knightsbridge-

M&S fully-coated digestives are fantastic. [https://www.marksandspencer.com/food/6-milk-chocolate-coated-digestives/p/fdp20002010](https://www.marksandspencer.com/food/6-milk-chocolate-coated-digestives/p/fdp20002010)

Look for a youth hostel. It's what they're for.

I once had a conversation with my husband which went something like: "I've known many Americans, I've had American friends, I know Americans are perfectly intelligent, nuanced people. But. There's something about them - the bombastic manner, the perpetual earnestness, the inability to laugh at themselves, the loudness, the credulity... There's something about them that makes them feel kind of like cartoon characters. Like they're larger than life, occasionally they don't feel like real people". British society is relatively understated and sardonic. Americans - and, to a lesser degree, Canadians too - just feel very big and loud and credulous by comparison.

I own 4 proper coats, and 2-3 hoodie-esque quasi-coats. The coats are: * Technical waterproof for hiking. It doesn't live in the normal wardrobe, it lives in the spare bedroom hiking wardrobe, since I only use it on long wet walks for a bunch of reasons I'm not going into here. * A regular cheap waterproof for rainy non-cold days. * A fancy wool coat for when I need to look good while wearing a coat (like evenings out to dinner, dates and stuff). It's not remotely waterproof, so it doesn't come out on wet days. * A big hunking great waterproof winter coat. It's very warm and very weatherproof, but it gets put away at the top of the wardrobe when it's not winter because I bake alive in it when the temperature is anywhere above 5C. * The hoodies are all just different thicknesses. Some are zip-ups, some are pullovers. One of them is a light gym hoodie for summer, one is a thick fleece for winter, the other two are in the middle. Honestly, my real problem isn't coats. It's shoe-creep. I own plenty of shoes, and yet I still find situations where none of them are appropriate. * Big stonking waterproof hiking boots: Only useful for hiking, not comfy enough to justify wearing casually, plus they were expensive and I don't want to wear them out unnecessarily. * Regular sketchers trainers for daily wear - very comfy and water-resistant but painfully uncool and make me look like a knob. That's fine for going to the shops or walking the dog, but not fine for any situation where I care about how I look. * Gym trainers. Basically just for the gym/running. Super light and breezy, not remotely waterproof, don't wanna get them too dirty too often because I don't wanna track dirt into the gym/onto the equipment. * Fancy black ankle boots. Fairly comfy and look good, but can't wear boots with all outfits. * White sandals. Good for summer, useless otherwise. * Crocs. For camping shoes, putting out the bins, going in the sea... stuff where you want to encase your feet in impervious comfy soft plastic. * Plain black court heels. My only option for semi-formal, but I hate wearing them, so they're really just taking up space. How can I own seven pairs of shoes and still sometimes feel like I have no idea which to wear? Which of these do you wear with dresses, if it's not summer?? I hate owning this many pairs of shoes because I have no space for them, but clearly I need at least one more pair because I still sometimes look at them all in despair and realise none will work with the outfit I've picked.

Basically anywhere that isn't London and the surrounding area, or the nicest areas in other major cities.

I mean... Of course they do. It's not like we've got billions of people driving scared. It's not quite right, but you can think of roundabouts as just circular roads with a lot of turn offs. You move into the outside lane in order to turn off on normal multi-lane roads, and you move into the outside lane to turn off roundabouts too. Old country lanes are just a side effect of a country where a huge amount of the road network predates cars. Nobody really *likes* driving down those roads, but they're fine. Everyone knows how to drive on them. Zigzags just mean "there's a crossing here, and it's important to keep good visibility of it so someone doesn't die crossing the road, so you can't park or overtake here".

