Melanie @mcflymell

On the 20th of October 1984, 11-year-old Craig Bromfield and his 12-year-old brother Aaron went down to the Seaburn Hotel in Sunderland hoping to get some autographs from the Nottingham Forest players. Aaron spotted Brian Clough walking along the seafront with some of his staff. The boys went over and politely called him Mr Clough. Clough took one look at them. They had no coats on, they were freezing and Aaron had just been swimming in the sea in his pants. Clough called them a couple of “ragtags.” He told them they would “catch their bloody death” dressed like that, and asked if they had eaten any breakfast. They hadn’t. Clough took them back into the hotel and got them fed. Then he told them they could travel to the match with Nottingham Forest on the team bus, as long as they went home first and got permission from their parents. So Craig and Aaron ran the two miles home to Southwick, asked if they could go and ran back again. Once they were on the bus, Clough sat at the front and told them to “bugger off” to the back, where Forest kept the chocolate, crisps and fizzy drinks. They could help themselves. Just don’t disturb the players. For two boys who had grown up in and out of care, begging strangers for money and being sent out to steal, it was the best day of their lives. Craig never got the chance to thank Clough properly, so afterwards he wrote him a letter. Clough wrote back. He told Craig he was pleased they had enjoyed themselves and hoped he would see them again. At the bottom he signed it: “Be good, Love Brian.” Not long afterwards, Sunderland drew Nottingham Forest at Roker Park in the League Cup. Craig and Aaron were waiting at the Seaburn Hotel before the Forest team had even arrived. When Clough stepped off the bus, he hugged them. Again, he decided they looked as though they needed feeding. He told them to go inside and order whatever they wanted. Forest returned to Sunderland again just before Christmas. This time, Clough brought presents. The boys were given a football signed by the Forest squad and padded jackets. Clough hadn’t forgotten how they had looked the first morning he met them. “Now you’ve no excuse for not bringing your coats.” But Clough’s involvement in their lives didn’t stop with football. One day outside the ground, Craig spotted four boys from school who had been bullying him. Clough noticed something was wrong and asked him about it. Craig told him. Clough walked over to the four boys. He gave each of them a ticket for the match. Then he gave them a warning. “I know who you are and I know where you all live, and I’ll come round to yer mams’. Now bugger off!” They never bullied Craig again. Over the next few years, Craig and Aaron became part of Clough’s family. They stayed at his home in Derbyshire, played in the games room, went into Nigel Clough’s bedroom, travelled with Forest and were treated like little brothers by Clough’s children. “We had been brought up to believe nobody could love us; that we were unlovable.” “For the first time, we felt loved and special.” When Craig was 16, his parents decided to move to London without him. Clough told him to come and live with his family. He went from being the 11-year-old boy outside the Seaburn Hotel without a coat to travelling to work with Brian Clough, helping out in the Forest dressing room and sitting in the dugout as they won at Wembley. Years later, Craig was asked what his life might have looked like if he had never walked over to Brian Clough that morning in Sunderland. “If Brian hadn’t done what he did, I wouldn’t have had a life, because I would have been in prison.”

1. Police Academy 2. Hot Tub Time Machine 3. Snakes on a Plane 😆

Nina Welsch @CleverclogsNina

5 days ago

3 perfect films 1. Don't Look Now 2. Harold and Maude 3. Inglorious Basterds

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😂

James Blunt @JamesBlunt

3 weeks ago

Hopping on the social media trend-wagon.

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"Women are not a special interest group. They are half the population." RIP Gloria Steinem, we women owe you.

Researchers recorded 31 conversations between men and women in 1975 and counted the interruptions. There were 48 of them. Men accounted for 47. The finding has been replicated for fifty years with better methods and bigger samples, and it has never gone away. Researchers at George Washington University found in 2014 that men were 33 percent more likely to interrupt when talking to a woman than when talking to another man. The behaviour changes depending on who is speaking. Then somebody checked whether status protects you. A team went through fifteen years of transcripts from the highest court in the United States and counted every interruption during oral argument. Women made up about a quarter of the bench. They were on the receiving end of 32 percent of the interruptions and responsible for 4 percent. Lawyers arguing before that court are not permitted to interrupt a judge at all. Male lawyers accounted for around 10 percent of the interruptions anyway. Female lawyers accounted for approximately none. There is a myth this kills on the way past. Women get interrupted more despite talking less, because across this whole literature men talk more and are interrupted less. The women on that bench had a habit of opening with a polite phrase, asking permission before asking their question. Researchers found that dropping the politeness reduced the interruptions without stopping them. If you are a man who has read this far and thought about your own meetings, that is the useful part. Almost nobody thinks they are the one doing it. Forty-seven out of forty-eight of them were. hbr.org/2017/04/female…

