Nice people thread part 8 - worth the wait

michaels

Spirit wrote: »

I really hope your wife has more to look forward to than that.

Did I mean DD?

Time to put the kids to bed then have another go in the hot tub...I'll catch up on posts later

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

sss555s wrote: »

Beach to the right of Madinat Jumeirah?

silvercar

chewmylegoff wrote: »

I have managed to replace my stupid lost iPhone with the latest iPhone. It appears to be exactly the same except it can take panorama photos without requiring a dedicated app. Apparently this justifies it being about twice the price of the old one. Excellent. I also lost an O2 friends and family discount I got which gave me 1/3 off the line rental as my friend who worked at O2 has now left.

Basically the least MSE thing I've done since taking OH to Petrus and panic buying the tasting menu with matching wines. On that occasion I got my money's worth by eating the sugar cubes that came with the coffee. I don't think O2 are going to send me any sweeteners unfortunately.

Download the O2 priority moments App. Plenty of sweetners on there.

PasturesNew

fc123 wrote: »

...blokes were just ordinary but most of the womene (and kids) were just very attractive.

Quite a bit of posh UK, tall and slim, dark hair, slender but muscly men.

Maybe there's a niche market going on: Hire a fit bird for the beach . com
Just paid escorts.

LydiaJ

lostinrates wrote: »

My mother was a single parent in uk then. Arrived with a husband and then ended up having to be the sole provider. It was possible. I doubt it was easy, particularly for less strong willed people, with less education and closer to home.

Yes, it's always been possible to bring up kids alone, just grindingly hard work in most cases. Widows have always done it, and divorced/separated women too. It's the ones who were unmarried when the kid was born who used to be under pressure to give it up.

silvercar

LydiaJ wrote: »

Yes, it's always been possible to bring up kids alone, just grindingly hard work in most cases. Widows have always done it, and divorced/separated women too. It's the ones who were unmarried when the kid was born who used to be under pressure to give it up.

There was a study comparing the highest level of education reached by children grouped by the status of their parent (s): widowed / single/ married or living together/. Those with widowed or married parents did far, far better than the single group.

neverdespairgirl

My maternal grandmother grew up in a family with a shortage of fathers over two generations.

Her own grandmother was widowed at the age of about 25, having eloped with her husband over a disapproving chorus of both families. She then found herself, 8 years later, a widow with a 7 year old daughter and 5 year old son, in Edwardian times. She installed her children with a friend acting as a sort of foster carer, and became a stewardess with Cunard, going to and fro across the Atlantic on the great passenger liners.

She ended up as a Chief Stewardess for Cunard, with a stateroom of her own on the liner - she was beached during the First World War, after the sinking of the Lusitania, but went back afterwards.

Her daughter, my Granny's mother, married very young to a much older man (father figure, anyone?). She was 18, her husband about 45 or so. He was a doctor in Northern Ireland.

He pushed off in 1916, when my Granny was a baby, came back a couple of years later, and pushed off again, leaving his early 20s wife with 2 young daughters. He didn't pay maintenance or anything of the sort, and every summer, Granny and her younger sister were taken over to Bangor, in N Ireland, to embarrass him in front of his mates until he kitted them out with a year's worth of clothes. That was all the support / contact he gave.

Granny's mother got a job playing the piano in the cinema, for silent films. When Granny was 13, and her sister 9 or 10, the three of them moved into the large flat of a bachelor second cousin, and Granny's mother acted as his housekeeper until her husband died, and she then married second cousin.

Granny said she was "in a single parent family before they were invented".

neverdespairgirl

lostinrates wrote: »

Feet are weird.

DH and my dad are both size nine. Dad is way taller than DH though. DH has awful feet. Like a hobbit's feet.

Charming description, there!

My Dad's just over 6 foot, but narrow-framed and only has 7 1/2 to 8 sized feet. OH is 6 ft 1, and takes size 10.

Isaac is a size 13 (little size 13).

Nikkster

PasturesNew wrote: »

Because I'd be driving and unable to answer the phone - and if I tried to call back I'd not know the name of who called me, then I'd be put on hold, then they'd say somebody'd call me back... and I'd have a phone bill

And/or using the self-service till, or in Lidl where you have to rip everything from the cashier's hand the second it's put through as they want you to clear out of the way and I never have a trolley to put things into. Etc.

Simples.

Not any more in my local lidl. I think they need to run some till etiquette training for all the newcomers

LydiaJ

silvercar wrote: »

There was a study comparing the highest level of education reached by children grouped by the status of their parent (s): widowed / single/ married or living together/. Those with widowed or married parents did far, far better than the single group.

Interesting. How did the children of divorced parents do? Have you got a link to the study, by any chance? And when was it done? I remember reading somewhere ("Freakonomics" possibly) that most studies show links between kids' achievement and the kind of people the parents are, but not between kids' achievement and what the parents do to the kids. So that there's a link with mother's level of education, for example, but not with whether the child is read to or taken to libraries.

neverdespairgirl wrote: »

My maternal grandmother grew up in a family with a shortage of fathers over two generations...

Fascinating. Thanks for sharing that. I come from a long line of people who had both parents until long after they were grown-up. My mum had a half-sister, though, a child of my grandfather's first marriage. Her mother was very ill (diabetes before insulin was available) from before the birth until she died when my half-aunt was 5. So from birth to age 10, she was brought up by various maiden aunts, who seem (from the stories she told) to have been along the lines of the sadistic aunts in Saki stories. Her father, although still alive, wasn't considered able to bring up a child alone, because of being male. :mad:

Fortunately for her, he remarried when she was 10, and Granny was much nicer to her than the aunts had been. She always said for the rest of her life that getting a stepmother had been the best thing that ever happened to her.