South West, England
Joined May 2014
- Tweets3.1K
- Following231
- Followers158
- Likes34.2K
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
I had a few tears watching this.
I used to be an addict. Nearly took my life.
This should be mandatory watching in every school.
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
I don’t want to post the video. You’ve all seen it. But I do want to write a love letter…
Dear everyone in Britain, ( even you illegals)
Just so you understand. The poppy is for the boys who never got to grow old. For the boys who were still somebody’s baby, brother, uncle or father. More than 600,000 of them.
It doesn’t matter if you support war, hate your country, think you are a woman (even though you are a man). It doesn’t matter which God you pray to, or if you pray to none at all.
It doesn’t matter who you vote for, what climate narrative you believe, or whether you believe Israel should exist or not!
The poppy isn’t for you!
It’s for those who came before. Those who fought for your right to be weird, annoying or even foreign.
The poppy is how we say thank you. Thank you for giving us time, peace and choice.
And attempting to ban our poppy by declaring it politically divisive isn’t a move towards freedom. It is an act of suppression. Understand that.
The poppy is about love and loss. For you!
So stick your rainbow flags and every other flag where the sun doesn’t shine and just wear your poppy. Those boys did not die as symbols. They died for you!
Did you know that poppies grew across the battlefields where so many fell? As though even the land refused to forget the blood once given to defend it.
So the poppy is for them. For those who came before us and paid in youth, in hope, in breath, in blood, so that we might have the freedom to be arseholes.
So that we might even have the freedom to fight over the ridiculous, the inconsequential and the insane.
Revere it, celebrate it and wear it. The very least you can do is that.
Best
The ordinary people.
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
99% of women and girls in Somalia have been mutilated in the following way: the clitoris is cut off, along with the inner labia. Then the inner flesh of the outer labia is removed before both sides are sewn tightly together, leaving a hole no bigger than a matchstick for urine and menses to trickle through.
All of this is done in childhood, and without any form of anesthesia whatsoever. Sometimes the little girl is given a scrap of leather or a stick to bite down on. The cutters use old razor blades, or sometimes a piece of broken glass.
This is only the beginning of a girl’s pain.
Most wedding nights in Somalia are aided by “the little knife” — that is, the new husband slices his bride open so that he can penetrate her now cut and bleeding scar tissue. Some men, however, simply batter their way through, tearing that tiny hole open by sheer force. When a woman goes into labor, she’s cut open more widely, then sewn back up afterwards so that when sex resumes she will have to be cut open yet again.
This practice leads to countless deaths from infection and a drastic increase in maternal mortality, but Somali men still refuse to marry uncut women, forcing mothers to have their daughters cut or face social stigma. Uncut girls are seen as dirty; the term for clitoris is a playground taunt in Somalia, and girls who are not cut are usually ostracized by their peers.
The Somali government recently debated the legality of this appalling custom, and the parliament largely split along gender lines. Female MPs roundly condemned FGM, while male MPs insisted that having a clitoris made a woman more difficult to penetrate, and quoted the hadith in which Muhammad condoned the practice. These are educated men who nevertheless claim that cutting a girl is necessary in order to control her sexuality, and that an uncut woman will be promiscuous and untrustworthy.
In spite of the Somali government’s continued support for FGM, foreign aid continues to flow into Somalia unobstructed. The West should refuse to give the Somali government so much as a single dollar until they outlaw FGM and take positive steps to combat the problem.
One tactic that has been highly successful involves showing Somali men a video of a girl being mutilated. Because FGM is seen as women’s business, most men have no idea what it entails. Men who watch this video are horrified, and the most common reaction has been “Not my daughter!” This proves that FGM is not hopelessly entrenched in Somali culture. Western pressure and resources could make an enormous difference in the lives of Somali women and girls, and put a stop to this barbaric practice.
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
In June 2014 the future King of England dug a hole in a flowerbed at his London home and buried two jumpers. Four months later he dug them up again.
They looked identical. One was pure merino wool. The other was a synthetic copy. Charles had them laid side by side in the soil at Clarence House in front of an audience, marked the spot, and left them there over the summer.
