I suddenly picked up “allergies*” in my late 30s - couldn’t work out what they were, other than antihistamines (cetirizine or loratidine) made them “not as bad”, and I also needed to avoid certain things in particular (breathing in dust, aerosols, perfumes, other chemical fumes, car fumes, cigarette fumes, wood dust and drinking alcohol).

Turned out to be Nasal Polyps. I was due for surgery to remove them in 2020, but then Covid happened and I’ve been on a waiting list since. Surgery may completely remove the problem, or at least lessen it - but they could grow back within five years.

Basically every day is like I’ve got cold or sometimes flu. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in phlegm. If I take antihistamines, it’s pretty mild or controllable, as long as I can reasonably avoid those triggers. Sometimes I have to drink lemsip in the morning (powdered hot drink of paracetamol, lemon flavour & decongestant). It’s there every day, permanently, but how severe it is varies between “slightly inconvenient” and “too unwell to work”.

Antihistamines are essential for me to function at all, and make a huge difference - though I feel they’ve become less effective in the last year or so. Thankfully they’re very cheap over the counter (~£1.30 for 30 days’ worth). I also use a saltwater nasal spray sometimes, and I sometimes eat a lot of menthol sweets. I have to be careful with decongestants to avoid “rebound congestion” where your nose adjusts to life with decongestants, then becomes twice as blocked up if you stop.

If I drink alcohol or breathe perfume etc, my sinuses block up within half an hour, I can get an asthmatic response, and I get crippling arthritic pain in my hands and joints. Sometimes perfume and other sprays can cause severe, possibly dangerous breathing problems. I have an asthma inhaler for these emergencies, and always have to carry it with me, in case someone sprays perfume in an enclosed space (which might cause me to die).

If I keep reasonable control over these things, I can live pretty “normally”. If I actually get a cold, it’s like I’ve got a “double cold”, and it can make me too ill to go to work.

When it’s bad, it’s a pretty miserable existence to be honest, but in the larger scale of things it’s not a serious or life-threatening illness, so you feel guilty for complaining.

When it’s not so bad, I can normally ignore it for most of the day - and I have a pretty active job and am otherwise fairly healthy. It’s worst in the morning/night when I’m horizontal.

Your case outlined in the original post sounds particularly upsetting and you have my sympathies. You’re not being a baby.

*technically it’s an intolerance or hypersensitivity, and not truly an allergy, though it behaves in much the same way, and symptoms can be controlled in much the same way.

Perhaps a warning rather then a genuine murder attempt?

Though the list of suspects must be “Any politician, celebrity or person who has been in the news and done something wrong, stupid or hypocritical since the 1980s”.

Sorry, I might have misremembered the exact process (this was probably three or four years ago), though no need for the nasty aggressive attitude (though my apologies if I offended you somehow).

Maybe it was version upgrades (e.g 18.04 to 20.04) instead of updates, or clean installs/new installs/reinstalls? I expect it was some of one and some of another.

At the time I used to (casually) maintain a bunch of Ubuntu computers for a few community projects, small organisations and older people who live nearby. I don’t remember the specifics, I just remember the phone calls of “the printer isn’t working” “Linux has broken my USB pen” etc, and the fix being “remove the snap version and install the deb version”. It caused a lot of problems.

If you were running a previous version of Ubuntu, where you had deb packages which worked, over the course of a few updates, they replaced half of your programs with snaps (without telling you), which were unable to see additional hard drives, USB pens, printers, scanners or cameras, couldn’t use plug-ins, couldn’t use 3rd party templates or presets, and didn’t respect any system settings for fonts/text size, icon placement and so on.

Snaps were fine for “aisleriot solitaire” or “calculator” (assuming you didn’t mind a 5 minute loading time) or other things which didn’t need to interact with any file or system or device, but for actual programs for people trying to do work? Bag of shite.

Now, I imagine some years later they must have fixed some of this rubbish, and I read recently they might have finally done something about permissions, but no, they didn’t ask anyone before they swapped working programs for completely broken snaps. They forced it on their existing users, and some of us bear grudges.

