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I've just found out I've lost another ex colleague to suicide. That's 5 good blokes gone in the past 10 years.

Tragic that anyone should get to that state of mind.

I remember a guy I used to work with, he was based in Holland, a nice guy, took his own life. Left for work. Got into the office. Left to get some lunch. Next thing he’s gone on the train line and ran at a train. Left no note or anything. Terribly sad and his family were not just distressed but confused

I worked with a guy who many years later was arrested for a sexual assault on a (child) family member. Initially he denied the charge, but on the day he came clean his wife walked in front of a First Great Western express train at Yate. He was out in a couple of years, whilst she paid the ultimate price for his crimes.

One has to be absolutely at the end of their tether to make such an awful decision.

That’s horrendous. She paid the price for his crimes. I’ve had some dark moments in my life, as I’m sure many of us have, but it’s never been that dark I’d consider that. I remember working on the London Underground and jumpers were regarded as an inconvenience

A case that I would welcome comment on, from whatever view. A man's wheelchair was confiscated by the police for 3 weeks and kept in the vehicle pound. Without it he was not comfortably mobile, even within his own home. It took some heavy intervention to shift the police stance.

The core issues are around the regulatory hole between tricycle, wheelchairs and mobility scooters, and which category a clip-on hand cycle fits into, the police being ill-informed / officious, and the failure of Governments to keep regulations up to date. Using a clip-on handcycle (manual or battery) can double or treble autonomous travel radius for a wheelchair user - maybe to 8-15 miles in any direction. This has been a campaign issue for a few years.

My photo today is the one at the bottom, which is a manual wheelchair with a clip-on handcycle attachment, as you can see.

Police impound disabled man's wheelchair for 3 weeks

A severely disabled man from New Cross was left housebound and completely dependent on friends and family, while he appealed to police to release his wheelchair from Charlton Vehicle Pound.
...
When Vidal woke up in hospital, he was told that the police had confiscated his wheelchair.

It took three weeks of appeals and lobbying from Vidal, his family, his GP, hospital medics and eventually advocacy groups before he got it back.

Vidal is paraplegic with complex health needs and has a specially adapted, manual wheelchair. It has an option to attach a wheel at the front, this can be manually operated as a "hand bike", or with different attachments, operated as an electric bike. The attachments are designed to be easily clipped on and off.

On this occasion, Vidal had clipped a battery-powered electric bike attachment onto his wheelchair. He explained that he has used the electric bike attachment for years, travelled extensively with it, including through airports, and that he believed it was legal.
https://www.salamandernews.org/police-impound-disabled-mans-wheelchair-3-weeks/

He got nicked because he's a law abiding citizen who was ignorant of the law, so an easy mark for the rozzers. If he was a 19 year old lad in a balaclava pulling a wheelie on a souped up ebike through Loughborough market place, on the way to nick other law abiding citizens' property, the rozzers wouldn't touch him.

He was unconscious, in hospital, after an accident. Which makes it even easier to nick him.

So, if we knock balaclava lad off his bike, we could nick him?
Genuinely, the talk on the Loughborough community forums on Facebook is all about vigilante action against him and his cohort.
Lots of tough threats, but no evidence yet of action!

Same in my town with the persistent offenders who treat front street as a racing strip.

Of course when they come off and the inevitable happens it will be ‘he was a smashing lad, a bit cheeky’, ‘fly high little angel’ followed by a balloon release.

I get bored of coming back from trips to the local NNR with balloons recovered from various bits of bog.

At least it beats setting it on fire with chinese lanterns, but only just.


There's a small local park near me which is a bit of green space with a few benches scattered about. Unfortunately the bench in the quietest corner has been replaced with a truly hideous granite seat which acts as a memorial to 5 children that died in a car crash (doing 90 in a 40), with carved pictures and names.

How they got permission for it I have no idea, but obviously nobody sits in it now.

So tempted to make a few copies of the front page of the Origin of Species to attach.

Before my dad died he lived in an old folks home and overlooked a bench to a little lad, Arthur Labanjo-Hughes, who was murdered by his parents/guardians. KRO Arthur. It was a genuine place of quiet contemplation.

How little shits driving dangerously and suffering the consequence get a bench god only knows.

All ‘with nana and the angles’ stuff

I have some sympathy with your views - its striking how whenever this happens the boys (and its almost always boys) were loveable rogues, kind to their grans, etc etc. I know we don't speak ill of the dead but sometimes the dead are that way because they are little shits.

Although of course only one of the five was driving. The other four could have been pleading for him t slow down.*

And its becoming increasingly clear that young men do not reach mental maturity until they are 25 ish.

So its not simple.


