Nic Dempsey

1) Brene Brown is awesome and I love how honest she is about what she gets wrong.

To a cynical British ear, this may sound embarrassingly new age, but Brown’s Ted talk has been embraced by the American military and she’s in huge demand as a speaker at global corporations. Neither is she a model of perfection: in a video call from her home in Houston, Brown tells me that she flips people off when she’s driving and would instinctively rather punch somebody than make herself vulnerable. But her academic research showed that the shaming culture we live in makes it harder than ever to show courage and be vulnerable – and somebody had to speak out. “People are sick and tired of being afraid all the time. People want to be brave again. So the message is, do it! Get your courage on, but be clear that it won’t be easy. It’s going to feel like shit.”

2) I want to eat all of these but especially the watermelon negroni lolly. Now where did I put the lolly molds…

3) Nice try Guardian but there is no defence of red trousers.

The great and the good of London’s royal boroughs have long-admired the blog Look At My Fucking Red Trousers, which is a brazen celebration of RTs of every sort. A quick browse and perhaps the hatred of the YouGov pollsters becomes clear. The young RT wearer tends to be the kind of wannabe brayer that gallivants around Henley pouring jugs of Pimms on errant serfs’ heads, whilst hoping that his friends won’t tweet incriminating pictures that may later spoil his chances of becoming a Tory councillor. They have all the markings of what the public loathe at the moment: the pillaging banker, the cosy hedge-funder or worse, the Chelsea Foxtons estate agent.

4) Jackie Ashley on what she learnt when her husband had a stroke.

And finally, and perhaps most important, I have become aware of just how fragile life is. We walk in the sunlight, ignoring the shadows. In the blink of an eye lives can be changed utterly. Every year 150,000 people suffer a stroke, and 50,000 of them are still of working age. It can happen while leaning back in the basin at the hairdresser, or even turning your head in the car to look out of the rear window. This is not to say it’s best to spend one’s life worrying about what horrible illnesses or accidents may strike. But there is nothing like a near-death experience to put life’s little annoyances into perspective and to learn to live each day for the day.

5) The Fire Brigade is launching a campaign to raise awareness of ‘silly’ callouts.

We launched our campaign, #FiftyShadesofRed, in a bid to highlight some of the less conventional incidents we’ve attended over the past few years. We tweeted about the incidents from our account, @LondonFire, which certainly raised a few eyebrows, not least among some of my international firefighting colleagues who were surprised to see us putting it all out there, so to speak. This included nine instances of men with ringsstuck in awkward places; nine people with their hands stuck in blenders and shredders; numerous people with their hands stuck in letterboxes; a child with a tambourine on its head … the list goes on. We’ve even been called out to rescue a man whose penis was stuck in a toaster. The mind boggles but the message is serious: use some common sense and remember we’re an emergency service and should be treated as such.

6) New Pope, same attitude.

As Erin Saiz Hanna, executive director of Women’s Ordination Conference said in a statement, there are plenty of other sources the pope could have looked to regarding women’s ordination that did not involve slamming the door in their faces:

[Pope Francis] could have quoted the Vatican’s own Pontifical Biblical Commission that concluded in 1976 that there is no valid scriptural or theological reason for denying ordination to women. Pope Francis could have cited history that documents women’s leadership in the early church, or acknowledge the great works Roman Catholic Women priests are doing today. He could have looked to Jesus who welcomed women as his equal.

He could indeed have done all of those things, but like pretty much every other member of the all male hierarchy in the church, the pope’s mind appears to be “definitively” closed on this issue. The church has gotten away with blatant sexism for so long that even a leader who says all the right things about the need to be inclusive and forgiving and non judgmental (and who probably genuinely believes what he says) loses all self awareness when the rights and expectations of women to be judged as equals within the church are raised.