I think it meant to say “Scrounger Guy Hands realises legislation loophole, which allowed him to steal billions of pounds of unearned money off the British Government and the British people, will be closed, leaving his company with a tiny fraction less of immoral profit, whilst still making billions in profit”

Sadly, it’s been mildly drifting that way since the 1990s - though the drifting has sped up quite a bit during most of the Tory Governments. Not sure if Brexit specifically sped things up again, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

“YOU. THE ONE WHO IS MOVING NOW.”

Are you The Gatekeeper from the tv/boardgame Atmosfear?

A “consent and pay”, or “paywall” (or even “register-wall”) website is totally fine and should be free to exist - but it shouldn’t be indexed by search engines as a response to a question, and shouldn’t be linkable on any form of social media.

Me “Hi, is that, umm… Phones, number four, uhhhh?”

Phones4u “Haha, yes, but It’s pronounced ‘Phones For You’”

Me “Oh, it’s it a wrong number? I’ve got it written down here, it’s a number four, not a word ‘for’ f-o-r, and it’s not the word ‘you’, but just a letter U on its own, which is pronounced ‘uh’”

Phones4u “yes, that’s how we write it”

Me “Why? Why didn’t you do it properly? It’s just like that argument with the 90s boyband Fiveive all over again.”

Etc etc

Is it a weird guilt thing?

I hated that song when the programme was new, but now I feel guilty about it, because someone was trying their best, and they wrote, re-wrote, edited and worked on that song and for every instrument and vocal, someone practised and practised and performed, and even if it wasn’t quite to my taste, it doesn’t mean it was bad, and I picture them still crying themselves to sleep at night, twenty years later, going “everyone hates the song I did for Star Trek Enterprise and now I hate myself”, so I make sure to watch the full intro so I don’t hurt their feelings.

That’s what everyone else does too, right?

This is good, but they could really do with running these for older people too.

Here’s one I heard this week for example:

“My friend down at the bowls club said on Facebook that they’re not even real immigrants, but they’re special forces soldiers from the secret UN Army and they’re bringing them over here to take over the British and they’ve all got really good shoes and mobile phones you see, that’s how you can tell and they’re all of fighting age aren’t they?”

6. Rupert Murdoch
7. The Daily Mail, Express, Telegraph
8. Nigel Farage
9. Elon Musk
10. Putin’s Internet disinformation army

“Phwoar! Most of the people in this hospital are wearing nurse’s uniforms! Kinky!”

I thought the pull-string light switch inside the bathroom was the standard in the UK?

I’ve only seen switches outside bathrooms in the last 5 years, in recent “having the bathroom re-done” cases.

It might be an age of house or regional thing though.

The Tooth Fairy is trying to save up for retirement.

Here they still exist - they just make you pay if you want a new one. I (and seemingly most people) use them all the time still, but I guess more people reuse them more times now. I’m quite happy to pay 30p for one when the old ones get used up. I think they’re a bit sturdier than they used to be too - so less likely for the handles to snap when you’ve still got a mile to walk home.

I guess it mostly cut down on unwanted ones getting littered etc. Now they’re valuable, all the more reason to hoard them in a cupboard in the kitchen.

Where you are it sounds like they stopped existing - what do you put your food shopping in? Do you still have a thousand left that you previously hoarded?

I think technically it’s both, but it’s mainly focused on the former - the shop and supermarket ones. You now pay 20 or 30p for them - previously when they were free, they would sometimes force a bag on you, even if you didn’t want one (I guess to walk around advertising their shop).

Throwing pretend milkshakes at a pretend Nigel Farridge is disrespectful.

We should be burning effigies of him on bonfires.

… “étoile de mer”, which would roughly translate as “star of the sea” or “sea star” - the same as the Spanish “estrella de mar”, Portuguese “estrela do mar” or Romanian “stea de mare”.

I miss lovely, earthy, warm, friendly chocolatey Brownbuntu.

I always felt purplebuntu was a bit vile.