FYI My Friends ❤️ I have attended CPR classes over the years, but was never told this particular scenario. I was told that when your body starts sweating profusely for no apparent reason followed by what feels like a spasm at the end of your esophagus, that is your body’s warning sign. When you are alone and have a heart attack, what are you gonna do? A really good post that can't be shared often enough: 1. Take a 2 minute break and read this: Let's say it's 5:25 pm and you're driving home after an unusually hard day's work. 2. You are really tired and frustrated. All of a sudden you experience chest pains. They are starting to radiate in the arm and jaw. It feels like being stabbed in the chest and heart. You're only a few miles away from the nearest hospital or home. 3. Unfortunately you don't know if you can make it.. 4. Maybe you've taken CPR training, but the person running the course hasn't told you how to help yourself. 5. How do you survive a heart attack when you're alone when it happens? A person who is feeling weak and whose heart is beating hard has only about 10 seconds before losing consciousness. 6. But you can help yourself by coughing repeatedly and very strongly! Deep breaths before every cough. Coughing should be repeated every second until you arrive at the hospital or until your heart starts to beat normally. 7. Deep breathing gives oxygen to your lungs and coughing movements boost the heart and blood circulation. Heart pressure also helps to restore a normal heartbeat. That’s how cardiac arrest victims can make it to the hospital for the right treatment. 8. Cardiologists say if someone gets this message and passes it on to 10 people, we can expect to save at least one life. 9. FOR WOMEN: You should know that women have additional and different symptoms. Rarely have crushing chest pain or pain in the arms. Often have indigestion and tightness across the back at the bra line plus sudden fatigue. ❤️Sharing this could help SAVE a life 🙏

I'm a cardiologist. A woman loses her husband. Two days later she's on my cath lab table — chest pain, EKG changes, enzymes elevated. Everything says heart attack. I thread the catheter. Her arteries are pristine. Her heart didn't clog. It shattered. From grief. Takotsubo — broken heart syndrome. Stress hormones stun the ventricle so severely it balloons and stops pumping. 90% of cases are women. Your heart can literally break. Not a metaphor. Physiology. But this is just one blind spot in a system built for men's hearts. Women get microvascular disease — plaque in vessels too small for angiograms to see. Heart attacks with "clean" arteries. Women get SCAD — leading cause of heart attack under 50. Most doctors have never diagnosed one. Women present with fatigue, jaw pain, nausea, back pain. Medicine called these "atypical" for decades. They're not atypical. They're female-typical. Half of humanity is not a variant. Heart disease kills more women than every cancer combined. Fewer than half know. Three things every woman needs to hear: Say these exact words to your doctor: "I am concerned this could be my heart." That sentence changes everything. Don't soften it. If tests are "normal" but symptoms persist — demand CT angiography or cardiac MRI. If you had preeclampsia — your cardiac surveillance starts now. Not at 65. Your heart can break from grief, from stress, from a system that wasn't built to see you. It can also heal. If someone finally looks. Share this with every woman you love.

