Notices by Mike 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 (mikefromlfe@cupoftea.social)

My Granddaughter is a second year Fine Art student who will be taking commissions over the
summer for custom artwork. She's happy to work from your photos.

Whether that's a pet portrait or a landscape painting inspired by a special place.

She's offering:
Pet portraits starting from £40
- Black and white or colour
- Pencil or watercolour
- A5 or A4

Landscapes starting from £60
- Colour
- Acrylic
- A4 or 40x50cm

Although she's in the UK, she's happy to talk to anyone, anywhere.

DM me and I'll put you in touch with Izzy

#FediArt #FediCraft #MastArt #CommissionsOpen #PetPortrait

I've only just realised that the pencil they give you as your 'admission ticket' at the Pencil Museum in Keswick is a special pencil!

I'm wondering if a museum purely devoted to pencils might be one of the most Mastodon places in England?
Maybe it's one of Mastodon's Spiritual Homes!

#Museum #Pencil #PencilMuseum #Keswick #Cumbria #Mastodon

@sand
I've absolutely no idea how the system works in Canada but doing that for a UK NHS blood test form would result in the sample(s) arriving at the laboratory and them being unable to process it because the tests needed would be encoded / linked to the QR code.

The QR code links •in my experience• expire after a finite time (for reasons unclear to me) so unless the tests are written in plain text, they can't be done.

In your situation •here• the request for the tests - if a paper form is needed at all - would be posted to the patient a week or two before the tests are due. This is the system for my wife's regular Haematology monitoring, and how we used to do it when I worked in pathology.

(Increasingly the NHS is doing away with paper forms and just printing QR codes onto the bottles at the point of phlebotomy)

@david_chisnall @ChrisMayLA6
I have never, ever understood the pharmacy thing.
(When I was in an NHS management role, Pharmacists were very defensive of their 'special' position in the organisation and no one senior could break through it to improve things.)

Splitting emergency transport and routine patient movements should have improved matters but has failed miserably in many places - I suspect that contacts aren't rigourously written or enforced?

Resident doctors? There simply aren't enough to deal with the workload. Fund it!

Social care backlogs? So much has been written on this - and it generally comes down to lack of funding (again)

My sister-in-law has phoned up in a bit of a flap (rightly)
The houses on her street - Essex /Herts borders - had a visit from a group of men 'suggesting' they put flags on their houses, which they'd supply flagpoles for at £150.
There were veiled threats to the neighbours who were reluctant ("nice car, shame if it got scratched" "nice dog, does he get ill?")
The street is pretty much all elderly people and they're frightened to report to the police in case of reprisals. Not the sort to have doorbell cameras.
I've suggested Crimestoppers as an anonymous route.

I wonder how common this is across the country?

#fascists #racists #flagShaggers

@Troggie
The camber (on pavements) was the thing that stopped my wife using her mobility scooter after a couple of nasty incidents.
She no longer needs it, but may well need to dust it off again in the future - which is worrying.

@Fragglemuppet Pretty much the same as my wife's experience having mobility difficulties - except in the UK we rarely get the prayer monkeys!

I'm absolutely certain that an agreement of some sort will be essential for the new Corbyn / Sultana party with the Greens.

A formal pact might be a step too far, but on a constituency by constituency basis, given local knowledge and conditions might be a lot better.
(It may be necessary to include the LibDems in a few areas as well - shock! horror!)

Whatever happens any agreement will upset someone in either tent, but the progressive vote mustn't split.

#ukpolitics

@adammoe2022
Thank you.
Downloaded.
Will have a listen later
I do like a bit of Country (but not sure if I understand the more modern variety!)

World War 3 is going to be easy to start... and extremely difficult to stop.

#ww3

@sng @inthehands None of the conservative, liberal (etc) really translates into British politics. Use of these terms confused matters over here.

@rhys I agree that the term 'eco-populist' is a serious turn-off. When I first saw this in the Guardian I too thought WTF?
I sincerely hope that this descriptor is intended for internal Green Party consumption, rather than as part of the intended Green surge. If it isn't, then, as you imply - the Greens could be consigned back to the wilderness.

The Green Party requires (AIUI) a co-leader, so hopefully it'll be someone with a more media-friendly description on their ballot card.

However - while I know nothing else about Zack, he at least recognises that Green campaigning has been too timid, and sees tgst this needs to change.

I have my fingers crossed!

The organisation my wife volunteers for has finally moved all its volunteer training online.

It's very clever, very cheap & extremely unfreindly.
The login initially assumes you are on the organisation's payroll and located within its premises and on their intranet - once I'd worked out how to get around that, it appears that it's impossible to stay logged in to do several courses at one sitting - you need to log in each time.

I'm not sure that the training itself has been run past any disability checks - Sacha has a degree of dyspraxia and she has really struggled with the training websites.
The manager is dismissive - the attitude comes across (meant or otherwise) as 'you're only a volunteer, so what?'

She's seriously thinking of giving up on the volunteering that she really loves and - I believe- does make a difference to a number of young lives. It's very niche - there's no alternative for her to move to.

#volunteer #volunteering #training #accessibility #disabled #dyspraxia

@clacke In the UK the cheapest practical electric car is the Dacia Spring at about £15000 - a cheaper BYD car is in the pipeline.
There are cheaper electric cars but they tend to be speed limited, and/or two seater.
The cheapest ICE car in the UK isn't much cheaper! It's the Dacia Sandrero at about £14500.

For no good reason I was thinking about our daughter's long stay in the psychiatric hospital.

There were a lot of patients on the ward (possibly about 2/3) who never got any visitors.
Where were their families, spouses, parents, children? Not to mention freinds?

The ward staff were delighted that our daughter had visits and support from her parents, brother, neices and work-collegues - she was certainly the exception among the patients.
I like to think that our support helped in her recovery, I definitely think it made her stay there more bearable.

If you know of someone receiving long term hospital care - psychiatric or otherwise - please don't abandon them. Make an effort. It won't always be easy, but doing good isn't always the easy road.

#MentalHealth #hospitals #Carers

@straphanger I've always thought the Aerotrain experiments were amazing. I'd love to have seen it.

Does anyone here know of any accounts - comprehensible to a general reader - of the lives of ordinary people in the Soviet satellite states during the collapse of the Soviet Union?

I'm less interested in the separate countries eg GDR, CSSR, Poland, Romania etc, and more in the Soviet states eg Georgia, Moldova, Belarus etc.

My curiosity is to understand how ordinary lives felt, and changed, during the collapse of a seemingly endless political and financial system, and perhaps to read how people adapted (if at all).

Boosts welcome.

#politicalhistory #sovietunion #sovietunioncollapse

Disabled assistance cards provided by East Midlands Railway.
Arrived in the post today.
Free at https://www.eastmidlandsrailway.co.uk/form/talk-passenger-assistance-cards

Edit: it seems they now also offer wristbands including an #autistic awareness one

How much use they'll be remains to be seen!

#disabled #disability #railway #TrainTravel #railways

@Sine_Nomine @ChrisMayLA6 All good stuff - some of which would be dealt with by reintroducing a fully funded, full time School Nursing service in all schools.

@scribblans
I'm hoping to do at least daily toots to chronicle how things go.

It'd be a good idea for there to be a simple #fediverse blogging type platform!