I would really like to have carnal relations with the woman off the Just Eat adverts. She's not even that fit, but there's something about her that makes my cock twitch.

>>456029
It's all the McDonalds sex advertising.

>>456029

Do you think that you might be sexually attracted to women who look confused and disoriented? If so, you should probably talk to someone about that.

My current job offers 1 month full sick pay, and 2 months half pay. After those three months, would I be able to get Statutory Sick Pay, or does having had company sick pay nullify that right?

>>456029
[spoiler]Just Eat Me Out[spoiler]

>>456032

>would I be able to get Statutory Sick Pay

Yes. SSP is the legal minimum that your employer has to provide. You're entitled to £99.35 per week for up to 28 weeks. Any weeks that you're receiving more than that legal minimum would still count towards the 28 week limit, so you'd be entitled to ~15 weeks of SSP after your contractual sick pay runs out.

>>456033
You know... I like the idea, but have always been repulsed in the moment and back down.

It is FREEZING today. I think the snow is coming back.

The BBC forecast says it's currently -2° in Beeston and tomorrow will only be above zero between noon and 5pm, although it will feel colder thanks to the wind. There was a bit of snow earlier but not enough to settle.

Beginning to think maybe everything will be this shit forever until forever stops.

>>456044
I don't think we're ever going to return to the world before COVID. Petrol will never see 99p again.

>>456044

Read some history mate. You happened to grow up in an incredibly brief window when (for people in the global west) things weren't completely fucking mental. 2023 is much more "normal" than 2013, which in turn was more normal than 2003, which was more normal than 1993. Everything being basically fine is a total aberration; chaos, conflict and poverty is the norm.

My mum grew up at the height of the cold war, when everyone sort of assumed that they'd all die in a nuclear holocaust soon enough. She remembers doing her homework by candlelight during the three day week. Her childhood home had no bathroom and no central heating, like the homes of everyone she knew.

My nan was born shortly before the Second World War; she spent many nights sleeping in an Anderson shelter before being evacuated. At the age of six, she was put on a train alone and sent to live hundreds of miles from home with people that she had never met. One morning she went out to play on the seashore, only to find that it was littered with debris and corpses after a ship was torpedoed.

Take comfort in the fact that, while things are getting worse at the moment, we still lead lives that would be the envy of nearly everyone who has ever lived. This country is getting poorer, partly as a result of the pandemic but mostly because of a series of disastrous political decisions; still, we're rich enough that people will risk their lives on inflatable boats for a chance at getting what we take for granted.

We should be angry at the government, we should demand better, but we shouldn't get caught up in a cycle of misery and pessimism. Some people think that it's smug or heartless to say "actually, we don't have it that bad", but I think it's the only way to stay sane. Most people in the world have harder lives than us and most of history has been worse than today; if we lose sight of that, we get trapped in a myopic world view that inevitably breeds envy and self-pity.

>>456045>>456046
I wasn't talking about petrol prices (get a bike, fatty) or the "arc of history", you freakshows. Christ almighty.

>>456047

To be fair, "everything being shit forever until forever stops" is a bit ambiguous. If you're just talking about the human condition, then yeah, that's a more difficult one to deal with. You could try reading some of the absurdists or stoics for that.

Better yet, wot r u on about?

>>456046

Reading history gives me a great sense of peace, for exactly this reason. Even just considering family history helps. I had a relative who was obliterated trying to close the door to a bomb shelter, my granddad worked on a railway his entire adult life and saw people lose limbs with disturbing regularity, my own dad grew up amidst dolphin rape and violence and narrowly avoided prison after some ugly incidents.

To add to your last paragraph, I don't think it's smug to keep that historical and global context in mind, rather it just makes it clear that these current problems are surmountable.

Are Clarks shoes still alright? I need a new pair of shoes for the few days I'll be in the office and I saw a cheapish pair on Amazon for £28 (price matching a sale on Very) which ultimately cost me £5.20 thanks to a student discount and a voucher for doing a survey through work. These ones are made in India.

Anyway, you shouldn't pay too much attention to the news. It focuses on the bad. When Liz Truss became prime minister you could get $1.15 for £1. The media went crazy when she tanked sterling but it's now higher than before she came into power at $1.22 per £1. Did that recovery make anywhere near as much news? No, because it doesn't sell. There's so much noise out there that most people would struggle to know what's actually important or not.


I'm less miserable since I stopped reading The Guardian so often, but this would apply to most media outlets. Guardian and Daily Mail readers both long for the good old days which didn't really exist outside of nostalgia goggles.

Sorry about calling you a fatty.

