Reading Time: 25 minutes

When I was a student, I did some research work with my favourite lecturer¹, looking at planning related news articles in local newspaper’s online outlets, to consider the range of opinions, knowledge of the planning system, and ultimately the state of potential NIMBYism² in specific areas of society. This would then be cross-referenced with opinions, objections and letters of support to Planning departments in the UK, which is all on the public record, albeit with names and addresses (Sometimes quite rightly) redacted. This ended up being an incredibly useful exercise, as one of my main roles when working in industry for the first 12 – 18 months was being a ‘data monkey’, where I would either be trawling through comments to applications / appeals online, or, in the case of South Staffordshire / Daventry, getting onto my motorbike of the time and traveling down to the Planning Department directly and tabulating all the information, as either the Local Authority hadn’t quite made the internet age, or were too lazy / too obstructionist to play ball with comments being online.

I’ve long been fascinated by the comments section on a variety of websites, from someone keeping a running count of how many times Stephen A. Smith ends up being talked about on Awful Announcing, to some pro-wrestling ‘dirt sheet’ websites. You get to see a pattern of active contributors, the nature of their comments (Tongue in cheek, sarcastic, biased etc), and ultimately the opportunity to look beyond a simple comment to a pattern of behaviour. No more so is this true though than the comments section on local / regional / national news sites. For this piece, I will be focusing more on UK integrations than international, just because:

• It’s easier to focus down on one population datapoint for comparison and discussion:
• I can’t often access articles from US / other international outlets, let alone comment sections!

It’s often noted how Social Media is toxic. I agree. I can’t go on Twitter (X) without some rant turning negative, toxic and having people spout utter BS. Facebook is fine if you have strict controls onto who you accept via friend requests, alongside page likes, groups and so on, but the number of ads these days is nauseating, as well as the fact that certain people seem to enjoy using Facebook to completely slander other people with you only finding out via third parties. BlueSky had a good concept, but now is basically a delivery system for left wing nausea and invitations to view OnlyFans profiles, Parlour send you ‘sponsored messages’ three times a week telling you that we’re all about to be in massive trouble, but buying gold or emergency meal kits, alongside donating to random individual’s political campaigns will make everything better. Tik Tok is basically an app that should have an upper age limit as well as a lower age limit due to the amount of crap on there that would make a pedophile happy for at least an hour, and Pinterest? Only useful for certain sectors of the population during fall.

I’ve had a hate hate relationship with social media for years. I classify myself as ‘Smart Enough’ to see through all the Fake News BS (The real Fake News, not the things a certain President calls Fake News whilst creepily praising a NewsMax correspondent), but the concept has been the same ever since Tom from MySpace didn’t want anyone to be alone with zero friends. You create as big a network as possible, and the more you do, the more you get to communicate and ‘have fun’ together. For cliche markets, this can make sense. There are a number of decent Reddit Sub-Reddits that do just this. Just looking at Reddit for fun though? That’s a minefield. And don’t even get me started on the 4Chan / 8Chan hot mess. I use some social media because I have to. Not because I want to. I remember having so many debates with colleagues at university about the value of LinkedIn, and these requests for endorsements from students. What? You want me to endorse you for sending an email? Perhaps I should screenshot how bad it is alongside a Gantt chart that makes it look like you can build a £300 million development in (checks notes) 7 months? Including planning? Sure. I’ll just go write ahead.

I’ve noticed over the years that people have started to segregate their social media usage more and more. Unless you have a very small Facebook friend circle who’m are all on the same wavelength politically / ideologically as you, many people have moved away from sharing specific opinions on platforms such as Facebook, where you can even see what groups someone is a part of. Facebook, X, Nextdoor and a few other Social Media platforms have a policy of people using their real name rather than a nickname, gamer-tag etc, which means that it’s easier to match person – post. In fact, in some cases you see how people have been disciplined / fired from jobs because of the fact that they were slandering their company online, or posting potentially offensive / obscene content. Once you reach the world of comment sections, forums and the like, things can get a lot murkier, a lot quicker, because of the fact that real names are no longer required.

