7 Things I Read On The Internet This Month - April 2016
7 Things I Read Online This Month - April 2016.
What's this? A new regular segment?
I've been toying with the idea for a little while about writing a weekly post about what I've read online but I've decided to make it a monthly thing instead.
Basically I'm going to share 7 things I've read or seen online over the past month from things that sparked a reaction from me to funny things to current news and just sharing what I thought. I'm definitely going to include blog posts in this segment because I think it's hugely important to share if we've liked something a blogger wrote or even if we didn't like it, just share our reaction.
So what've I read April 2016?
1. Prince George's JimJams.
**DISCLAIMER. Photo taken from Daily Mirror website, source here.
So you'd have to have really avoided all forms of social media, tv, radio and human contact the past few days not to hear anything about the Royal Family. In fact this article is just one of 37982748365 I could have chosen but I simply went with this one because the first hit was the Daily Mail and ain't nobody got time for that. No matter what you think of the Royal Family, you could not escape the Queen's birthday and all the parties and TV specials and the official portraits but it's this news story that over shadowed them all for me. Prince George is the cutest little boy and at 2 years old he met THE PRESIDENT OF THE USA in his pjs and was allowed to stay up a little bit later than bedtime. I mean, not even 2 year old gets to do that. The Royal family and the press have a really weird relationship, especially when it comes to the children so I think when the Palace does release photos and news stories like this, it is a really important way of showing the relationship and letting people who DO care about the Windsors see what they want, without getting too close to the kids. I think he's cute anyway and those pjs are goals.
Prince George Stays Up Late To Meet The President - Daily Mirror Article Here.
2. 22 & Married.
**DISCLAIMER: Photo from The Curvaceous Vegan.com, source here.
Big wave to the first blogger in this section! Amie off of 'The Curvaceous Vegan' fame is one of them bloggers I see everyone tweeting about and have occasionally chatted to in chats or on Instagram but I have only just started reading her blog lately. I read this blog last week and I knew I wanted to include it in this list because I thought it was SUCH an important post! I won't spoil all the lovely wording for you (read via the link below) but basically Amie is married and she is 22 (if you didn't get that from the title I can't even). Now I am not married and I am 24 this year so maybe you'd think I couldn't relate BUT I have been in a relationship for 6 years in May and we got together when we were 17 so yuh, I relate. What really resonated with me the most was that Amie wrote about why should being married at 22 stop her from doing all the things other 22 year olds do? She just gets to share it with her best friend and her husband and that is something I think is 1. Lovely and 2. Important and so true. The generation before us and especially the generation before that were all married in their early 20s and if you weren't, YOU were the minority. I might not have been ready to marry at 22 and I'm still not, but I can definitely see why Amie is.
22 and Married by The Curvaceous Vegan Link here.
3. Compassion In Care.
**DISCLAIMER: Illustration by Sebastien Thibault for The Gaurdian; source here.
Of all the things I read online and out of this list, this article from The Guardian was probably the one I found the most emotive. The article is about care for the elderly and wasn't it about time carers showed a bit of compassion when doing their job? The reason this is close to my heart is my boyfriend is a carer for the elderly. He works 66+ hours a week and gets paid for just over 40. He first call is 7.10am and his last one of the day is 11pm and he works solidly between those. He doesn't get a paid lunch hour. He doesn't get paid for travelling. What he does get paid for is minimum wage. He is phoned constantly from his office asking him to pick up more calls or asking for what time he clocked in and he has to use his phone to sign in and out of each call. He doesn't have a work phone and his contract isn't paid for by work. He paid for his uniform, he pays for the printing of his rota every week, he uses a Sat Nav to get around that he bought and he uses his own car and pays business insurance on it.
I have no doubts that there are bad carers in the UK, no doubts at all but what I have a problem with is the part of this article that says "If they're just bad apples, there's a lot of them". As if saying these bad carers are not the norm is untrue and all carers are being tarnished by the same brush. My boyfriend is a good carer. A really good carer and because of the way the system works he is desperate to leave caring and leave the industry ALTOGETHER. I see my boyfriend between 5.30am-6.30am when he's getting ready to leave and 11pm-12pm when he comes in and I make his tea and he's been known to stay late at work to deal with clients who need him, to wait for paramedics when someone has had a fall and when the client keeps asking for more and more, half an hour after his shift has finished and he still has half hour to drive home. The article says "More then 3m visits were late" as if these carers are just pissing about and being hapless. My boyfriend is late to calls almost every day because he works in a city centre at rush hour and is given 5 minutes travel time to drive to the other end of town; a journey which takes 40 minutes.