>>456049

Any passable office shoes for 5.20GBP is a pretty good deal. Even if they break after a dozen wears, that's still less than a takeaway meal.

>>456051

You can't wear a takeaway meal in the office.

>>456052
You can fashion bread into stylish headgear that's also practical if you find yourself in the middle of a riot.

>>456053
Will it protect you from a police baton?

>>456051
Sam Vimes flipped his desk at reading this.

>>456055
The availability of boots cobbled by children in the People's Beneficent Republic of Agatea for sale at 1/4 the price of sausage inna bun complicates his analogy somewhat.

>>456054

If you bought one of those big crusty loaves, hollowed it out and left it to go stale, I reckon it would make a passable hard hat.

>>456056

I wear posh shoes that are hand made in Northampton, but I'm acutely aware of the fact that getting them soled and heeled costs me more than a cheap pair of high street shoes. I'm not going to wear cheap high street shoes because nice shoes are a fanny magnet, but it'd be cheaper in the long run to buy cheap shoes and bin them whenever they get tatty.

>>456057
I got fancy-pants shoes before but they ended up all scuffed because I'll get bored and walk like a spazz at some point as I'm an overgrown child. This is why I don't buy overly expensive things.

Is it just me, or does Greta Thunberg look like she gets an erotic thrill out of being arrested? I'm not kink shaming or anything, if she's into that sort of thing then fair enough.

>>456059

I always kind of thought she'd turn out lesbian.

She really reminds me of somebody from my school who went that way, so maybe I'm biased.

>>456059
Getting arrested on purpose has a sense of freedom to it, ironically.

>>456059
God she really is tiny isn't she? Isn't she supposed to be like 20 now or something?

>>456062

Global warming can't have stunted her growth, could it.

>>456062
You don't get tall people with Down's Syndrome.

>>456064

She's not a mong though.

>>456059
No offence, and in many ways I'm simply playing the odds, but I reckon you're just a horny pervert.

>>456060
Same, that and Asexual.

>>456065

She had an eating disorder in her early teens, which almost certainly caused the stunting. Neither of her parents are tiny.

>>456066

This is .gs, of course I'm a pervert.

>>456067

There are three options for robot moon ovens: asexual, an extremely specific fetish or willing to shag anything. Gender doesn't really come into it - robot moon ovens are nearly always bi/pan and are vastly more likely to be trans.

Incidentally, this is why Barclays sponsor Pride and why major investment banks were well ahead of the curve on LGBTQIAAP++ inclusivity. They couldn't give a toss about the shipping forecast, but they're desperate to hire high-functioning robot moon ovens to work in their tech and quant departments. It isn't gays and lesbians they're trying to appeal to, but weebs and furfags.

>>456068
>She had an eating disorder in her early teens, which almost certainly caused the stunting. Neither of her parents are tiny.

It's probably more to do with what her mum got up to whilst pregnant.

Anyway, seeing as we're on about Greta and Clarkson like a bunch of boomers, when do we get mad about Ken Bruce being pushed out of Radio 2? Will the BBC be bold enough to replace him with a straight white man?

>>456069

With alcohol prices being what they are in Sweden, it even more denotes her upbringing as upper middle class. It's an expensive habit to have there. And it's also why Swedes on holiday are some of the worst behaved people you'll meet.

>>456069

I understand why people make that connection, but I think it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what Scandinavians are supposed to look like. Thunberg has a lot of Sami ancestry, an indigenous minority who are closely related to the Turks and Mongols. She's the spitting image of her paternal grandmother and looks perfectly ordinary by Sami standards.

See you lads are being normal about women again.

>>456072
Longstanding tradition.

>>456072

Have you ever been on Mumsnet? We've got nothing compared to their longstanding issues.

>>456074
I prefer Hunsnet.

Feeling cocky today so I'm not even going to lower my standing desk while the binmen are hanging around.

It's getting daft this is lads. I'm sick of it. And you can piss off an' all Thích Nhất Hạnh, we have one of the highest standards of living in the world because we fought for for it, if it was up to your sort, we still would have the outdoor bathrooms and routine polio deaths my nan and grandad had.

My ancestors did not conquer half the fucking globe so that I would have to agonise over putting the heating on. Rich people all over the world have a wonderful standard of living, the miracle of this country is that ordinary people can too. That's a good thing, and if we let it go we're fucking mugs. Why aren't people angrier.

>>456078
Simple as, mate.

>>456078
Atomisation of society, the Tory's slow propaganda of low expectations, piss weak opposition parties.

>>456078

>if we let it go we're fucking mugs

We already let it go. We voted to be poorer; not you and me, obviously, but a plurality of the electorate. While poor people bear the worst impacts, the whole country is getting poorer.