Sometimes, if websites you comment on use third party integrations, your name / ‘handle’ may be shown across multiple sites you comment on. Disqus is the one that I most frequently use on sites that I comment on such those mentioned earlier. I have no personal issue about using this as I have nothing to hide, but even then, it’s drawing together strings across multiple websites. I’ve often toyed with the idea of using such integrations on Wil-Vincent.co.uk, but from a privacy perspective, I like to be in control of the content I post, and anyone’s data who post comments. I don’t sell anything to anyone unlike multiple 3rd party providers do, and for me this is important. An upcoming post is on why 20ish years post-facto it would have been so much easier for the UK to have fully adopted ID cards, as frankly, most social media companies, or websites with active comment sections / forums have more information on you than any ID card would have. Heck, I’m sure that if you do online shopping, they can tell if you’re in a relationship, in need of a new job, or even when to advertise you buying wine, flowers and condoms!

UK Print Media Explained

Although the UK is a democracy with a free press, this doesn’t mean that all political views and ideologies are equally represented. In fact, out of all the ‘major’ newspapers in the UK (Sorry Morning Star), only one could be considered to be truly left leaning and independent to report editorially, and that’s the Guardian. If you were to break down the UK press, you would have:

• Your ‘Broadsheet’ Newspapers, of the Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. Each of these  apart from The Guardian are right leaning, with The Times being owned by Rupert Murdock (Of FOX News, Formerly Sky News, and other Right Wing Media fame), The Telegraph by the Barclay Brothers (Though in the process of selling to Abu Dhabi’s Redbird Capital), whom have supported the Conservative Party since the end of WWII. Although the broadsheet name remains (As they were double the size of tabloid newspapers, they no longer are large enough to cover a rear window of a car with two sheets.
• Your tabloids of the Daily Mail and Daily Express, both right leaning overall, although the Daily Mail did support Labour in the 1997 General Election, so can be described more as populist, making news and editorials more suited to selling papers than a constant unwavering stance. The Daily Express has a fascination about Madeleine Mccann, and statins saving lives. It was also owned by the same guy who owned a boatload of porn mag titles back in the 90s and 2000s, which created no conflict of interest at all.
• Your ‘Red Tops’ of The Sun, The Mirror and the Daily Sport. The Daily Sport seems to care about comedy and little else, and once had a competition to see if a head of lettuce would last longer than former PM Liz Truss (The lettuce won). The Sun is also owned by Mr Murdoch, and used to have a sister publication for Sundays called the News of the World, who were not only sensationalist in their reporting, but constant, unrelenting law breakers, including phone tapping, fake stunts and the like, leading to it closing down. The Mirror has always been left leaning as a newspaper supporting the Labour Party, and workers during the strikes of the 1970s and 80s, but acquired the Daily Express’ parent company in 2018, which will form a point later in this piece.
• The I / Metro Newspapers. The I is the sister paper of the paper that used to be The Independent, but is now online only, and despite the claim to be independent, is owned by a mixture of Russian and Saudi money. The I has never endorsed a political candidate, but the newspaper is designed to be headline and fact focused less on editorials and opinion pieces. The Metro is designed to be read on the way to work, in less than 30 minutes, and is in essence a grab of content from it’s owners of the Daily Mail Group, condensed down, with as much entertainment and gossip BS as you can thrown a stick at.

On top of that, there’s a range of local / regional newspapers, some paid, some not. The most famous of these is the London Evening Standard, which used to have three print runs a day to keep itself as up to date as possible, and designed for the bus / tube / train ride home. This used to be a paid newspaper, but once taken over by the same Russian who owns the I Newspaper, became free. This actually helped keep the ‘gluit’ of evening newspapers / magazines down in London, as you at one point could get up to 5 free publications a day, all free to give advertisers more space to advertise.

Outside of London, you could have argued over the years that the Manchester Evening News (MEN) is the most read evening newspaper outside of London in  the UK, followed by the Birmingham Mail (BM). Both are owned by Reach PLC (The same people whom own The Mirror and The Express). There are other local / regional newspapers whom print normally once a week, again heavily subsidised by the fact that for local businesses this is the best way to reach a captive audience. Some newspapers also have a duel role of being the method by which local authorities put up official statuary notices, including from my former life, planning applications as well as birth, death, bankruptcy etc notices where relevant and required.

Digital First Strategies.

If you look at the MEN & BM circulation figures, they are at 5,291 for the MEN, and 3,389 for the BM. In fact the Express and Star, which serves Wolverhampton and the Black Country now has a higher print readership than both of these publications at just over 8,500 for the latest reporting period. Up north, the Liverpool Echo has an average daily readership of just over 9,000,  and the Newcastle Chronicle has overtaken the MEN, with an average readership of 5,440. This is of course just a snapshot, but there’s two important things that come through.