In October the soil was turned back. The synthetic jumper came out whole. It was clean, white and untouched, as if it had gone in that morning. The wool one was a few threads clinging to the wire frame. The rest had rotted away and fed the roses.
He had done another test the day before the burial. A wool jacket and a synthetic one were each set alight. The wool smouldered and went out. The synthetic went up like a torch.
For 40 years this man was laughed at. He talked to his plants. He worried about soil. He wore the same patched tweed coat for decades. In 2004 he launched a campaign to get the British eating mutton again, on the grounds that an older sheep tastes better and gives the hill farmer something to sell. In 2010 he launched another, for wool, from a medieval barn, because the price of a fleece had fallen below the cost of shearing it.
He was treated as an eccentric with too much land.
Go back over that list. Soil, wool, mutton, old cloth that lasts, small farms, raw milk cheese. Every one of the causes he was mocked for has turned out to be right.
He proved the simplest of them with a spade. One jumper went back to the earth, and the other will still be there when he is not.
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
Ask this one calm, strategic question:
✅ “May I understand how this information relates to the requirements or performance expectations of this role?”
That single question does three important things:
1. It keeps the conversation professional
2. It protects your boundaries
3. It signals confidence and awareness
If HR says it’s about availability or flexibility:
✅ “I’m fully able to meet the role’s expectations regarding time, travel, and deliverables.”
If HR says it’s about long-term commitment:
✅ “I’m committed to delivering value and growing within a role where performance is the key measure.”
See the shift?
From a personal question
- to a role-focused discussion
- without confrontation or disrespect
You’re not being difficult.
You’re being professional.
If this helps, retweet it so more people can learn!
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
🚨 17 HOURS ON: 3YR OLD NOAH STILL MISSING
Its 7:30am and almost 17 hours have passed since vulnerable 3-year-old Noah vanished in Brantham, Suffolk, shortly after 3pm yesterday.
Noah, who is autistic, non-verbal and partially deaf, has still not been found.
Police have released a new photo and warned that, due to his vulnerabilities, Noah may not respond to his name being called, making the search even more challenging.
He was last seen near Merriam Close after reportedly running down an alleyway towards a new-build estate.
Temperatures fell to around 10°C overnight.
Emergency services searched throughout the night, with specialist officers, dog units, helicopters from NPAS and HM Coastguard, Suffolk Fire & Rescue, Suffolk Lowland Search & Rescue and members of the public involved.
Door-to-door enquiries, CCTV and doorbell footage are being checked.
Train services between Manningtree and Ipswich are also running at reduced speed due to the searches.
Residents are urged to check gardens, sheds, outbuildings, behind bins and cars, including neighbours’ gardens.
Noah is white with curly ginger hair. He was wearing a Bluey T-shirt, shorts and Vans trainers with a white stripe.
Please share and check your property. Noah needs to be found.
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
J’ai 82 ans.
4 enfants, 11 petits-enfants, 2 arrière-petits-enfants…
Et une chambre de 12 m².
Je n’ai plus ma maison.
Plus mes meubles, ni mes souvenirs autour de moi.
Mais j’ai quelqu’un qui fait mon lit, me prépare à manger,
et prend ma tension chaque matin.
Je n’entends plus les rires d’enfants,
je ne prépare plus mes boulettes, ni mes œufs mimosa.
Je ne tricote presque plus.
Certains passent me voir tous les quinze jours.
D’autres, tous les trois mois.
Et puis… certains ne viennent plus du tout.
Alors je fais mes sudokus.
Je vais en ergothérapie.
Je parle avec ceux qui restent… mais pas trop.
Parce qu’ici, les liens se brisent vite.
Ils partent souvent sans prévenir.
On dit que la vie dure plus longtemps qu’avant.
Mais pourquoi, si c’est pour la finir si seule ?
Il me reste mes photos.
Quelques objets ramenés de “chez moi”.
Et le silence, parfois trop lourd.
Si quelqu’un me lit…
J’espère que les générations futures comprendront une chose :
La famille, ce n’est pas que des débuts.
C’est aussi des retours.
C’est prendre soin de ceux qui nous ont aimés les premiers.
Prendre soin de ceux qui ont pris soin de nous…
C’est peut-être ça, le vrai respect.
