• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • The actual reason that we don’t is pretty much because of the invention of sewing machines. Once sewing machines were widespread, making coats became sooo much cheaper than they had been. Coats need a lot of tightly made seams which took time and so made coats very expensive. With sewing machines, making these seams was vastly quicker and more reliable.

    Coats win over cloaks in so many ways because you can do things with your arms without exposing them or your torso to the rain and cold: impossible with a cloak.

    Capes were the short versions - and intended to cover the shoulder and back without seams that might let the rain in, but with the new machine made seams, they were not needed either.

    The really big change was when it became affordable to outfit armies with coats instead of cloaks or capes. At that point all the caché and prestige that was associated with military rank disappeared from cloaks and capes and they were suddenly neither useful not fashionable.

    Nowadays, of course, they are no longer what your unfashionable dad would have worn: they are quite old enough to have regained a certain style.


  • I don’t think that I have ever submitted more than 2 applications in a week. Most of the info in those is the same, so it’s just copy and paste from the last one or from your cv and then how you fit the person spec, which always the one involving most thought.

    It hardly counts as a full time job though.

    I don’t think that I have ever actually kept it a secret as such, but I would seldom have cause to mention it anyway until I get an interview. At that point it depends on my current relationship with my manager. Sometimes I have just booked a day off for no specific reason, other times I have told them. If it is a post in the same organisation I’d certainly tell them. If it was a place where yhe managers were that bad, I wouldn’t want to stay there at all.


  • When I was unemployed I used to walk waaaay more than I do now - both to get to places and just as a hobby - and I’d hope to do the same when retired, as long as I am fit enough. That’s walking though. Standing in one place is something that I find extremely wearing and have never done when not necessary. As I understand it this is fundamental to the nature of bipeds. To stand still, we constantly need to adjust balance. However, when walking, it is basically a continuous, controlled fall forwards, and takes less energy. For quadrupeds, it is the other way around: they are stable when standing, but require constant effort to walk or run.

    I probably spend most of my reading time horizontal rather than sitting, but if I am reading when vertical then, again, it will be walking - or pacing around - rather than standing. I would seem really weird to simply stand there and read.














  • I can recall being in the cot under the window in my parents room, but there is nothing else attached to that memory.

    I can also very clearly recall being put onto the floor in the back of my dad’s dark blue side opening van, which had an orange tinted skylight, and crawling across the corrugated floor panel to pull myself up against the wheel arch - since this was evidently before i could walk - whilst my parents were talking just outside, and the van itself was parked across the road from the entrance to our garden.

    However, apparently my dad never owned a van of that type, nor anything like it, and nor did anyone that either of my parents or my - significantly older - siblings are aware of. So despite the clarity and detail of that memory, I have doubts that it is at all real.