• Newspaper readership in metropolitan areas can vary wildly when you look at the per 1,000 of the population statistics. In the case of the Express and Star, I know that they are in almost every medium sized newsagents / supermarkets, right by the till if possible. The Birmingham Mail used to be sold like the London Evening Standard from little outposts on the street, and their conversion into a shop bought product has seemingly negatively impacted on their sales.
• Where a local / regional newspaper has a ‘Digital First’ strategy, like the MEN and BM as examples, there’s less physical papers being sold, but more eyeballs on the product, as people are more likely to access the website / app multiple times a day, rather than read a newspaper once.

In the case of the Birmingham Mail at least, there is even the opportunity to receive breaking news via WhatsApp, which admittedly is a cleaver strategy for those looking for creative ways to get around notification permissions and the like. I generally use the ‘Reduce Interruptions’ focus mode on my iPhone, but will still check WhatsApp multiple times a day, meaning that these news articles will still get through to close to, if not the top of my notification feed. It’s a decent tactic, because when news is essentially ‘free’ to the reader, you want to push it to as many people as possible because of that thing called advertising.

There’s long been a war between news / gossip etc. sites and ad blockers. I have an ad blocker on every device I own that can make use of it, from my desktop machines, to my MacBooks, iPad, iPhone and emergency phone. Wherever possible, I ask for an app / website not to track me, and heck, the other day I denied access to all 256 companies that wanted data from my Smart TV. I think as a society we’ve gotten into the habit of either just clicking OK, or Reject All (Unless you need to accept to view for free), to the point that the South Park iPad / Human Centipede episode makes more and more sense by the day, as we view Terms and Conditions largely as an opportunity to see how quickly you can scroll down to the bottom to hit the next button.

So in short, using a digital first strategy, it’s about getting as many people to view something as possible, in order to appease the ad gods, the same way that YouTube used to use a CPC model for ad revenue to creators. But having news on a website is only part of the way of embracing a digital first model. There are two other ways of getting more views:

• Sharing Posts to Social Media, which starts it’s own local view / debate setting
• Encouraging Users to interact with the article, via comments sections, polls, and ‘interactive content’.

Ironically, the best example of keeping people on a news page in the UK is the rolling news coverage by the BBC, where there’s no advertising (In the UK at least), due to the nature of the BBC’s funding. They themselves use some nifty tricks to keep people on the page, either through the interaction with users via text / WhatsApp / X integration, rolling / live video in-page, or even with a ‘XX,XXX people viewing now’ marker on the highlights section of the page. The more people viewing, the more important it is. Right?

Where / How To Interact Is Key.

I never studied a media degree, but between all my work in Esports, Student Radio, and having some amazing friends and contacts in the media department / the courses taught at my Alma Mater, I know my way around most things. I am in fact a registered UK / International Journalist, and even cough up money for the AP Style Guide. Because of this (And with a bit of common sense thrown in), I know that there are certain news pieces where commenting / Calls To Action (CTA) simply can’t be allowed, for example during an active Court case / investigation, or where the person involved is a minor. Depending on the news / online outlet, it can often then be down to them as a content provider to choose what articles / opinion pieces / editorials are publicly commendable.

Sometimes this is just a case of ‘Every article’, other times it’s more selective. For example I often see the Birmingham Mail not allow commenting on articles where there’s more risk of xenophobia / racism if there’s for example not people on hand to moderate comments. As most articles have a shelf life of a few days (Unless part of a more drawn out campaign, investigation or specific aspect of news), it’s important to consider how quickly a comment section can spiral out of control, or be used later on to hijack a similar article without a comments section on it. When they use the phrase ‘News Cycle’, it is often that, but in the UK, specific issues are far more drawn out than this.

Take the housing of Asylum seekers in hotels as an example. The crossing of the English Channel from France to the UK by small boats is not something that has just started. It’s a decades long issue, and whilst it has gotten substantially worse in more recent years, the root causes and outcomes of the issue remain the same. One thing that has changed however is the percentage of Asylum seekers being placed in hotels. 5 years ago this figure was at about 1 – 5%, whereas now it is 1/3. Throughout all this, there are a number of secondary news stories, such as the number of boat crossings overall, the fact that there are investigations into sexual assault at these hotels towards children & women, and the protests / counter protests that have taken place over the last year, leading to one hotel in Epping being forced to stop accepting asylum seekers by the High Court.

