If you’re using a DSLR, playing around with where you’re pointing the camera when you’re setting your exposure can radically change your picture. Point the camera at the sky and set your aperture and shutter speed so that the light meter in your viewfinder is balanced, then move the camera back down so that the buildings are included again. The light meter will indicate that you’re underexposed but taking the picture like this can keep the buildings in shadow, while allowing the sky to shine through.

Also think about how your composition is balanced. If you want the sky to be the focus, try including more of it in the image. Remember the rule of thirds - maybe try with the sky taking up two thirds and the buildings just the bottom third.

My dad worked at Gatwick Airport as a cleaner in the 70s when he was a teenager. His first week there, a woman drops a duty free bag with a bottle of booze in it and he rushes over to clean it up. He’s just about to put the bag, full of liquid booze and broken glass, in the bin when one of the senior porters stops him and tells him to bring it in the back. Turns out they had a filtration system in the break room for this exact scenario. They’d pour the booze out of the plastic bag and through a sieve that would collect all the broken glass, it would all go into a big container at the bottom and voila, free booze! They offered my dad some, but he declined. Anyway, I guess if you were working at Gatwick in the 70s you could have had a chance to drink some airport jungle juice, you’d just need to be brave enough.

You can get bath crayons for kids that let you write directly on the wall of the shower or w/e. Searching brings up lots of options…

I wonder if it would be possible to find an option at an actual university that still aligns with her interests. Thinking more along witchy lines than medical lines, would something like anthropology interest her? There’s specialisms like ethnomedicine which would explore traditional/herbal medicine from a more academic perspective.

Yes! I’ve really gotten into actually making use of my freezer recently. It’s also great for spices and herbs that you use less frequently.

• Fresh tumeric and ginger: just grate off what you need and pop it back.
• Chillies: freeze whole and cut up and use as needed
• Herbs: how well they freeze depends. Things like sage, thyme, curry leaves freeze really well. Basil and coriander will be very soggy when they defrost but are fine if you’re just using them in a sauce.

I love ‘dreich’ (rhymes with ‘greek’) because it perfectly sums up British weather most of the time.

Also a fan of ‘banging’, as in top, class, right good.

This made me think of an article I read today about the Nazi occupation of Rome during WWII:

Marjorie Scaretti, my great-aunt, lived in Rome for much of her life. She was in the Apennines after the armistice talks of July 1943 and returned to Rome on 20 October, two days after the remaining Jews of the Roman ghetto were sent by train to Auschwitz. Her husband, Enrico, was a banker, some of whose property and businesses were appropriated by Mussolini after he refused to join the Fascist Party. Aunt Marjorie kept a diary, and in its pages she writes about the furtive lives Romans led during the occupation: the ceaseless speculation about where the Allies were; whether the Nazis would destroy Rome by defending it from an Allied attack, turning it into another Stalingrad; at which prison or police station someone was being held and how to get them out – many arrests in the months of the occupation were entirely arbitrary.

[…] She wrote of ‘the hair’s-breadth escapes, the adventures, the amazing and often fantastic existence of thousands of fugitives, coupled with the fear, the secret anxiety, the danger and the want, the heroic, the ludicrous and the vile – all packed into the daily life of the harassed citizen’. Josette Bruccoleri, an interviewee in Trevelyan’s book, spoke of the same unease: ‘Everyone seemed to be in possession of some great secret which they did not dare reveal. People hardly spoke to each other and if they did it was only for a moment. I myself felt like a time bomb ready to explode, but like everybody else I did my best to look as innocent as possible.’

Not exactly the same, but every day it feels like there are more and more echoes of the past.

That’s great news. I thought it already was, but it turns out it’s just some places that offer it for free so good it’s being expanded:

The new announcement aims to increase access to the morning-after pill; while it is already available for nothing from most GP surgeries, most sexual health clinics and some NHS walk-in centres, not all pharmacies offer it for nothing, with some women paying up to £30 for the medication.