Real wages are stagnant because productivity is stagnant. The average German or Pole or Cambodian gets more done over the course of a working day than they did in 2012, but the average Briton doesn't. The reasons for that are complex - Brexit, a lack of investment, over-reliance on services, planning constraints, ageing - but they boil down to a failure to recognise that Britain is a small fish in a big pond and has been for a long time.

We have to solve the productivity problem. We can use redistribution to paper over the cracks, but the economy can only bear so much of that. We can't just pretend that we have a god-given right to Western European standards of living even though we have Eastern European levels of productivity. Nobody in Westminster is willing to seriously address the issue, because the middle-aged and elderly people who represent the majority of the British electorate don't want a more productive economy.

People with triple-locked pensions and paid-off mortgages fundamentally don't care that our economy is going to the dogs, because they feel completely insulated from it by a political system that is wholeheartedly committed to insulating them from it. They don't care if we desperately need more immigrants to fill skills shortages, because they don't like hearing foreign accents at the bus stop. They don't care if that new industrial park will create hundreds of jobs, because it's an eyesore. They don't care if we need free trade with our closest neighbours, because they don't want us going cap-in-hand to BARMY BRUSSELS BUREAUCRATS. All of the policies that might actually stop the rot are wildly unpopular with the voters who actually matter.

Maybe we should be angrier, but it's hard to admit that your parents and grandparents don't care about your future. It's hard to live with the fact that this country has been broken not by a shadowy cabal of oligarchs, but by millions upon millions of people with fat pensions and six figures of unearned housing equity. The people who picked our pockets, frittered our inheritances and mortgaged our futures aren't some faraway them, but the people around us, the people closest to us.

I ate Asda's cheapest tinned chili con carne tonight, done up a bit with some seared bell pepper and onion as well as fresh tomato, chili pepper, tomato puree, a bit of vegetable stock and some garlic. And for a bit of smoky flavour, I first lit a few wood chips inside the pot with a handheld gas torch and let them smolder for a few minutes under a lid, like I saw once on a cooking show.

I am starting to experience comical amounts of flatulence.

An evening well spent.

The weather outside is absolutely beautiful and I'm stuck indoors answering phones. What a load of shite.

>>456089

Asda and Aldi's own brand chilli is far better than the branded stuff like Stag and so on, in my opinion.

Whenever I want to be a fat indulgent bastard I make a massive stack of nachos using a full tin of it. Four cheese blend, salsa and a bit of that dirty Yank spray cheese. Can't beat it for a hangover.

Tell you what, lads, I've had just about enough of living in a near-constant state of panic.

>>456093

What are you panicked about?

>>456094
Everything and nothing at all. My career is eating me alive and, compared to my peers and immediate colleagues, I don't feel like my massive amounts of labour are bearing significant fruit. I have a deep insistence that everything be done correctly all of the time, which does not lend itself to working in a collaborative setting, as I spend my nights working until midnight fixing the (incredibly minor) errors made by others. The simultaneous feeling that I have a million things that need to be done right away must surely have a silly German word.

>>456095

Gleichzeitigegefühlvieleaufgabenerledigenhabe. That sort of word?

Anyway I think you probably need to take a week off and chill out. Turn off your work phone, don't read your e-mails, and just spend the week binge watching The Sopranos, or going fishing in a very remote location, or something like that. Get your wife or girlfriend to be in charge of making sure you don't do anything even vaguely work related.

It's worth remembering that if you really do take your work seriously, you have a personal responsibility to yourself and your colleagues to maintain a healthy work/life balance. You're no use to them if you work yourself to the bone and burn out.

>>456096
What's funny is I'm actually on a sort of holiday right now. The Gleichzeitigegefühlvieleaufgabenerledigenhabe really is getting out of hand. I bailed on my own honeymoon a few days early last year because I thought I'd had a heart attack in the French Pyrenees, it turned out to just be a days-long panic attack which was almost certainly brought on by dread of the amount of work I was going back to, mixed with the feeling that I would have missed out on too much work by taking a month of honeymoon and how that might reflect on me in the eyes of my colleagues.

>>456097

But if you spend half your time picking up after them, clearly your colleagues are in no position to be critical of your work ethic. And indeed, perhaps if you stop wiping their arsed for them, they might have to learn to do it themselves.

>>456095

French government: We 'ave raised ze price of stinky cheese by 0.5%.

French people: We are on our way to parliament with grenade launchers.

British government: it's illegal to strike now. It's also illegal to protest. We have abolished 'hospital'. The police are allowed to murder you.

British people: We need to ban trans people.

>>456098
>But if you spend half your time picking up after them, clearly your colleagues are in no position to be critical of your work ethic.

