Horror-Kumquat

Community centres, village halls, libraries, parks, cafes, leisure centres, pubs, restaurants, churches and church halls. All of these things still exist.

I inherited £50,000 a few years ago, at exactly the time the car died. £20,000 on a replacement car, £10,000 on a new bathroom (the old one was embarrassing when we had visitors), £3,000 to replace the sofas that were falling apart. The remainder was absorbed into general expenditure.

It's honestly not much eaten outside the East End of London, and not that much there either these days.

Swapped out simple carbs (white bread, rice, and pasta) for complex carbs (wholemeal everything). No beer or sugary drinks. Replace low-fat with full-fat versions of everything (fat fills you up and means you feel hungry again later than with low-fat stuff). More veg, less baked stuff. More exercise - not gym workouts, just walking more every day and some yoga.

My husband used to say ‘Look at your bottom!’ because he likes looking at my derrière. That became ‘your bottom!’, and now he just calls me ‘bottom’. Which is fine, except when he does it in front of friends and family …

I spent five hours in A&E the other night with my husband, who had what turned out to be a minor injury. When he was finally treated, the doctor took us to the major injury bit because he needed some of the equipment there. Looking around, I was grateful to have been one of those waiting instead of one of those being brought straight through.

Mine was my grandmother's. My mum knew I'd always liked it, so when he was about to propose, she gave it to him. Lovely ring, cost us nothing.

London. All human life is here, almost literally.

Clothes don't need cleaning as much as people think. A good airing, maybe some spot cleaning with a sponge if there's a mark, is sufficient most of the time. Maybe dry clean if it's noticeably dirty, but not often.

Plus you can go up to Rievaulx Terrace, which is in woodland, to look down on it.

My grandmother had all her teeth removed as her 21st birthday present. It seems horrible to us, but it was quite normal then, when the dentist was too expensive for many people and an infection could kill you quickly. She lived to 94, and I never knew all her teeth were false until she was a very old woman.

We moved into this flat in **2005** and discovered we had a party line with another flat in the same building whose owners had moved in the same week as us. Took a while to get that sorted out.

Have you tried IKEA?

It's an alternative way of saying taking French leave.

They’ll be gone once Nigel and his chums get in though.

‘Were you born in a barn?’ When you leave again without shutting the door.

Someone who is young and fit and not having any seizures is not going to get a blue badge just because they have an epilepsy diagnosis. There must be other issues that you don't know about.

Who are these young, fit people in their 20s with controlled epilepsy and blue badges? My husband is 65 and his epilepsy is not controlled by the medications he takes. He certainly doesn't get a blue badge.

The secret to good chips is to double-fry them.

Sit down every Monday and plan what the meals are for the week ahead. Write a list, and go shopping, It works for us. We've reduced our food spend and have much less wasted food because perishables are used before they go off.

It depends how tired you are with the jet lag. It won't take long to get into central London on the Elizabeth Line, and the dining options will certainly be better than at or around Heathow. But you'll need to be back at the airport before 10 (maybe even 9) the next morning.

A monthly donation to the Trussell Trust and a big annual one to a homeless charity.

I enjoyed it in the 70s, especially the bits where John Noakes risked life and limb doing dangerous things. Apart from him, it was very much grown-ups talking down to you, but ALL children’s TV in the 70s was grown-ups talking down to you. And as others have said, there wasn’t any other choice.

It's less than we're paying to those thieving shysters at Thames Water.

Train from Charing Cross to Greenwich (may have to change at London Bridge, but it’ll just be to a an adjacent platform). Takes about 15-20 minutes.

Affordable housing. Wages that could support a family on one salary. Good public services

You'll get six sessions of CBT if you're lucky. Mental health services in this country are appalling.

Hell yes. It was my OH's birthday last week so we went out for a meal. He wanted pizza. Two pizzas, one side salad, two pints of beer and two helpings of ice cream later, we were down £70. It's not that long ago you could get a reasonable three courses for two with wine for that.

I spent two years working with a bunch of people from around Western Europe and our equivalents in the organisation from the US (think European head of tech, US head of tech; European head of marketing, US head of marketing, etc.) That experience was enough to convince me that we in the UK have so much more in common with our fellow Europeans (especially north Europeans) than with people from the US. We are fooled by the common language thing into thinking we're closer to Americans, but that is so untrue.

Potatoes once or twice a week at most, chips once a week. I prefer rice or pasta. Would probably not eat potatoes at all if it wasn’t for the husband.

Once in Sainsbury’s the cashier greeted me with a cheery ‘Having a good day?’ then looked down at my items: a bottle of wine, some grapes, a bar of chocolate and a box of tampons. ‘Oh, sorry love.’

Hoick

And God forbid they should see a nipple.

No. It drives me mad. Why can’t people enjoy a day at the beach or in a park without ruining it for everyone else?