In 1943, an American pilot crashed into one of the most dangerous jungles in the world. For 31 days, Fred Hargesheimer wandered alone through the rainforests of New Britain after his plane was shot down over Japanese-controlled territory during World War II. He was starving. Delirious. Barely alive. He survived on roots and stream water while hiding from Japanese patrols searching the island. By the time voices finally emerged from the jungle, Fred thought he had been found by enemy soldiers. Instead, it was a group of Nakanai villagers. They carried the exhausted American pilot back to their village and hid him from Japanese forces fully aware they could be executed for helping him. The villagers protected him anyway. Fred was so weak he could barely eat. Then a nursing mother named Ida began feeding him her own breast milk for days to keep him alive while also caring for her infant son. Fred never forgot her name. Whenever Japanese patrols approached, villagers blew a hidden conch shell warning so Fred could escape into the jungle. Children even followed behind him sweeping away his bootprints in the sand with palm-frond brooms to hide evidence he had been there. If the Japanese had discovered him, the entire village could have been massacred. Nobody betrayed him. The children called him “Mastah Preddi.” Master Freddie. He lived among them for seven months before Allied forces finally rescued him by submarine in 1944. But Fred never forgot the people who saved his life. Especially Ida. Especially the children with the tiny brooms. Years later, one thought still haunted him: “How could I ever repay them?” So in 1960, he returned to New Britain. As his boat approached the shore, villagers stood waiting for him and began singing the only English song they knew: “God Save the Queen.” Fred stepped onto the beach and cried. After returning home to Minnesota, he began raising money through churches and local donations to help the village. Over the following decades, he helped build: • schools • libraries • a medical clinic At one point, Fred and his wife even moved there for several years to teach children themselves. In 2000, the Nakanai people officially named him a tribal chief and gave him the title: “Suara Auru” Chief Warrior. Then, at age 90, Fred made one final trip into the jungle to visit the wreckage of the plane that had crashed there in 1943. Villagers carried the elderly pilot through the rainforest on their shoulders so he could see it one last time. Fred Hargesheimer died in 2010 at age 94. The schools and clinic he helped build still serve the community today. When people asked why he spent nearly 70 years repaying strangers he could have simply forgotten after the war, Fred always gave the same answer: “They saved my life. How could I ever repay it?” So he spent the rest of his life trying.

One of Scotland's more unusual memorials, which I came across on a hillwalking trip today. It's dedicated to Barry from Eastenders and is near the Rest and Be Thankful in the Arrochar Alps, about an hour's drive from Glasgow. Cont./ #glasgow #memorial #scotland #eastenders

"No, I don't subscribe to this 'kindness' - I'll tell the truth instead." I spoke at the Cambridge Union last night about LGBs, children's safety and women's rights. Full video here:

A man came home from work one evening and instantly knew something was very wrong. All five kids were outside — still in their pajamas, playing in the mud, with empty food boxes and wrappers scattered across the yard. The front door was wide open. His wife’s car door was open, too. No sign of the dog. Inside the house, the chaos continued. The living room looked like a tornado hit it — a lamp knocked over, rug shoved against the wall, toys and clothes everywhere, TV blasting cartoons. In the kitchen…the sink was overflowing with dishes, food spilled on the counters, fridge door hanging open, dog food all over the floor, a broken glass under the table, and sand tracked in by the back door. He rushed upstairs, stepping over toys and laundry, calling for his wife. Then he saw water seeping out from under the bathroom door. Inside the bathroom, he saw —wet towels, toys everywhere, toilet paper shredded across the floor, toothpaste smeared on the mirror and walls. Panicking now, he ran to the bedroom. There he found his wife. Still in her pajamas. Curled up in bed. Calmly reading a novel. She looked up, smiled, and asked, “How was your day?” Stunned, he asked, “What on earth happened here today?” She smiled again and answered, "You know how every day when you come home from work, you ask me what in the world do I do all day?" "Yes," was his incredulous reply. She answered, "Well, today I didn't do it."

A wool jumper, made in 1985, washed in cold water once a month, worn through three decades of British winters, would currently be sitting in someone's wardrobe doing fine. A polyester fleece, made in 2026, machine-washed weekly, will start to lose its structural integrity within three to five years, shed an estimated 700,000 microfibres per wash into the water system, and end its life in landfill where it will persist for approximately 200 years. The wool jumper: - Came from a sheep - Required grass and rain - Will biodegrade entirely within three years of being buried - Will keep you warm when wet - Will not melt if exposed to a flame - Will probably outlive you - Cost £80 in 1985, which is £230 today, and represents the entire jumper budget for the next forty years The polyester fleece: - Came from an oil refinery in Texas - Required hexane extraction, polymerisation and dyeing in three different factories on three different continents - Will not biodegrade in any human timeframe - Will get cold and clammy when wet - Will melt against your skin if exposed to a flame - Will be in landfill within five years - Cost £40 in 2026, which means you'll buy ten of them across the next forty years for a total of £400, and the planet will still be eating the residue in the year 2226 But yes. The sheep is the problem. The sheep, standing in a field in mid-Wales, growing a renewable fibre from grass and rain. The sheep is the problem.