Each aspect of this news ‘sphere’ has the possibility to create what I would call a ‘toxic’ comment and debate section on a piece by piece article, as well as overall. More recently, there have been shows of ‘national identity’ through the use of Union Flags and English flags outside homes and on lamp-posts, with some even painting the St George’s Cross onto mini roundabouts. When Local Authorities remove these, the narrative from some is that it’s pandering to multi-culturalism, without necessarily understanding the potential health and safety implications, as well as the fact that this is public land, not an individual’s private property. From one angle you could compare it to graffiti on the same lamp-post, and when I was challenged yesterday about why Christmas decorations can be hung on lampposts and not flags, the individuals failed to recognise the health and safety differences (Risk assessments, proper hanging and installation and so on).

In terms of comments and debates, using this one news sphere alone, it can be editorially difficult to make a determination as to how individuals can interact. Sure, it’s possible to moderate and remove comments, either via manual input / AI, but this still leaves the door open to:

• Posts being potentially offensive and remaining on the site until flagged / removed.
• Individuals claiming free speech is taken away from them by having posts removed.
• Individuals hijacking other pages where commenting is allowed, and taking their debates there.

In terms of Reach PLC, it seems as though they are taking an overall more cautious approach where possible, which minimises risk on the site alone, but perhaps less so when articles are shared through ‘traditional’ social media channels. After all, Reach PLC can’t moderate content on their articles on Facebook / X, unless it’s them sharing it themselves in the first place (Where moderation is possible, or simply restricting the right to comment).

Other news outlets take a different approach, which brings us nicely to the Daily Mail Group (DMG). In the same way that WWE Network were ahead of their time when it came to offering a streaming service, DMG have always led the way when it came to a ‘Digital First’ approach. They remain one of the most read newspapers in the UK, with the Mail on Sunday being one of the most lethal legal weapons in the country alongside The Sunday Times, due to the number of pull outs, magazines etc. Roll one of those up and if you hit someone round the head with that, they may very well end up on the floor with a concussion³.

Online, the first Daily Mail presence on the ‘tinterwebs came in 2003, before becoming its own entity in 2006. Honestly, I don’t think much has changed on the website over the years except many, many more adverts, and becoming more mobile friendly as smartphones became a thing. The fact that they were already a ‘most viewed’ site before smartphones gave them a perfect head start in the ‘News from phone’ revolution. They knew how to target different groups with different devices, offering either a full rich / stripped down version of the content depending on need. I remember back in 2005/6 trying to load a BBC news article, and it was like having a root canal compared to DMG’s offering.

Whilst people have started to get ‘News burnout’ on mobile devices in particular, combined with products such as Apple+ providing an all in one news gathering app that can be more directly tailored to the audience, DMG group is one of only two major news outlets to grow their online reach in 2023, the other being CNN (I’m guessing in part because of their constant coverage of elections, with a presidential election process taking the best part of 18 moths to 2 years).

DMG largely use a three pronged approach to user interaction. Polls / Quizzes, comments, and forums. The first is innocent enough. Getting a user to interact with a page beyond just skimming through an article, as in the SEO / content analytical universe, time on page is as important sometimes as clicks, as well as to what they do next, such as viewing another article, commenting and so on. This is why you’ll often see side swipes with suggested content when you get towards the end of an article, to keep you on the site instead of going elsewhere.

In terms of comments, instead of using Disqus or a third party comments system, everything is directly integrated into the Daily Mail website & ecosystem. Although you can now sign in using your Facebook / X / Google / Microsoft account, you still have your own unique profile on the site, complete with a list of all your comments over time, and importantly, your very own ‘Arrow Factor’, which is like your likes on YouTube / Facebook, but over the course of eternity. Below is a summary of my profile on the Daily Mail Website, which has randomly claimed that I’m from Slough, with a made up username in place of my actual name.

Aside from the fact that the DM Website reminds me of a Geocities / Angelfire website from the early 2000s with the amount of pop-ins, slide ins, and random video content loading at the bottom of your screen, everything is integrated. This means that your new best friend in the Arrow Factor will not just be with you through your comments on posts, but also on the forums. If you’re wondering what my comment on a random article was, it’s the same as I used to use for many years on this site for gentle trolling: ‘If only Diana were here’… Crazily enough, I got many more green arrows than red, and loving Diana’s supposed to be a Daily Express thing.