Our quiz master has a zero tolerance approach to phones. One strike and you’re banned. No one cheats any more.

He proposed without a ring. We then went looking for one. In the event, my mum offered him my deceased grandmother’s ring, and I love it, because it reminds me of her and I know she’d love that I’m wearing it now. I don’t get these couples who choose a ring together and then she’s waiting for the proposal. If you’re choosing a ring, you’re already engaged - having some Insta-friendly down-on-one-knee moment doesn’t make the slightest difference.

This is true. Don't believe the media nonsense. Crime, particularly violent crime, is low and falling in the UK. The reason stabbings make the news is because they are rare.

Yes, but the point is you only get a number if you're the reigning monarch.

Presumably she was a queen consort though, not a queen regnant. England has had several queens consort called Elizabeth.

That's low. My husband settled a disability claim eight years for £6K with seven months service in a very low-paid (like just over minimum wage) job.

My mum carried on booking appointments for the entire family to go at the same time right through my time at university (making sure to book for when I was at home during the university vacations) because she knew I wouldn't go of my own volition. She would also take care to have the penultimate appointment and stay in the room while I had the last one (got to put it off as long as possible!). I was so freaked out I didn't even notice that she used to do that. It took a while to cure me of my dentist-phobia.

He arrived about 9:30pm, was triaged pretty much straightaway, sent for a X-ray and then admitted for surgery. On his way to bed on a ward at midnight. Not too bad for a non-critical injury on a Friday evening. Surgery on Sunday afternoon (would have been Saturday but I think he was bumped by a serious traffic accident), discharged on Monday morning.

My husband turned up at St George's Tooting on a filming day. He was approached while he was waiting, told that they were filming everywhere and was asked to sign a release form with name and contact details on it. I think if he had refused to sign, they'd have had to ensure that no footage of him at all was included in the show. He was asked if he'd wear a mic and when he said yes, they fitted one to his shirt. I arrived a little later and he'd already told them I was coming, so I was met with the same form and fitted with a mic too. As we were waiting around in various treatment locations, we were conscious of cameras everywhere and that everything we said was being recorded. A couple of weeks after that, we were called by the production company, saying they were thinking of featuring us in an episode (my husband's injury just happened to fit nicely with that week's theme) and would we be prepared to be interviewed in our home? The assistant who'd called us later came round to ask us a lot of questions about ourselves and about my husband's injury/recovery. A couple of weeks after that, a director, a cameraman and the assistant turned up and spent half a day interviewing/filming each of us in turn. The director interviewed, the cameraman filmed, and the main job of the assistant was to keep the one who wasn't being interviewed occupied elsewhere. We agreed specifically because my husband's injury was related to his disability, and he wanted to publicise the problems he faces because of it. Two or three months later, we got a call from the assistant, telling us which episode of the new series our 'bit' was in and talking us through what would be shown. After the episode aired, they sent us a copy of it on DVD. All in all, it was a positive experience, although it's interesting how they spin some of what they show. For example, at one point a doctor arrived to give my husband a painkilling injection. They showed that, but not the bit where I'd had to go and find someone and ask for painkillers because he'd been left alone for nearly an hour by the doctor who'd assessed him and was in increasing pain.

The only time I’ve ever flown from Luton, we totally screwed up and realised we were at the wrong gate at the wrong end of the airport, just as boarding was happening. A very kind airport worker took us outside and drove us across the tarmac to our plane. I won’t hear a word said against the place.

But they can't prevent you from getting married just because you don't know them.

If you're both British, if neither of you has married before, and if you are both of sound mind and want to marry each other, you have a legal right to marry. Whether or not you can remember each other's birthday is none of their business.

Sadly, by the time I was old enough to understand that it would be good to talk to her about that sort of stuff, she was past talking about anything that wasn’t purely personal to her. So lots about Joe (my great-grandfather, long dead before I was born), their shop, and her parents, but nothing about the great sweep of technological and political change. Although she was very excited when my grandparents got their first colour TV.

My great-granny was 18 when Queen Victoria died. I knew her (she lived to be 100) and her younger sister, Beattie, named after Victoria’s daughter Princess Beatrice.

I was at Cambridge with a girl who told me that her parents had been to the first parents’ night at her (state secondary) school and been told their daughter was a hard worker and should be able to get five or six CSEs (side note: before GCSEs, there were O levels, and CSEs were for the less academic kids). Her very middle-class parents were horrified that their precious child should be lumped with the ‘thickies’ and promptly moved her to a private school. She duly got into Cambridge University, where she scraped a third in her degree. She told this story to illustrate how poor the state school system was and how committed her parents were to her education. All it told me was that they’d bought her a place at Cambridge that would have been better filled by a bright child from a council estate whose school would never have had the resources to put into grooming them for Oxbridge that her posh private school had.

The catch is apparently that the certificate costs around five times what a passport would. An ETA is £16.