corvée is what you might call 'slavery-adjacent', much modern law on slavery considers it; the ECHR and 51 Convention are basic UK treaty obligations. This stuff is prominent in major legislation: it beggars belief that Shabana Mahmood hasn't had legal advice to that effect.

there's a 'civic obligations' getout, but that covers 'normal' compulsroy work or service (such as a period of military service) or 'normal' obligations, which assumes they're non-discriminatory. Article 3 of the 1951 Refugee Convention requires states not to discriminate against refugees.

and to demand compulsory work would amount to corvée, which is contrary to Artice 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights; the ECHR has confirmed that labour enforced under threat of penalty is unlawful.

in your 70s it means "I didn't need to take a laxative today"

I can identify with this. The UK is having the same effect on me. Like you, I daydream of moving out, well, a bit more than daydream; but health issues for me and my wife pretty much preclude it. If the UK is in your daydreams, make it Scotland, not England.

doh .. Luke 16.

that is surely the point of the 'send Lazarus to bring me a drop of water' bit. Even when he's in hell and Lazarus is in heaven, the rich man still thinks Lazarus is his gopher.

Also the message of the story of the rich man and Lazarus, in Luke 6. For generations, not least courtesy of Billy G, this has been spun as a heaven or hell text, even though that renders the bit about the prophets' witness irrelevant. The issue is the rich man treating Lazarus with contempt.

There was a nationally-shared sense of emergency, I guess, which there needs to be now. A war will do that, but it doesn't need a war; consider the massive sense of urgency that produced Shelter in direct response to Cathy Come Home; a single powerful TV drama .. a bit like Mr Bates and the PO.

I wonder sometimes about the post-war prefabs, built at speed and on a huge scale across the country, not just on bomb sites. I used to often pass what was effectively a good sized town of them in Leeds. Cheap, a bit flimsy, but did the trick for years, then better build gradually replaced them.

sadly not free; you can read till 'what can be done' and then it's paywalled. You have to sign up for a paid subscription to access the 'free' period.

did geomorph and geology at Aberdeen decades (literally) ago. Not going to get something like this wrong.

patently obvious to anyone living on the East Coast that these are indeed east coast waves; their superior quality is immediately apparent

me too, as it should be
also because shooting with people is the most intense brain workout I know, and I worry will I be up to it this time.

that's a great rule to bear in mind, might just end up in the handful of how to take good photographs quotes I carry in my head.

I spend too much time looking at photos on bluesky, but this is one of the very rare ones that stopped me in my tracks.
Conception, composition, exposure .. all great, but above all I love its celebration of life and ordinariness. Ordinariness is such an undervalued thing.

I'm in Montrose, in the county of Angus, on the East Coast of Scotland. We also talk about East Coast folk (often older fishing communities). Also, sometimes North East folk, as in the apocryphal Aberdeen newspaper headline: North East Man Injured in US Nuclear Holocaust. #EastCoastKin

a rule that applies much, much more widely

priceless