It's definitely more popular among older people. My husband and I walked the Hadrian's Wall Path a few weeks ago. I'd say about 70% of the other hikers we saw were over 55. I understand, frankly. It ate up loads of our annual leave to do a hike that long, I'm not surprised it's mostly retired/semi-retired people doing it. I think it comes out of the fact that there isn't much in the way of "dangerous" hiking in the UK. Even stuff like Cape Wrath is relatively tame compared to more rugged countries, and the "three peaks" routinely have queues of normal people climbing up them. This makes most UK hikes very accessible to older people, who have the time to get out and do them. It's a shame, honestly. Hiking should be more popular, it's fun!

I was once interviewing for a job. A friend of mine happened to work for one of the two interviewers, so he filled me in on some basics about the guy and what he was like. Because my friend is managed by the interviewer, I also got to hear which room they're using for the interviews (my friend went to say hi, since the manager doesn't usually work at our site). I didn't consciously intend this at the time, but these two pieces of info meant I could; * Get to the room early, without needing to be fetched by the other interviewer. Actually, the second interviewer went to get me, not realising I knew where to go. * This meant I got a solid 20 minutes sat alone with the first interviewer, my mate's manager, before the interview started (big building) * I spent those 20 minutes engaging the interviewer in a long, detailed chat about World of Warcraft, which I only knew he also played because my mate mentioned it. To this day, I'm pretty convinced I got the job because of this. I think it may have been the thing that helped me stand out. (This all happened more than 10 years ago).

Lardy Cake. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lardy\_cake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lardy_cake) They used to sell them for £1 for a whole one or 50p for half a one at the local bakery in the high street. I'd happily scarf down a whole one by myself (and yes, this did mean I eventually started resembling them). Haven't had one in decades, can't seem to find them where I live now. Sticky, sugary, doughy, delicious.

There's just so many issues blocking young people from getting a job, fixing all of them is probably impossible. * Cost of living just means that everyone is getting less for their money, and young people who earn very little are going to feel it more than more established people, making working seem less worthwhile. * University degrees are being devalued by the sheer number of people going to Uni these days, but you still have to pay back your student loan for your less-valuable-than-it-was-20-years-ago degree. * Young people are just less willing to take a shitty job than they were in the past, rightly or wrongly. * Rises in minimum wage and employee NI responsibility has made it more expensive to employ entry level employees. * And, of course, AI and related automation tech has removed a lot of traditional entry level jobs from the market completely. I have sympathy for the government, I wouldn't even know where to start with this. The only guaranteed solution is to *make sure* that working is always better than not working, but that's out of their control - how much someone enjoys their job and how fulfilling they find it is not something the government can control. They have maybe a little more control over how financially viable it is, but that ties into huge questions about affordability of rent and bills which are whole separate problems that are hard to solve.

No, though I probably should. My husband is slathering it on because he turns into a full-body lobster after 15+ minutes of sun exposure. I haven't bothered because I don't usually get sunburnt, I tan reasonably well (for a pasty British girl). I'm actually kind of enjoying my mild little tan. These reasons have absolutely nothing to do with preventing skin cancer, which is the real reason why I should be wearing it.

I think this is a hard question to answer because social media was *very* different when I (and most adults living today) were children. I grew up with stuff like MySpace and early Facebook. They couldn't do video, only updated a couple times an hour, you only connected with people you knew (and rarely saw any content from people you didn't know, unless it was a band you'd explicitly chosen to follow or a friend of a friend or something). The idea of propaganda via social media didn't quite exist yet (though it had started). This is an entire world away from the modern reality of Instragram (+Reels) and TikTok, which are the main forms of social media kids wrangle with today. They're based on a constant, endless stream of short form videos from hundreds of thousands of creators with various different agendas and goals. They just aren't comparable. We don't yet know how modern social media will affect kids because *none of the kids that use modern day social media have finished growing up yet*. TikTok became popular in the West not even ten years ago. ... ... But it's difficult to argue in favour of modern social media when the only clear positive is "It's kinda fun". A lot of things are fun.

If it's for an office job, then no, don't wear shorts. The interview will be in an air conditioned building anyway. If it's a manual job, I doubt they'd care.