* Leads into a classic Bob Monkhouse joke - "I want to die in my sleep, not screaming in terror like the passengers on the bus I was driving at the time".

The word covert was pronounced "KOVV-ert" for centuries until the 1960s.

"The top secret story of why you say this word the way you do!
Dr Geoff Lindsey"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeHRN6GlNOs

I am told marriage and carriage, etc were all pronounced like Farage not too long ago.
The garridge/garaaaage split is a remnant of that shift

I rarely have even heated words with my wife, let alone full scale arguments. But scone/sconn and mirror/mirro !!!

Would you be a Lootenant, a Leftenant, or a L-Tenant?

The word covert was pronounced "KOVV-ert" for centuries until the 1960s.

"The top secret story of why you say this word the way you do!
Dr Geoff Lindsey"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeHRN6GlNOs

I am told marriage and carriage, etc were all pronounced like Farage not too long ago.
The garridge/garaaaage split is a remnant of that shift

I rarely have even heated words with my wife, let alone full scale arguments. But scone/sconn and mirror/mirro !!!

Would you be a Lootenant, a Leftenant, or a L-Tenant?

Definitely leftenant

When I worked on the mini project I used to get the piss took for calling down tubes ‘down toobs’

I've just found out I've lost another ex colleague to suicide. That's 5 good blokes gone in the past 10 years.

Tragic that anyone should get to that state of mind.

I remember a guy I used to work with, he was based in Holland, a nice guy, took his own life. Left for work. Got into the office. Left to get some lunch. Next thing he’s gone on the train line and ran at a train. Left no note or anything. Terribly sad and his family were not just distressed but confused

I worked with a guy who many years later was arrested for a sexual assault on a (child) family member. Initially he denied the charge, but on the day he came clean his wife walked in front of a First Great Western express train at Yate. He was out in a couple of years, whilst she paid the ultimate price for his crimes.

One has to be absolutely at the end of their tether to make such an awful decision.

Absolutely, and then the shock and trauma is magnified by the suffering not just of her family, but the train driver(s), and to a lesser extent the passengers etc

If people really want to end their lives, there should be a clinical solution available to everyone, with safeguards, rather than people stepping in front of trains.

Radio Five Live is discussing this website, which I'd never heard of before.

"The creator of Tattle Life could face a raft of new lawsuits from stars defamed on his website after he was unmasked as the King of Trolls, experts told MailOnline today. Vegan influencer Sebastian Bond, 43, was exposed after a couple won a £300,000 libel payout over vile claims posted about them on the so-called 'trolls' paradise', which he quietly founded eight years ago. Tattle Life became an unchecked breeding ground for bullying, ‘doxxing’ and outright lies."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14820403/Tattle-Life-troll-new-lawsuits.html

I'm familiar with the case of one person who was "documented" there - Jack Monroe. The bits I have seen have been about embarrassing detail and exposing hypocrisy - much of which is often true but the subject may wish to have out of the public gaze. In the JM case for example there was stuff about family background and behaviour, which did not quite match up to the portrayed public image. I'll say no more detail.

Probably well-described as tittle-tattle, or perhaps gossip including some malicious gossip. Think of it as content about individuals that in the political universe might be on Guido Fawkes or Popbitch.

I think Guido just lost too, did he not - where his 'my site is libel proof' claim went slightly pop ?

I see that the lawyers involved are Carter-Ruck.

Reflecting further, I'd quite like to see the judgement, because I'm not sure where we are on defamation law now & "truth" as a strong defence.

Tattle is a mixture of the true but embarrassing, the questionable - "himmm, is that true?", and the made up. The difficulty for the site owners is that they have some liability themselves (I'm not sure what that extent is, either), and curating a Wild West is difficult.

In some ways it is like running a Tabloid Newspaper, but with anonymous authors and without the resources to manage it effectively.

Are there perhaps implications for Twitter, where Musk & Co have arguably posted plenty of material that is imaginary.

There are also issues around internet regulation. Does the Online Safety Bill have anything relevant to say?

Tattle is very, very entertaining. I'm not a member, registration was closed years ago, and I wouldn't join anyway, just because it is absolutely the wild west.
Some of things you read make your toes curl, and the way that social media influences are called out/ debunked is how I found the site- trying to find out how legit some people I followed were.
I'm not surprised it's in trouble.
The Carter Ruck bod is called Persephone Bridgman Baker. That's the sort of name that I look for in a barrister. Never trust a legal eagle with a boring name.

For many years I thought they pronounced it ‘Percy-phone’ rather than ‘per-sef-funny’

Didn’t come across too many Persephones growing up

Like pronouncing Hermione as Her-me-one, as one child did when reading Harry Potter.

Goblet of Fire was genuinely a revelation on that point for me.