Editor of Trans Britain. #Author of Pressing Matters. Lifetime Achievement Award PrideOfManchester 2021. Drove an 8 year old #EV called Peggy and now drives Olga who is one year old.
Posts about #climate mitigation, #trans moral panic, #books. Was #retired. Checked out but unable to leave. She/Her.
Imagine 25% of Londoners thinking walking gaffe Susan Hall was a credible candidate for Mayor. Mind you, every day it amazes me that Joe Biden and Donald Trump are neck and neck and anyone thought Liz Truss could be prime minister.
In a landmark ruling, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that gender identity is a protected characteristic, and that Medicaid bans on treatments for gender dysphoria are unconstitutional.
Guess when I’m charging the car today. 3 hours at 6.4kW is 19.2kWh, which is almost a third of the battery capacity. I’m on 40% right now (over a hundred miles) so I should be able to top up to about 72-74% before the afternoon demand peak arrives. In that modest way I’m helping to balance the grid.
A nice coincidence is that the cheapest electricity is also the lowest carbon. Here in the North West I’ll be charging up with energy that cost 2g of CO2 per kWh to generate. https://agile.octopushome.net/dashboard
Wondering what to believe about ‘the trans issue’? Feeling scared to ask? Don’t know where to even begin? Trans Britain tells the story of trans people’s progress from the very margins, generations back, to the threshold of widespread acceptance just seven years ago. It’s told through the first person accounts of people who witnessed events at each step along the way. Tuck in to your own copy today, wherever you prefer to get your books.
Having never had a smartphone (although, to be fully transparent, my wife does have one), I'm deriving a certain amount of amusement from the continuing rise in commentary on the health & wellbeing benefits of the 'dumb phone'.... which directly parallel my reasons for not wanting one in the first place.
@ChrisMayLA6 I can’t help feeling people would have a more balanced view of what a smart phone can be were it not for social media which (contrary to impressions given) is not the only use case. The device isn’t the evil, it’s what foolish easily obsessed people do with it.
@ChrisMayLA6 If the smart phone had never been built then people would ascribe all the bad stuff stemming from internet access to the evil laptop or desktop. And before the public had access to the internet it was common to blame television or pop music. When I was a teenager discotheques and mopeds got the blame. Go back further and the root of social evil was the distribution of pamphlets. I blame coming down from the trees.
It’s hard to believe that it’s just over 31 years since I attended this conference in Amsterdam, organised by the body responsible for the European Court of Human Rights. In my book ‘Pressing Matters’ I describe these 3 days in April 1993 as my epiphany — the point where I realised what was already known and understood among scholars about trans people, and how that made campaigning for our rights in Britain a feasible prospect. The right may try but it can’t put that back in the bottle.
Over 90% of vehicles driving in the ULEZ zone are exempt from charges because they are compliant. You’ve got to wonder where the membership of these groups come from. My hunch is that a lot of them are bots or workers in troll farms, which means Tories are preaching to people who in many cases don’t exist.
That lovely heart skip when you realise someone you knew from the other place has been quietly lurking on this place and just revealed themself with a ‘like’.
Today is St George’s Day. Don’t be fooled by the very British name though. If Gammons met St George today they’d immediately say he was a forriner. That story about slaying a dragon is well-suspect. Dragons don’t exist. The rest of his backstory is confused and he’s either a Greek or an Italian depending on your point of view. Spent time in Syria and Palestine which makes him even more suspect. I suspect if he turned up today with those credentials he’d be straight off to Rwanda.
No, M&S haven’t ’just launched’ an LGBT sandwich - it came out in 2019
I swear a part of society is having some kind of mental breakdown, unable to cope with a bit of inclusiveness and change. These are the same people who lust romantically for the days when we were in a world war and everyone was supposedly endowed with a stiff upper lip. They wouldn’t have coped.
The terrible irony of the British mistake in banning puberty blockers for those kids who would have been assessed to benefit is that the country is setting up a controlled trial (randomised if you think country of birth is a random accident). The rest of the world can give blockers to their kids and watch them grow up healthy and happy whilst studying the blighted British cohort for the next 50 years, forever affected by the policy inflicted on them. I saw this first hand in 2010 when Dutch..
An ordinary British woman is in jail for holding a placard informing British jurors that they don’t have to convict climate protestors if it goes against their morality. Meanwhile a former US president is repeatedly making statements on social media which can be interpreted as intimidating jurors, witnesses and court officers in his criminal trial whilst it is in progress. Go figure.
Happy first birthday to Olga, my second EV, shown here being unveiled by the salesman at the dealer’s 12 months ago today. In that time I’ve covered 4,600 miles exploring the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, Lancashire, Cheshire, London, Kent and places in-between. Olga has consumed a net 1 megawatt hour of energy, 934kWh from public chargers at a cost of £554. In the six months since late October I’ve exclusively charged from home, covering 380 miles of local driving for £33
My mission for the coming year is to use Octopus Agile tariff to minimise the cost of charging at home by (a) charging overnight (00:00 to 06:00) on the car’s timer (Agile is most reliably low cost overnight) and (b) charging during the day during periods of negative pricing (which will mitigate the cost further). There will still be premium priced rapid charging on long road trips but setting off with 250+ miles range in the battery will mitigate some of that. Also visiting Scotland is cheap.