"Stylistic" means "the specifics of how something feels/is designed". For example; "While both authors write in the fantasy genre, their stylistic approaches are entirely different". The word you were looking for was "stylish". "Aesthetic" is a noun that refers to the specific style of a given thing. Like "this outfit has a Victorian aesthetic" or "this room has been decorated with a retro 60s aesthetic'. The word you were looking for was... Actually, I have no idea, kids these days love using "aesthetic" to mean "looks good" and I have no idea what word they're confusing it with. Anyway city Airbnbs look like shit because they don't *need* to look good in order to make money. Enough people need to stay in the city that the rooms can be let regardless of how they look. Rural and unusual Airbnbs are often trying to sell you on the Airbnb *itself*, as if it were a resort, so more effort goes into making people stay at this specific rural Airbnb by making it a nice place to spend time.

The best cheap fix I've discovered is to put your feet in a tub of cold water. Doesn't even need to be that cold - regular tap water is fine. It cools you down extremely well, way more then you'd expect. We've got a couple of super cheap "foot spa" plastic tubs off Amazon. They're basically washing up bowls, but shaped for your feet.

Occasionally, if I'm feeling fancy. I can't imagine caking up every single day, that sounds exhausting. None of my male colleagues ever wear makeup, so why should I?

Maybe a couple times a year? Not as often as I should, honestly. I've had two days so far this year, and I think I had four last year? Mostly just for days where I wake up and think "... No. No, I can't today." Usually because I'm tired or stressed about something that may or may not be work related.

Confused. Why would the bus be a problem...? I got the bus to work from age 16 to about 26-ish back in the 00s because I couldn't afford a car til then (I had a license, just nothing to use it with). Why would an employer care how you're getting to work as long as you get there... ?

Confusing post. The "right then..." is basically a way of saying "I think this social encounter is over". It's not unique to turfing people out of your house. It's also used to leave *their* house, to leave the pub, to leave a restaurant, to exit random bumped-into-someone-i-know-in-public chats... Sometimes I've seen it used to end meetings at work, to indicate people should move on to the next activity in a gathering (e.g. "right then, shall we..." with the actual activity usually left implied). It's a universal term for "I think this conversation is over, don't you?". It's not rude, it's just a shorthand for a whole load of similar-ish scenarios with a common theme.

My flat is impossible to find (six identical buildings each containing six flats, 36 flats in total, all labelled like they're in the same building and no indicator on the buildings themselves which flat numbers are in which physical building. Also none are directly on the road, all are only accessible from footpaths from the shared car parks. Yes, it is atrocious). Royal Mail seem to manage, and DPD also do okay. Evri do whatever they feel like, and the likes of Deliveroo/UberEats always get hopelessly lost. I always give rigorous directions to try and get them to the nearest bit of road I'll be able to see them from, then stand on the porch and wave. Otherwise I'm never getting my food.

I think there's a pretty grand myth about how many people have it hard (Vs how many don't). First, lives can be hard for all sorts of reasons. Past abuse, chronic conditions, neuro diversity, single parenthood, LGBTQ identity, learning difficulties, generational poverty, racism, whatever. Second, the number of people who legitimately have no or close to no struggles in life is extremely low. They are the minority, not the majority. We basically all have our own struggles to manage, you just don't hear about the struggles of everyone around you. So... You're expected to cope for the same reasons everyone else is. Because life is a series of obstacles to overcome, regardless of who you are and what your particular obstacles are shaped as.

Sort of, but maybe not for the reason you'd think? I actually think neck tattoos can look pretty cool. But I'm also aware that a lot of places won't employ someone with a large neck tattoo. Which means when I see someone with one, I tend to think "This person wanted a neck tattoo even though it might cost them in employment opportunities in the future." That's not a choice I'd make - no matter how rad the tattoo is, I'm just kinda risk averse and wouldn't wanna limit my chances in any way. So when I see a neck tattoo, my general thought is something like "Damn, this person really didn't give a shit about whether that thing was gonna make it harder to get a job later." Good? Bad? A bit of both? Dunno.