— Une maman, une grand-mère…
Ou peut-être toi, un jour
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
Today is World Sepsis Day, in 20O7 I almost died of sepsis after a shaving cut got infected. Sepsis kills more people a year than breast, bowel and prostate cancer combined. Find out how to spot sepsis here: sepsistrust.org/about-sepsis…
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
I need to make a very PUBLIC announcement on behalf of younger GenXers and older Millennials.
If you see someone in their 40s or 50s who seems a little boring now, I need you to understand something...
We already got it in.
Like...GOT. IT. IN.
We are not sitting home on a Friday night because we never knew how to have fun.
We are sitting home on a Friday night because we have seen enough.
We went to parties in houses that should have been condemned and were almost certainly owned by the local drug dealer.
We saw police lights and RAN and not across a nice, flat field.
INTO THE WOODS.
Do you understand the athleticism required to hurdle uprooted tree roots in platform shoes while simultaneously trying to keep your low-rise jeans from sliding completely off your ass?
And somehow...we never spilled the Zima. We never spilled the Boone’s Farm.
That was TALENT.
We slept on floors in strange houses because the designated driver either never showed up or, in a shocking turn of events, was drunker than everybody else.
There was no Uber, Life360 or Find My Friends.
There was just somebody named Mike saying, “I know a shortcut.”
And we FOLLOWED MIKE.
We closed down bars and then decided the night was still young, so we drove to Atlantic City, where we somehow managed to get drunk, sober up, get drunk again, sober up again and then get drunk a THIRD TIME before breakfast.
And according to our parents? We were at Michelle’s house.
Eating pizza and watching movies.
Michelle’s mother unknowingly covered for approximately 17 people every weekend. If there even was a Michelle.
We drank things called Purple Passion, Mad Dog 20/20 and whatever somebody mixed inside a giant plastic garbage can. Nobody asked what was in it. You grabbed a red Solo cup and trusted the process.
We went to clubs until the lights came on. Do you know the psychological damage of seeing a nightclub with the LIGHTS ON? Nothing good happens after those lights come on.
We danced for four straight hours in shoes that permanently altered the structure of our feet.
We made entire plans without cell phones...no texts, dropped pins or group chats...just an extremely questionable sense of direction.
We rode in cars with 11 people when the vehicle legally seated five. Someone was always sitting on someone. Someone was always in the hatchback.
And there was always one friend yelling, “DUCK!” when we passed a cop.
So yes...now we like being home.
We like sweatpants.
We like cancelling plans.
We like saying, “That sounds fun!” with absolutely no intention of attending.
We like restaurants at 5:30 because we can get a good table.
We like being home by 8:17.
And if someone texts at 9:30 PM and says, “What are you doing?”
Sleeping...we are sleeping.
Because this is not boring my friends...this is retirement.
We already played, partied and danced on the bar.
We already ran from the cops through a wooded area dressed like a Spice Girl.
We have stories that cannot be posted because there are still people with careers, marriages and reputations to protect. And thank GOD there were no camera phones.
So kids, when you look at your Gen X and older Millennial parents sitting peacefully on the couch watching Dateline at 8 PM and think:
“God, you guys are boring.”
Sweetheart...oh sweetheart.
You are looking at retired legends.
Put some respect on our names. We're probably the reason Life360 was invented.
xoxoxo (posted from someone else on FakeBook) 🤣 #genx #oldandtired
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
Look at this adorable man who has started a men's wellbeing walk and talk in Mottingham, South London
No one turned up on Wednesday to join him but he's still hopeful
If you know of any men who might be struggling in that area, please let them know about this new group
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
A Hero That Trusted His Intuition.
The problem wasn’t that Morgan Stanley didn’t believe him.
Rick Rescorla had already been right once. After the 1993 basement bombing of the World Trade Center, the firm’s security chief walked the towers, studied the site, and reached a conclusion most people preferred not to hear: the World Trade Center was still a target. Next time, he said, it would not be a truck. It would be an airplane.
An airplane. In a 1993 report.
Executives listened. Then they looked at the lease.
Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the complex—twenty-two floors of the South Tower, thousands of brokers, and a trading infrastructure that could not be packed into boxes and wheeled across the Hudson.
They literally made it a trading center.
The contract with the Port Authority ran until 2006. Walking away from premium Manhattan space of that scale would have meant penalties measured in the hundreds of millions, plus the operational chaos of relocating an entire downtown machine. So the company stayed.
Rescorla adjusted. If they could not leave the building, they would learn to escape it.
He built a protocol and treated it like doctrine. Unannounced drills. No exemptions. Brokers who billed by the minute were pulled off their desks and sent into the stairwells two by two, starting from the top floors, leaving a lane for firefighters coming the other way.
People complained. He did not care. Practice, he believed, was the only thing that would beat panic.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. From the 44th floor of the South Tower, Rescorla could see the fire. Then the Port Authority came over the speakers: the South Tower was secure. Stay at your desks.
Rescorla grabbed a bullhorn and ignored them.
He started the drill his people already knew by heart. Floor by floor, two by two, down the stairs. He sang as he moved—Cornish songs from childhood, then “God Bless America”—keeping the line moving, refusing to let the stairwell become a stampede. Seventeen minutes later, the second plane struck the South Tower.
By then, most of Morgan Stanley was already on the way out.
Of the 2,687 employees in the building that morning, all but 13 survived.
It was stunning.
Rescorla could have been outside with them. He went back up instead. Colleagues told him to leave. He said he would, as soon as he was sure no one was left behind.
He was last seen around the 10th floor, heading higher.
The South Tower fell at 9:59 a.m. They never found him.
He was one of the 13.
He was a hero in every sense of the word.
Remember Rick Rescorla, he remembered for us.
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
Beatrix Potter left fifteen farms and four thousand acres of the Lake District to the nation, with a condition attached that the fells are still arguing about.
Peter Rabbit money bought that land. Book by book, farm by farm, from 1905 onward, a Londoner with an income and a stubborn streak buying up Lakeland ground as it came available to stop it being sold off in parcels for villas.
What she did with it is the part that gets skipped. She farmed it. Properly. She bought Troutbeck Park in 1923 and built a Herdwick flock of over a thousand, took advice from her shepherd Tom Storey, showed her tups at local shows against men who had been doing it for four generations, and beat them. She was the first woman elected to lead the Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association and died before she could take the chair.
The Herdwick was in trouble for the reason all hill breeds get into trouble. Slow growing, fewer lambs, small carcass. On a balance sheet it loses to a lowland sheep every single time, and the only thing it is unbeatable at is living on a Cumbrian fell in February.
She understood the other half too, which is the part that would get you shouted at today. That view, the one on the biscuit tin, the open fell and the walls and the cropped green, is not wilderness. It is a grazed landscape. Take the sheep off and you get bracken, then scrub, then a different place entirely, over about fifteen years.
So when she died in December 1943 she left the lot to the National Trust, the largest gift of land it had ever had, with instructions. The farms were to stay working farms. The Herdwicks were to stay on them, heafed to their own ground, the flocks passing with the tenancy.
Eighty years on, the fashionable position in that valley is that there are too many sheep on the fell and it should be allowed to go back.
Back to what, nobody can say, because nobody has seen it. The last ungrazed version of that fell predates the pyramids and there is no photograph of it, no survey, and no living thing that remembers it.
The woman who wrote Jemima Puddle-Duck saw this coming and wrote it into a legal document.
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
If you feel like giving up please, please, please remember the reasons why you held on for so long.
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
If you lost someone very special in your life, this is for you.
“Tired of hearing that I will see you again in the 'next life. I don't want to wait a lifetime to see you again. I want to see you today, right now.
Tired of being told I have memories to cherish. I don't want memories, I want to make memories with you.
Tired of the words "time heals". Time will never heal this empty place called my heart.
So tired of hearing that you are with God now, safely in his care...an angel in heaven. I really do not care where they say you are. I want you here. Here. Here with me. I want to see you, feel you, touch you, hear you, speak to you, and just sit in silence with you. It doesn't make me feel any better knowing you are at Disney land or on a cruise... or in heaven.