Safe Places, Free Speech Unleashed.

Continuing with the use of DMG’s website as a case study, once you have a profile with a completely made up screen name (Which you can change easily), you now have the chance to post comments on almost any article on the site. The article about the Princess of Wales having a hair style has 2,000 comments. That’s right, 2,000 comments on the shade of a woman’s hair! Of course, the headline of this article is about xenophobia and racism, so using the news sphere of asylum seekers in hotels, about 10 articles down I came to something relevant. Whilst the Birmingham Mail has restricted comments on their reporting of the protests taking place in the Midlands, on the Daily Mail, free speech and comments are welcome.

I perhaps stupidly decided to have a read through these comments just as a bit of validation research to this piece’s title, and the first comment I saw was:

These people who are standing up for the migrants must have serious mental issues and must address the dangers they are bringing to this Country.

immediately followed up by:

It’s about time all these protestors waving Palestinian flags, Ukraine etc,etc,started taking notice of what’s actually happening in their own country.

With the next being:

What makes me laugh is the left and their response, once again they have decided anyone flying the flag is a brainless, knuckle dragging thug; of course the irony is that they are the ones maintaining the fallacy that to fly your national flag in your country is right wing extremism, I wonder what their take is on British and non British people flying the Palestinian flag, and protesting on behalf of Palestine in Britain whilst waving said flag?! Surely they must be incandescent with rage at that?!

Then.

People in the hotels live in a luxury that ordinary working people can’t afford and they are taxed to the girls. Only human rights lawyers and charities who benefits

Ironically, through my long dot – dot tying of comments on sites such as these, many people who complain about immigration also believe that Mental Health is ‘made up’, as an excuse to get out of doing a day’s work, and collecting dole money. Throwing out buzzwords such as ‘Mental Health’ or ‘Dangers to this country’ are often repeated. With the Isreal / Palestine conflict still chugging along, alongside #Flaggate2025, just these comments can start to draw together different issues into a convoluted repetition of the same thing, across multiple articles. Also, for the record, having been homeless and placed into emergency accommodation back in 2008, I can say that this is NOT luxury accommodation. I was moved immediately from one hotel to another because of the risk to my mental health (The ‘hotel’ was essentially a brothel and a crack den, and one of the worst rated in Birmingham), to another where you had to use a side door, and food was stale bread and boiled eggs.

Using a couple of the individuals on this article as a starting point, DMG are great for researchers in that you can view anyone’s profile and comment history, as well as that magical Arrow Factor. One individual had a factor of +124 over the past 24 hours alone, and an overall factor of +474,651 over 22,933 comments. I’ve built a ton of discussion forums and websites with comment functionality over my years, and between these, the websites I’ve followed for decades and my own social media posts, I don’t think I have 22,933 comments in total! Let alone on a single site!

Another user, who calls himself ‘cleverbeggar’ posted this comment, in irony to his username handle:

No genuine refugee would reach here because they must have passed through a free country to arrive and thus be grateful for the chance of freedom! Thought of living in and being paid to do so is the incentive for them to come here at our expense!

In 4 years on the site, he has an arrow factor of +351,824 over 20,876 comments. That works out to be at least one post per day, every day for 56 months since joining the site.

My final random scroll is MrSmall. His comment was:

I can think of absolutely no good reason for them being here,95% are not genuine asylum seekers,that is why they throw their passports away,if you are genuine you want to prove where you came from,not hide it. These are either economic migrants or criminals escaping from a country it is to hard for them to operate in anymore,if only the gullible in our society could see through this smoke screen and stop taking these people at face value the whole country could start pulling together to get rid of them.

Mr Small has less comments in his 16 years on the site (5,138), but an Arrow Factor of +189,078. Here’s some of his latest comments:

I admit, that I’m using an incredibly small sample size, using a controversial comment just to make a point, which is why I will be developing this into a much more extensive research paper later on this year. But there are a couple of key points to immediately note:

• I have no idea who these people are, as their real names are not shown either when commenting or on their profile.
• The comments taken as a random snapshot are very similar in context and opinion⁴.
• In a vacuum where it’s easy to post some-what anonymously, views that may not be aired on Facebook or other social media outlets are simply easier to post.
• DMG facilitate this by allowing commenting on more sensitive content compared to other news outlets, including Reach Media, who honed the ‘Digital Media’ approach at about the same time as DMG, who have a much more local / regional reach through inter-connected titles from National to local, all accessible with a single login.