Setting someone on fire is fairly difficult. It requires you to have access to a source of fire to begin with, and then to successfully ignite someone's clothing, which probably requires an accelerant of some kind. Basically, it's really unlikely that it's a practical option for repelling an attacker. UK law allows for *reasonable* levels of self defence. That usually covers things like hitting, kicking, biting, grappling, maybe hitting them with an object you have handy. It generally doesn't cover stabbing, burning, and other forms of lethal force, but it always depends on the situation. My real question is what kind of day you're having that made you think about this at all.

I know it's weird. I just find potatoes boring - I don't mind them with something to dip them in, but I don't love them.

Hard to say. I suspect they don't much care as long as they don't get in any real trouble.

This might get spicy. It's well known that food delivery apps don't do a great job of enforcing that a given driver is the person who set up the account they're using. This can sometimes be a revenue stream for the person registered to the account. If you're Dave, and you have a full-time day job and the right to work in the UK, but Sandra doesn't have the right to work here (for whatever reason), Sandra might pay you £20/day to let her use an UberEats account registered in your name so she can earn money from it. Most people don't particularly care who's delivering their dinner.

Basically never. I don't really like chips, and I like oven chips the least. If I'm doing chips - which is rare - I do them from scratch.

I can't speak to modern day, but this sort of happened to me in the 00s. I was bullied at school. I was also the kind of teenager to dig my heels in and refuse to do things I didn't want to do (rightly or wrongly). This led to a lot of me refusing to go to school and my parents being unable to physically drag me out of the house and force me to. I eventually missed enough school that my mother started to get in trouble for it. She eventually ended up going the nuclear option and taking me out of school in favour of homeschooling. She didn't particularly *want* to do it, but it was seemingly the best solution she could find. I was just thrilled that I didn't have to go back to school again. My homeschooling was nonexistent. I never studied, I was never taught. I spent my life from age 14 to 16 playing World of Warcraft and occasionally working part time. I didn't go outside much because I didn't have any friends anyway and our family was small. I failed all of my GCSEs, mainly because I turned in 0 coursework (apparently I did okay on the exams themselves, surprisingly).

No, not really. There are very few nutrients that you can't get from multiple sources. Just eat a different one. I don't really like fish, which means I sometimes struggle with stuff like omega3... So I just eat more of the few fish I *do* like.

Barely any. We just don't go on a lot of holidays. Haven't been overseas since our honeymoon in '22, and before that it was a couple years. I like holidays just fine, but it's always hard to justify the cost when I could spend that on something more tangible.

We had a loud dog when I was a kid. You just become numb to it. He's going to bark, no matter what you do. If you shush him or try and stop him, it only holds for about five minutes before he starts up again. Decades of attempts to train him out of it never really worked. So he can bark right next to you, or he can bark at the end of the garden. You hear the former and neighbours hear the latter. Back in my house, we used to split it near 50/50 so we only had to deal with half of it.

They stay in flat shares and/or rent rooms. Unless they're in social housing, low wage workers aren't affording self-contained flats. When I met my husband, he was a masters graduate working his first job, and he was living in a bedroom in an HMO because that's what he could afford at age 25 on his starter salary. That's reality. It's why so many people don't move out at all.

I know a couple of people who passed automatic only because they couldn't get to grips with gears. In the past, this would've mattered far more. As we trend towards more and more EVs on the road, manual geared cars are likely going to become a pretty niche hobby sometime in the next 50 years. So I wouldn't say it really matters anymore.

Kind-of. When I was a kid, if I really really misbehaved beyond the point of a verbal telling off, I'd be threatened with a smack. Like, if all negotiations had broken down and I was completely intransigent, the final nuclear option was "Do you want a smack?" Usually, that threat was enough to make me stop doing whatever I was doing. I can only remember twice ever in my childhood that the promised smack was actually deployed, and it was entirely performative. It was so soft that I could barely feel it, let alone feel any pain. Looking back, I think my mum was uncomfortable doing it and hated that I'd called her bluff. Still worked pretty well though. I was afraid of the dreaded smack, and the threat did get me to behave.