Even the flûte was like “bro… I didn’t know I could do this either” 😭🎵 This absolute legend took the plastic recorder we all suffered through in 6th grade and turned it into Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing.” Zero shame. Maximum talent. The flute is now in therapy. #SultansOfSwing

The IOC’s decision to protect the female category is a victory for fairness | Tanya Aldred theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Tanya is wonderful, and this is a miraculous article. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

𝐍𝐎, 𝐈𝐓'𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐀𝐈. 𝐈𝐓'𝐒 𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐃 𝐏𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐓𝐔𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍. I see it constantly now. Someone reads a post or an article and spots an em dash — that long horizontal line — and immediately declares it was written by AI. 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐦 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡, 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐆𝐏𝐓. You know who else uses em dashes? People who actually learned how English punctuation works. I don't normally step on this particular soapbox — and I commit authorial malpractice by never trying to sell you my books — but I've authored over 30 of them. Many have been international bestsellers. Well over 𝟏,𝟎𝟎𝟎,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐞𝐬 in print, translated into 7+ languages, sold around the world. I am, amongst many other things, an actual author. So let me give you a quick education your grammar teachers apparently skipped. The em dash — this thing right here — is one of the most versatile punctuation marks in the English language. It's called an "em dash" because in traditional typesetting, it was the width of the capital letter M in whatever typeface you were using. It serves three primary functions. First, it sets off a parenthetical statement within a sentence — like this one — when you want more emphasis than commas provide but less formality than parentheses. Second, it signals an abrupt break in thought or a dramatic pivot. Third, it introduces an explanation or amplification of what came before it. Writers have been using it for centuries. Emily Dickinson used em dashes so obsessively her manuscripts look like they were attacked by a horizontal line. Mark Twain used them constantly in dialogue. So did F. Scott Fitzgerald. None of them had access to ChatGPT. Now for a bit of trivia most people never learn. There's also an 𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡 — slightly shorter, the width of the letter N. The en dash has a narrower purpose: it connects ranges. Pages 12–44. The years 1941–1945. The New York–London flight. It's the dash between two things that are connected but distinct. Most people have never heard of it, and most fonts render it just barely shorter than an em dash, which is why almost nobody notices the difference. Both have been part of formal typography since the invention of movable type in the 15th century. Gutenberg's typesetters used varying dash lengths to organize text. By the 18th century, printers had standardized the em and en dash as distinct glyphs with distinct grammatical functions. This isn't some modern AI invention — it's older than the United States. And if you use Microsoft Word, they're trivially easy to type. An en dash is Ctrl + Minus on the numeric keypad. An em dash is Ctrl + Alt + Minus on the numeric keypad. Word also auto-converts two hyphens (--) into an em dash if you have autocorrect enabled. That's why you see me use them in my books and in my posts — because I know they exist and I know the keyboard shortcut. The reason AI chatbots use em dashes frequently is because they were trained on well-written text — books, journalism, academic papers — written by people who knew the rules. The AI learned proper punctuation from proper writers. That doesn't make proper punctuation a sign of AI. It makes it a sign of 𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐲. For the record, the only things I use AI for are conjuring up a quick graphic — like the image on this post — or as a shortcut for preliminary research. Think of it as a Google accelerator. The writing? That's all me. It has been for 30+ books and countless social media posts such as this one. If you've reached the end of this post, you now know more about dashes than most people who graduated with an English degree. And the next time you see an em dash and your first instinct is to scream "AI" — maybe consider that what you're actually looking at is someone who paid attention in class. Or someone whose grammar teachers didn't fail them quite as badly as yours failed you. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐦 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡 𝐢𝐬 𝟓𝟎𝟎 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐥𝐝. 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐬.

I wholeheartedly welcome the new IOC guidelines that secure a safe and fair female category that excludes male athletes. SRY screening is a simple, non-invasive, once-in-a-lifetime check that returns female sport to female athletes. Laurel Hubbard should not have been allowed to lift weights against women. Caster Semenya should not have been allowed to run against women. Imane Khelif should not have been allowed to punch women in the face. This is a vindication for all the brilliant women who have fought for fairness and safety for all women in sport. Thank you to Kirsty Coventry, Jane Thornton and all those in the working group for a clear, evidence based policy. @iocmedia