There's no guarantee there's anything wrong with what they're doing. Some people are just nitpicky and have to have things done their way when it can be more hindrance than help; a fantastic way to endear yourself to colleagues and stall your career.

>>456100
I have yet to see anyone approve of the British government's decision to overrule a democratic decision by the Scottish people in the name of political point-scoring. I know we're all a bit servile compared to the French,but the Scots in particular really need to tool up and march on London. It's getting to the point where I would vote for Scottish independence just to liberate them from us. We need a William Wilberforce to fight for Scottish interests in England.

>>456100
Don't post here like it was Twitter. You're not here to "generate likes", you horrid bastard. You're not going viral on an imageboard with a quarter of a dozen users.

>>456102

Perfect demonstration of English middle class self loathing.

It's the SNP who is trying to score points here lad, by drumming up a big deal about a bill 2/3 of Scots don't even like, just so they can point at those unelected Westminster bureaucrats and go "See! They English bastarlrds dinnae leyt uss haff oor oon lawws!", and it'll work. There's no conflict between a utopian progressive Scotland and regressive, controlling England here, but in pushing for daft laws they can get the useful idiots in the papers to make it look like that.

Middle class thickos continue to cheer on this miniature fractal Brexit, because it gets them off when our country is the baddie, and they can loudly profess their self-disavowal on the internet about it. More balkanisation please, sir, they say, because they have the national identity equivalent of a CBT fetish.

>>456104

Compulsory Basic Training fetish?

>>456105

Analyse my negative cognitive schema? I bet you would, you dirty bugger.

>>456104
Sounds like neither of us like the Westminster elite. But at least I am educated enough to know that "middle-class" has a hyphen.

*sashays away in my university gown*

Now sets you lot off like having a go at the middle classes, you big bunch of touchy Graun reading poofters.

It's true though. Middle class neurosis is the obstacle that prevents us solving nearly every divisive political issue in this country. Being smug about not having a big telly, and wanting things to get worse forever to soothe your own guilty ego for being in the top 5% of global earners just for sitting on your arse in the office scrolling the internet all day, you're scum. You don't want to admit that you personally are the individual scum, but nowt gets your knob hard like envisioning the entire country and everything it stands for as collective scum.

>>456109
It doesn't "set us off", you're just talking pure shite every time you bring it up. It's an entirely imagined set of circumstances that bear no relation to reality and whenever anyone points it out you lie about everyone hating the UK and being a Richard Littlejohn inspired caricature of a Guardian reader. You also have a writing style that reads as a complete and total affectation. Ironically sounding like a middle-class person doing a bad impersonation of a working-class person from 1992, very "did you see that ludicrous display last night?". I honestly wouldn't mind if you weren't surreptitiously using it to embelish your reputation as .gs' resident mad prophet, speaking the hard truths no one else dare. But the "truths" are fiction and the reality is less mad prophet and more pompous mard arse.

Also, the service sector is over 4/5ths of the UK economy, everyone works in office, or a shop, you tit. What do you do for a living? Steeplejack? Farrier? Coal miner? Yeah, didn't think so.

>>456104
You're imagining people as both smarter and stupider than they are. Theresa May was looking at similar legislation at the same time the SNP started work on their reform. (and everyone at Holyrood had some kind of manifesto commitment to reform in 2016.) If the SNP wanted to provoke a section 35 order, they'd have done it over something constitutional, or at the very least something economic. "They won't let us pass a law that you don't like or understand which only applies to a minority nobody likes!" is hardly the kind of argument a strategic genius would want to work away at since 2016 - back when Brexit was throwing up far more opportunities and far stronger justifications for getting upset.
Plus if that were their plan there'd always be the risk that the UK government didn't issue a section 35 order in response and just let it pass, leaving the SNP having worked 6-7 years on passing a law only to get... a new law.

>>456110

Leave him be, he's got such a chip up his arse you'll only make him do it more.

>>456110

You sound pretty agitated to me mate. Did Waitrose not have your favourite chutney this morning or something?

The last few posts have me very confused. What do the English middle classes have to do with Scottish legislation?

>>456114

The attitude of the English middle classes towards the continued existence and prosperity of the United Kingdom can be roughly summed up as "Please mummy, break up the union, I've been such a naughty boy! Humiliate me, I deserve it for my ancestor's imperialism! Make me pay for apartheid! Punish me for the potato famine!" but they really don't like it when you say so.

Alright calm down, I'm only having you on. Tarts.

YOU'RE GOING ALL WEIRD AGAIN.

Who pissed in your collective arse this morning?