They do look like fruit flies or house flies, though the photo isn't very clear. Look for hidden pieces of food. These look like freshly hatched baby flies. They lay their eggs on decomposing food. If they're near the bin, check under it, the underside of the lid, any food that's missed the bag and fallen in the bottom of the bin etc and any cupboards nearby. Personal horror story: Last year, our kitchen was invaded by exactly this kind of cloud of baby flies. I had no idea where they were coming from or why. After a few days of nuking them with fly spray and having them immediately replaced by new ones, I tore the kitchen apart to look for the source. I eventually found a bag of potatoes that'd for some reason been pushed to the back of a cupboard that we don't normally keep food in (it's there "hand mixer, mixing bowls, minor appliances I never use etc" cupboard). The potatoes were extremely rotten and lying in a pool of disgusting fluids - they were so far back in the very bottom cupboard that I couldn't smell them with the doors closed. Thankfully. Extremely disgusting. Getting rid of them and cleaning up and sanitising the cupboard got rid of the flies.

The advantages: * Generally speaking, charging an EV is significantly cheaper than buying petrol/diesel. This isn't universaly always true - it depends when and where you charge and what fuel prices are currently doing - but overall you'll save quite a bit of money. * They also pay less road tax, are always exempt from ULEZ, and tend to need fewer mechanical repairs (no gearbox, and electrical engines tend to be easier to work on than combustion engines). Obviously tyres and wipers and stuff are unchanged. * You get the satisfaction of knowing that your personal driving is causing substantially fewer emissions, if that's something you care about. The disadvantages: * EVs are more expensive up front to buy than non-EVs. The gap is closing, but for now, it still exists. * Charging infrastructure is nowhere near as developed as petrol station coverage. If you frequently drive long distances away from home or around rural areas, you may struggle to find a working charger. * They take time to charge. If you need to charge halfway through a roadtrip, you have to sit there for far longer than you'd sit at a petrol pump. * The battery will degrade over time. It'll degrade slowly, but it'll happen. At some point, you'll either need a new car or a replacement battery. The could-go-either-ways: * You probably want a charger installed at your home, and you're shit out of luck for that if you rent or live in a flat. That said, if you do have a home charger, your car charges overnight and you probably never have to visit another charger unless you're doing a long distance journey

Surely this is obvious... ? "Nee" is a regional variant of "No". It says "No cheesy chips allowed in here". It's a joke.

I made a lot of objectively bad choices in my 20s, but I don't think I'd do anything differently. If I hadn't made those mistakes, I might not be where I am right now. And I love the life I have right now. Wherever the me that took a different road might've ended up, I'm happy to stay where I am.

Being poorer? I dunno what answer you're looking for here. I've had two below inflation pay rises in a row the last two years, so my income is just a bit lower than it was two years ago. I suppose the real answer is saving. While my income has gone down in pure terms, I've still spent those years paying down debt and saving money, and the gains from doing that offset the pay cut significantly. If I manage to save £200/mo every month for two years, I've still got nearly £5000 in savings at the end. Even if my income didn't rise, I still became wealthier because I accrued wealth over time. Try and curtail lifestyle creep was another one. As I get older, I'm getting better at realising that I don't actually need that much stuff. That there's a difference between stuff I actually need, stuff I really want, and stuff I only kinda want. I never buy the latter anymore, and I rarely buy the second. Younger me would've bought all three, and stopped caring about the third one within a few weeks of buying it. For me, that final category is niche electronics, hobby stuff, unnecessary clothes and mini holidays/days out. There's probably stuff in your life that you spend money on that isn't actually a great return in happiness for how much it costs. Keep the stuff that actually makes you happy, cut the stuff that only kinda does.

I track my weight in kg, and I spend a fair few cumulative minutes googling what a certain number of kg is in st when I have to talk to older people who don't speak metric. I have no idea how much a stone is, it means nothing to me.