I am so tired of hearing that you are with me always. That you are watching over me. I can't see a spirit or touch a ghost. I do not want you as a guardian angel. I want you as a face to face human being. I want you alive and breathing. I want to hear your heartbeat and see your chest rising with each breath.
I am so tired of trying to make a life again. A life without you.
Tired of trying to smile. Tired of being strong. Tired of holding back tears. I am so lost. The pain is unbearable. Sometimes can barely breathe. I am so tired. Tired of having a reason to grieve.”
#Repost to show someone that they are not alone. ❤️
Catherine Pengilly retweeted
A German soldier stopped at the front of the line. He stared at the old man leading the children.
He knew that face.
The man was Janusz Korczak. The soldier had grown up reading his books.
The guard leaned in and offered him a way out. Step aside. Disappear. Live.
Korczak shook his head. He took the hands of the two children beside him. And he kept walking toward the train.
That was the last offer. There had been many.
Here's who he was.
Janusz Korczak wasn't even his real name. He was born Henryk Goldszmit. A Polish Jew. A doctor.
By the 1930s he was famous across Poland. A pediatrician. A writer of beloved children's books. A radio host. Everyone knew his voice.
He could have had an easy life.
Instead he gave it to orphans.
In 1912, he built a home for Jewish orphans in Warsaw. Dom Sierot. The Children's Home.
It was unlike anything in the world.
The children ran their own little parliament. They had their own court. Their own newspaper. They were treated as people, not problems.
Korczak had one rule above all. A child is not someone who will matter one day. A child matters now.
He lived among them for 30 years. He never married. He had no children of his own.
They were his children.
Then the Germans came.
1940. The Nazis sealed 400,000 Jews inside the Warsaw Ghetto. A few city blocks. Walls. Starvation. Disease.
Korczak moved his orphanage inside. He moved in with it.
His friends begged him to run. He was famous. He looked Polish. He could pass. He could vanish onto the other side of the wall.
He refused.
Inside the ghetto, he fought for the children every single day.
He begged for food in the streets. He carried sacks of potatoes on his old back. He wrote in his diary by candlelight, tracking how much weight each child was losing.
He was starving too. Under 800 calories a day. His body was failing.
He kept going.
In July 1942, he staged one last play with the children. A story about a dying boy who is finally set free.
A friend asked why that play. Korczak answered quietly. He wanted to teach the children to meet death without fear.
He already knew what was coming.
On July 22, the trains began.
Day after day, thousands were marched to the Umschlagplatz. Packed into cattle cars. Sent to Treblinka. None came back.
The resistance came to him one more time. Fake documents. A safe house. A way out.
He said no. He would not leave the children to face it alone.
On the morning of August 5, the soldiers came to the door.
Korczak did not panic. He gathered the children. He told them they were going to the countryside. Fresh air. Open fields.
He had them put on their best clothes. Each child carried a small bag. A favorite book. A beloved doll.
Then 192 children and a handful of staff walked out into the street.
Witnesses never forgot it.
The children did not cry. They did not run. They walked in calm rows behind the old doctor, as if they were heading off on a trip.
Korczak walked at the front. A child holding each hand. The smallest ones carried in his arms.
They marched through the ghetto to the train. Three miles. He never let go.
At the platform, the offer came one final time. And one final time, he refused.
He climbed into the cattle car with his children.
He was never seen again.
Korczak, the staff, and all 192 children were almost certainly murdered the moment they reached Treblinka.
Here's what makes this story unbearable.
He could not save them. He knew it. There was no version of that morning where those children lived.
So he saved the only thing left to save.
He made sure not one of them walked to their death alone. Not one of them was afraid. Not one of them was abandoned.
In the worst place human beings ever built, he gave them the one thing the Nazis could not take. A hand to hold.
Today, Treblinka is a field of stones. 17,000 of them. A silent graveyard for nearly a million murdered people.
Only one stone carries a name.
It reads: Janusz Korczak, and the children.
He had no children of his own. He died beside 192 of them.
So that not a single one would face the end alone.
He couldn't save their lives. He made sure they weren't alone. The least we can do is remember them. Share this so 192 children are never forgotten again. Like if his courage reached something in you. And in the comments, say his name — Janusz Korczak