The article basically suggests that because carers are paid minimum wage and aren't paid for travel time that they DON'T WANT to care properly and do what is asked for them because they aren't being paid. This is blatantly untrue and really offends me when I know that today, my boyfriend will have had a 15 minute call time with one of his clients, a call time that is decided by a social worker NOT HIM and a call that he will have been paid £1.75 (yes really) for and I also know he will have given that client THE BEST care he possibly can. Articles like this need to weasel out the bad carers and not stuff them all under one umbrella. Articles like this need to raise awareness about the care industry and improve the system so that those who ARE good at their job will be able to stay in the jobs, give the good care AND earn enough to actually live off their salary because at the moment, they can't.
4. Refusing To Pay Rent.
**DISCLAIMER: Refusing To Pay Rent Promo Photo from Little Miss Fii; source here.
Yay another blogger! Again, I follow Fii from Little Miss Fii on Twitter and I started reading her blog more regularly a few weeks back but it was THIS post that I loved! Fii is basically talking about the price of student housing and how student landlords can basically charge what they want and we have to pay it, like it or lump it because that's all we have. I was pretty lucky with my landlord at university, I stayed in the same house for 2 years after I moved out of halls and we had the cheapest rent out of most of the other people in town and most of the other people I know in other towns. I was paying £3000 a year for my room and water/leccy and my boyfriend in Bristol was paying double and I dread to even think what London prices were last year. Because of the rates of everyone else I know me and my flatmates felt pretty lucky we were paying the amount we were but when I look back at it a year after graduating, I'm not so sure. I lived in a SMALL terraced house with 2 bedrooms and a tiny front room converted into a third bedroom and I lived there with 2 other girls. My landlord was making NINE GRAND a year from my teeny tiny house and he had around 16 properties. When I think how much he must've been making I think 3000 for that one room was crazy. But we pay it because we have to and we're naive twenty somethings (or even late teens). I loved this post by Fii because we need more people shedding light on it and maybe the system needs to be changed to protect students more when they're already going through enough changes and making enough decisions for one lifetime.
'Refusing To Pay Rent - The Sorry Sorry State Of Student Accommodation' by Little Miss Fii.
5. Lemonade.
**DISCLAIMER: Lemonade Promo from Tidal Streaming Service; source here.
Again, I could have chosen any article to cover the work of Queen Bey but I've gone with Rolling Stone. This might have only happened yesterday but the Queen dropped another album last night with a video and a full track list of collabs and tunes and damnnn it's good. I don't want to say too much until you've listened to the album yourself and I want to feature it in my Friday Favs at the end of the week but you can stream the album exclusively on Tidal here.
Beyoncé's 'Lemonade' - Everything You Need To Know Rolling Stone Article.
6. Hannah's Bullet Journal Masterclass.
**DISCLAIMER: Bullet Journal Photo from Hannah Emily Lane; source here.
So the last (and certainly by no means least) blogger of this post is Hannah who writes under Hannah Emily Lane. I have spoken about this on Twitter and have gone Pin crazy on Pinterest but Hannah is the QUEEN of the bullet journal in my eyes. I couldn't choose just one article so I've had to link to all of her BuJo posts - poor you. Not only does Hannah write in a really relatable easy to read way, she photographs errrrrrthang so you can get all the inspiration. I love her bullet journal and I love her blog so you should definitely keep following her (and saving her posts naturally) if you're also journalling of if, like me, you need some inspiration to get started, she's your gal. Also I binge read a shit tonne of her posts on Bloglovin this week so there's that too.
'Hannah Emily Lane Bullet Journalling' posts.
7. Innocent Smoothie Twitter.
**DISCLAIMER: Innocent Smoothie Logo.
Switching things up a bit and moving away from articles and bloggers, Innocent Smoothie killed it on Twitter this week. On the Queen's birthday they jumped on the hashtag #QueenAt90 and they professed to tweet 90 facts about her Maj to celebrate. Let's all remember here, Twitter is limited in characters so it took A WHILE. They were bloody hilarious (my personal favourite being "she has not had 6 wives" followed by "she has not beheaded any of them") and you should definitely go find them and retweet cos they were gold.
Follow Innocent Smoothies on Twitter here.
What have you been reading online that you enjoyed or that sparked a reaction this month? Leave me links in the comments below!
If you liked this you might also like 'Why I Started Blogging'.
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