I have no idea what group you're talking about.

You would be seen as a Canadian with British parents. This isn't really a bad thing, though. Nobody hates Canadians.

English. Spanish bluebells are thicker and heavier, and the stems point straight up with the unopened flowers as a point at the top. English ones are more slender and the top of the stem tends to bend over to the side under the weight of the flowers.

Stand in the kitchen chopping onions at 7, honestly. But not every day - I always cook enough to have at least one more meal's worth of leftovers so I only have to cook roughly once every other day. I also just don't cook anything too elaborate or complicated unless it's a special occasion. I live off curries, chili, Bolognese, pasta bakes, casseroles, and the traditional "veg and meat on a plate" type meals (hunters chicken, sausage and mash, parmigiana). I'm not sure I believe that many working people are assembling lasagnes and whatnot after work, unless they're cooking all the components across multiple days or something.

By buying from a local farm shop while strawberries are in season in the UK. Strawberries that are shipped from abroad are always going to taste worse than ones grown locally, as they must be refrigerated or frozen for transport. Likewise, strawberries that are grown out of season in polytunnels or greenhouses are not likely to get a chance to become as sweet as naturally ripened strawberries grown under the sun. Strawberry season in the UK is from late May to early Sept. Once it starts, get ye to a farmers market or "pick your own" farm.

Politeness =/= Kindness. British politeness *is* about avoiding conflict and letting people get on with their day unrumbled. This isn't the same as actual kindness, and the existence of politeness doesn't say anything about whether you're kind or not. It's wrong to think of them as in any way related. I once work with a Ghanian man who'd lived all over the world. Someone once asked him if he noticed any differences between Brits and Americans. He thought for a second, then said: "Americans, if they don't like you, they will want to say it to your face. They will walk across the room specifically to tell you that they don't like you. British people, it's hard to tell if they like you or not. They don't say it either way. They are polite to you even if they don't like you, and even if they do." I suspect this isn't quite as true these days as it was back in the 00s when he was answering the question, but it's a pretty good answer to your question. Politeness and kindness are not connected to each other.

Because I think it's important that there's a source of news and entertain that is politically neutral (or at least, more politically neutral than most). The fact that the BBC is more than half funded by license fee payers and doesn't exist to make a profit - having no shareholders to demand it does or doesn't make certain things - is valuable to me. I don't want to live in a world where all TV media is either a) for profit, b) to advance a specific agenda or c) influencers (which is just a sub-genre of "for profit"). So I do my part and give them my £15.

They eat rotting wood and other plant detritus, so look for the nearest source of that to where you're finding them. Rotten wood is the most likely culprit, especially if you have any damp corners. Attic beams are a decent shout, so are musty wardrobes or kitchen units. You probably know better than us which room(s) you find them in. The woodlice themselves aren't harmful in any way... But they're a sign that there's probably some rotting wood somewhere in your house.

I'm exactly 35, but my husband is 33, so I'm gonna say we count. We pay the license fee because we support the BBC as an institution that should exist, so it seems a decent enough use of £15/mo. As far as whether we actually watch it; occasionally. Not often.

Pretty normal, I'd say. We've never had moths or carpet beetles, but we do have a little colony of silverfish that live under our bathroom floor. They come out at night to eat the toilet paper dust. I kind of enjoy watching them when I get up in the night to use the toilet. The previous flat I lived in was on the ground floor, which was far worse. We would occasionally get explorative ants coming in under the back door in our kitchen - had to be diligent in keeping all food hidden away, or the trickle would become a stream. The house I grew up in had a problem with slugs in the kitchen, which is also pretty common in older houses. They're my least favourite bug to find in my house. The door didn't seal very well, and led to a fairly damp side alley, so slugs would get in through various gaps and holes. My cat used to alert us whenever she found one encroaching on her bowl. Most bugs are harmless. It's just a reality of living in older buildings.