>>456117
Not me. I'm in the finest of moods. It's Friday, and it's payday.

>>456118
Is that a

or a

mood?

>>456118

Hang about, payday a week early?

For most of us this is the depressing part of January where you've run out of money because you got paid the last week before Christmas and had to stretch your wage out over an extra week and a bit.

>>456120
Everyone in financial services gets paid on the 23rd, which means it credits tonight because of that being a Monday.

>had to stretch your wage

I'm literally counting the minutes until midnight.

Rishi in trouble for not wearing a seatbelt. I might be wrong but, I never wear a seatbelt when I am a passenger in the rear seats. I didn't even know it is an offense. Am I missing something? When did this change happen?

I've been doing a pretty basic bodyweight workout routine since about... Maybe early December. I'm starting to develop muscles where I never knew you should have muscles.

Not because I've turned into Arnold Schwarzenegger by doing a few push ups every other night, I mean, but because it really brings home how I was basically just a skeleton with skin hung over it before. I always thought I was in "good shape" just because I didn't have a big gut or man boobs, and I always did a lot of biking so I thought I must have been fit, but jesus christ. It's like I might as well have had bits of string moving my limbs before this, and this is only the most basic, first step improvement.

Do some exercise lads, it's good.

>>456122
It's absolutely illegal; it's just that a lot of people don't care. Three people in the back of a taxi aren't going to fumble around with seatbelts, but legally, they should. And one person in the back of a taxi definitely should.

>>456122

You've been required to wear seat belts where fitted in the front or back seats since The Motor Vehicles (Wearing of Seatbelts) Regulations 1993.

Peculiarly, taxi drivers don't have to wear seatbelts.

>>456125

This is mental to me, maybe me and my mates are a bunch of squares but I don't think I've ever seen anyone not buckle up in a taxi or otherwise.

I suppose if you lot are in London it sort of makes sense, as you probably never get above 10mph.

>>456122
I take it you never saw this, then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE

>>456130
I remembered a really cool seatbelt advert from my childhood and tried to find it once. There's a website with nearly all of them, so I just watched as many as I could.

Never again. It gets pretty harrowing after a while.

>>456134
What you want is some singing hedgehogs.

Is Russell Brand a gammon now?

>>456175
What makes you say that?

>>456176

He's flogging gold bullion and getting favourable coverage on Fox News.

>>456176

He says the sort of things people with very small and unassuming tellies don't want the plebs hearing, so they are re-branding him as some kind of fake-lefty Jimmy Saville, or toxic Alex Jones style influencer.

I don't agree with a lot of the shite he comes out with, but I do see him as a very sympathetic character. He doesn't have a formal education, but he's clearly very sharp, and I think that repulses a lot of people on the very principle of it.

Like I say I don't agree with a lot of what he says, but I think he receives a disproportionate level of criticism that he wouldn't get if he was an Oxbridge graduate writing the same shite in the Guardian.

>>456179

Agreed. I admire Brand for his willingness to use whatever celebrity leverage he had in the interests of the majority of the public. It is a bit of a sad thought but I expect we will continue to watch him get spurned and misrepresented more frequently in mass media until the general opinion of him becomes "I liked him when he was on Big Brother, but it's a shame he's gone a bit weird since then/said those nasty things about (demographic group)/turned out to be an antivaxxer/had those allegations of sex pestery against him".

>>456180

I liked him better when he was doing general observational humour. He's coming across as a bit of a common edgelad in his newer videos. Somebody who you can't deny has some sort of fair point, but he just isn't suited to be a political commentator.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prHK_uy4crs

Once again I see that, despite the pretense, you people frequent the same social media feeds as me and are just as suceptible to its sways and manipulations.

Far to many of Brands video titles are generic clickbait which offer no indication of the actual content. "Now it comes out", "The BBC Aired THIS?!", Oh Sh*t, this just happened" etc. I'm not going to sit through 15 minutes of rambling just to find out what he's talking about. Don't fucking bait me like that, you cunt.

>>456179
>they are re-branding him
Maybe my repulsion is exactly the intention, huh?

I tend to judge this sort of thing in part by whom makes up their audience. Admittedly I only know one person who regularly watches Russell Brand's videos, but she is the mentalist of mental slags.

>>456179
>>456182
>they are re-branding him
Ehehehehehehe

>>456184

Wanky wanky!

The trick with Brand is to ignore his videos and annoying humour and to use him as a collator of interesting articles. The stuff he links to in his video descriptions is often pretty interesting.

I can't decide if this is terrible or genius.

I know that it was a wise choice when I stopped regularly reading the opinion columns in the Graun years ago, but there's one at the minute saying it's smug and middle-class to own books.