For all you know your little boy may secretly want to be a girl and you’ll offend him deeply if you refer to him as a boy.😉
Well we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
I've just ordered this T-shirt (unisex fit obviously) for my boy since he refers to pylons as Eiffel Towers. I'm not sure he'll be in on the joke but he'll enjoy the picture
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
We don't have our own wotsits but do have a pair of timeshare wotsits - one niece and one nephew. He returned to the nest twice - once when he broke up with his girlfriend and once when his wife sent him back to his parents because she thought he had Covid and she didn't want to catch it!
The niece is currently back with her parents but in rather different circumstances. They had been living in another part of the country but wanted to move back to where her parents live. They thought they had sold their house and she made the mistake of handing in her notice, getting a new job near her parents, and moving in with them "For a couple of months until they got their new house". That was in October 2021. The house sale fell through and they only managed to sell it a couple of months ago - just as mortgage costs started to increase. Their financial advisor suggested holding off from buying until the financial markets settle down. Fine for him to suggest, but she, her husband and their extremely badly behaved Staffie are still with her parents. Things are getting extremely fraught, and I don't want to be around when her mother inevitably loses her rag with them.
If you're talking about the population stats, the BBC article link posted earlier puts the numbers in some context. The Beeb were showing the rate of change. 1 billion all alive in 1800s (so it took, what, 200,000 years to achieve that density?), then by 1920s up to 2 billion, then by 2020, 8 billion. One of the issues is longevity and not necessarily birth rate - as of the 8 billion alive now, some could have been alive when we reached 2 billion 100 years ago.
Edited to add: This isn't a curmudge...the population stats always astound me. No so much in the growth, but what it must have been like in centuries past. It's so easy to think the world has always been thus, but even my grandparents back in the 20s would have seen wide open spaces where there is now urban sprawl. And why oh why would the Egyptians have wasted so much human resource building pyramids, when you had to live first? There were so few people spread about, why use thousands building?
@steveTu you don't need to go back to the 20s to find wide open spaces where there is now urban sprawl. The difference between the 60s and now is incredible. In the area where I lived with my parents there is virtually no open space any more, and what little there is is now earmarked for more housing.
My Grandmother lived in a small town in Scotland which had a clear 2 mile gap between it and the nearest village. The two are effectively just one now. When we went to visit her we had about a 1 mile walk from the railway station to her house and that was farmland all the way. Now completely developed, the railway is now the M90 and the location of the old station is a motorway service area.
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I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...
One is hoping to move next year @Lyn , but we're waiting to see how things go. The other one will never be able to live on her own.
I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...