he should at least use the right grammar. It happened in school, I was bleeding, no one thought to call my parents, or even give him detention, I was expected to spend the rest of the day in school, with him and was told I had provoked him. He had spent a month calling me names, I answered back once, he punched me. Clearly my fault! I can’t remember if he was suspended, I do know I was concerned that I would get in trouble for wearing a non-uniform jumper the next day (mine had blood on it!) and asked Mum to write me a note because I was worried I would be told off for it (I was).

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, please watch this…

Here are the rest of the links….

How many nurses’ salaries does it take to redecorate Downing Street?. I’m wondering how long it’ll be before they u-turn or the nurses go on strike.

Strong on rhetoric, weak on substance – so much for the ‘vision’ of Global Britain. Boris Johnson and the Stupid Boys…

In the battle of Meghan versus the Firm, who do we cheer on? How about neither… A period of silence from both sides would be welcome, I’m still up for getting rid of the lot of them.

Why are adoption numbers falling, when there are so many children in need?

All in it together? The pandemic’s losers could soon be left behind