This is before I even get to the final part of DMG’s offering which I think is now a part of their paid subscription called Daily Mail+. The discussion forum. As mentioned above, I’ve built, run, moderated (And in one case destroyed) many a discussion forum, and am thinking about how I could successfully do something around mental health peer discussion and support (Albiet with a full and complete safeguarding & intervention strategy, which alone will take 6 months to perfect). Forums can be a nightmare to run if you want to embrace free speech ideals, but also respect identity, race, nationality, and other protected characteristics. One of the common arguments is that ‘Free speech allows me to speak my mind’, whilst forgetting the harm that it can cause to others, particularly around these protected characteristics. Some may argue that playing the ‘race card’, or ‘disability card’ as examples is just a way to silence ‘the common man’, but without some form of content moderation, things can degenerate to the lowest common denominator, or something akin to 8Chan.

Having their discussion board behind a paywall (If indeed this is the case, I’m already nauseous trying to navigate the site!) makes even more sense. It’s possible to link a person to a username / handle if they use the same across many sites, but if you have a paywall, content can only be viewed by those who are also subscribed, making that ‘like minded vacuum’ even tighter. Once upon a time there was a site called Redwatch, where ultra-left wingers or people ‘spotted’ on demos were subjected to horrific abuse online, but because it was behind a paywall for much of it’s existence, it was safely in it’s own vacuum, not visible to those outside of the paying subscriber list. I don’t want to say that this is similar to cultism, but to be frank, it’s not far off.

Completely flipping the approach,  BBC has their own approach to interaction. Some posts will be open for comment with moderation, others will have a ‘Do you know’ or ‘Have you been in this situation’ style CTA, which provides a link / option to provide comments that are sent to an editor / journalist that can then be filtered / followed up on otherwise. They also have things like Points Of View for those challenging the reporting / perceived bias of news / sports articles. The BBC do still need page views and eyeballs on their online offering to keep their funding through one of the endless BBC saving and content reviews, but they still try and focus on telling a story, not using clickbait tactics. Ironically, when I test if my internet is working, I type in BBC, just as it’s easier and quicker than anything else, and I’m certain I’m not the only one! The BBC require you to sign ups allowing usernames, but having a much stricter stance on breaking house rules.

Additional Thoughts

I’ve focused on DMG the most here, however The Times, The Telegraph and Reach PLC each have their own way of doing things. I was subscribed to The Times as a student as it was essentially free, and whilst I don’t believe in the editorial stance of each of these newspapers, as a researcher I was always told to read as many differing views on the same topic, then use this to formulate my own opinion, taking into account bias. Heck, if I could be bothered to seek out sponsorship, Ground News would be perfect for this piece, as it pulls together many different reporting sources of the same topic, surmises the key points, and shows where the leaning is of each outlet reporting.

Whilst I’m not focussing on the US much in this piece, an example of how understanding leanings of outlets can help build a clearer picture of bias. The AllSides Media Bias Chart is a perfect example of this:

Whilst the focus of charts such as these is for the reporting, it also comes to the outside contributors to articles, via the infamous comments section. With no need for your real name, it’s easy to put on an internet disguise and say what you ‘really’ feel. No need to use Facebook / X / Whatever Else, just jump on in, and know that there’s very little consequences to what you say. And if there’s AI moderation, it’s easy to talk in some form of code, such as ‘We all know who’s to blame here’, or ‘I could say which nationalities are responsible for this, but I can’t, but we all know who it really is’, and so on.

Of course, there’s also podcasting, and how people interact with these. From Andrew Tate to Joe Rogan, they’ve made a difference in their own messed up ways, but that’s another piece for another time. Somehow DMG have figured out I’m diabetic already, and are offering me adverts for FreeStyle Libre, even though I have one on my arm right now! Oh, and my Arrow Factor after posting ‘Oh, If only Diana were here!’? 31+, and 29-. Could be worse!

Peace, Rage And Love xx

[1] Who’s the same person who taught me how to write and speed up my research process

[2] Not In My Back Yard.

[3] As well as me strongly suggesting not to buy any DMG publication, please don’t use it as a weapon if you choose to ignore that first piece of advice!

[4] Of course, this is on a right wing aligned website, so more likely to have right leaning views.

Last Updated on 19th September 2025 by Wil Vincent