This. My main memory, as someone who was born in 1980 in small town England, was the novelty of trying to get one of the new atlases/textbooks in geography class that 'Commonwealth of Independent States' in it, rather than USSR.
Mostly because my dad made me watch it, as he said it would be important for me to be able to remember it happening one day.
He was right.
IRA was a constant thing though in our heads.
Multiple school evacuations due to suspect packages. Plus I was 'blown up' once. Was on the bridge when the Stevenage rail bomb went off in 1994.
Trips down to London always had a hint of danger, especially Docklands.
Basically, I think Cold War memory for 80s kids in the UK was often related to family situation and geography.
As London/London adjacent, it was ALWAYS IRA that were the mental worry. Not the soviets shooting missiles.
Oh, should add that getting blown up by the IRA (i wasn't. the blast did knock me off my bike though) only gave me increased cred at school for about a week.
Kids are fickle.
I do have a bit of an addiction to late Cold War books though. They tell you a lot about the period they were written in.
Remember! You can cash in stream points on Sundays to get me to tell you about anything on my bookshelves. twitch.tv/gariusthebrit
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This place can be rubbish at times. Really rubbish. But I've also always believed that you have to try and make Twitter the space you'd like it to be.
Over the last week, you lot have donated over £1,500 in memory of someone you never met just because I asked.
You're wonderful.
OBVIOUSLY I still don't believe any of you are real people. You're all bots and AI scripts.
But you're very nice bots. You helped make a widower (who doesn't quite understand why you did this) happy, and helped Clara's family make a difference for others with MND in her memory.
New phone time, so a reminder that this is what my home screen looks like.
This is it. Everything. It only shows things I ACTIVELY interact with at a given time. All passive apps are hidden and accessed via notifications.
Better for mental health. Zero distractions.
To be on the list, something needs to be an app that i choose to click to achieve something on a regular basis.
Items are added temporarily to that list as required (e.g. airline check in app if i'm flying that day etc. Teams if i need to watch it on my phone for a bit)
Adding an item temporarily, or removing one i've stopped using, requires simply clicking the black space and then, when the list of EVERYTHING installed on the phone pops up, checking or unchecking it's check box.
Okay, because @findmypast's ridiculously lazy PAYG approach to 1921 census access pricing has triggered both my historian AND Digital Strategist anger:
Who: General public
Wants: Looking for specific family members.
Behaviour: Intermittent user. May sub for month then accidentally roll over. Will micro-pay for a few personal records.
Model: PAYG per record as per published model.
FISHER
Who: Amateur historians/Battle guides etc.
Wants: Fishing expeditions. Shallow-but-wide access
Behaviour: Maintains 12 month sub or uses in bursts. Prone to cancel/renew behaviour.
Model: Standard subscription grants 5 1921 creds per month. More can be bought as a bundle.
This is outrageous and basically fucks any amateur historian trying to do stuff like, say, WW1 survivor research that isn't about one particular person in their family.
I have zero problem with paying a subscription to services that provide access to records and do the legwork of digitising.
I pay for a whole bunch - from ancestor searches, to war record stuff, to newspaper archives.
I pay that, for 12 months every year, when in reality I'm not doing searches every single day. And I don't MIND that, because implicit in it is an expectation that what my money is going towards is FUTURE digitisation.
Right. As requested. A thread on how a randy Italian Admiral had his reputation saved by the reveal that Bletchley existed.
Includes golf, sexy spies, post-war beef between German/Italian armed forces and the almost-forgotten work of Bletchley's female codebreakers /1
1941. The Mediterranean. Adm Cunningham is pulling a Sneaky McSneak on the Italian fleet, who think (at this stage) that radar and night battles are for losers.
They think his big ships are still in port, because he made the Japanese ambassador think he was off golfing.
Wrong.
The result: Cape Matapan, a running naval battle that culminates in battleships Barham, Valiant, and Warspite sneaking up on the Italians in the dark.
Prince Philip then turns on the lights and Cunningham hits them with the last, full point-blank broadside in naval warfare.