cruises and springlike days wonderfully normalising shorts in winter

All over Britain there are now many mild days in Nov-Mar and many when temperatures surge up into double figures. We never used to experience that as possible in 1970s-80s winters, whatever your casual view is on climate change. I say that remembering those winters in South Wales, and now being based in and preferring the climate further north that's supposed to be relatively cooler!

In the present early winter, Britain actually has already had one snowy cold snap, but on either side of it a lot of milder time, and I saw really strikingly what that was like at south coast latitude. I was in Southampton on Nov 24-5 and 9 Dec 2023, both dates when the weather was bright and more springlike than used to be possible at those dates in childhood memory, but Dec 9 had a nippy windiness too. There were loads of folks wearing shorts. Not just one in a day. Not a few one-off sensory issue outriders like when folks see me on colder days. No. There were many. Still a minority, but steady stream of them everywhere and all through the day. Like just as casually ordinary to do then as in summer. Both adults and kids alike, as is good for social freedom. So that for Dec 9 it could be predicted from the earlier memory, and that prediction was right!

Social progress carries a painful mix of emotions, as all good feeling about it, in place of the anger there would be at not having it, is always mixed with anger at past memory of not having it. It would be less possible to have an undiscovered shorts sensory issue in your childhood if this had used to happen at winter dates then. This experience in Southampton is a much further, deeper scale, conditions shift and culture shift with it, to see, than already the striking but handful number of shorts I saw being happily worn on a frostier day in Manchester Feb 2019. Go back another 2 days to Dec 7, I was on the return leg (how freudian) to Southampton aboard a P+O cruise ship, hugging the Bay of Biscay on a prospectively stormy Atlantic day just as it crossed from balmy Iberian back to colder British air. Aboard there too it was wonderful to see that most of the folks who had taken on the comfort of shorts in Iberia, of all ages, found comfort in them and chose to remain in it, securely among each other in this holiday setting. That too felt as an enlightenment for many and cultural advance, though seen only inside its own bubble where the media and rest of the country are oblivious to it.

Money of course affects who gets to take cruises and how frequently, even at a time when it's worth knowing there are some cheap bargain ones around as they try to recover from covid. It was still not something I could afford to do at all in my Thatcher generation and pre-diagnosis youth. Coping ability with the bureaucratic preparations for them is a concern that some may feel overwhelmed by, print a boarding pass and proof of insurance, fill in a medical needs questionnaire and an emergency contact form and your passport number. But the practical reason to take cruises is that they are a much easier more safely organised for you way to travel than a self-organised holday. Their slow reemergence from covid has sifted the arrogant from the careful, as only within this year has there ended a requirement to take a covid test just before the cruise and not be allowed to come if it resulted positive. Last winter the company Fred Olsen was taking an outrageous line of no refunds if that happened and leaving it to claim from your travel insurance with all that can be bad in that! P+O at present is providing its own inhouse insurance deal that is part of its trading with you, so makes the refund so too, and as said, you no longer have to test before coming: which is why this was my first cruise post-covid.

I'm writing about it in furtherance of dress freedom and social ease of wearing shorts: yet that is exactly something that cruises traditionally have not been associated with and have been oppressors against. Anyone with my absolute and identity defining opposition to all dress codes will only take a cruise that is possible to go through the whole of without at any time submitting to a dress code, to keep away from all the places where they have them. But when you can do that, it is actively a good feeling to take part in rolling back the boundaries and being part of the solidarity of so doing, thus helping to reduce the dress coded culture and keep it constrained enough to be optable out of. Thus on this cruise it just meant I needed to opt out of all the onboard events and bars in the evenings and spend them mostly in my cabin. Enquiry before booking established that it was not dress coded to go to the buffet for supper, or to return aboard from a port we were still at into the evening. It was even a pleasure to find myself joining other shorts wearers, adult and kid, in successfully establishing something not found out in advance, that sightseeing on the open air decks did not become dress coded in the evening either.

So it was actively a nice action against dress codes to take the cruise. It gave this wonderfully revelatory nice experience that needs sharing, where many Brits on the day of sailing back into our climate in December shared among themselves, in the confidence of numbers, the comfort choice to stay in the shorts they had started wearing while in a neighbouring warmer climate.

Maurice Frank
12 Dec 2023

you no longer beg for, you now cite for by right, straight answers against stupid rules

Here is how you do, on grounds that come from autism work too.

To Livingston Designer Outlet, a central shopping mall there, today Jul 16:

Almondvale Boulevard is a perfectly publicly open street. I walked round the corner to check.

Exit is not like entry. The emergency conditions around entry, around controlling numbers and hand sanitising and enforcing masks, are well known and everyone can see that they would justify limiting entry to the points where those things are organised. Entry enters us into the situation of your shoppers' health. Exit does not. Exit is our return to the outside world and simply ceasing to be your concern.

Hence, no health protection is achieved at all by forbidding exit at any unlocked door. Indeed oppositely, that keeps us mingled inside your premises for longer. If a person sent from one exit to another is infective, they infect the folks around them during that unnecessary walk. Frustration and rational anger caused by it will increase involuntary face touching, and with Covid, that increases both infectivity and personal infection risk.

Nothing is achieved at all, and your shoppers' health is risked more, by forbidding exit at the door on the corner of Almondvale Boulevard and calling it only a staff exit. It does not lead to a special staff space, it leads straight onto a public street that is open. Ordering us not to exit there constitutes confining the public unexpectedly inside a potentially infective space against our will. There is no functional or health difference whatever between staff and shoppers leaving the premises at that exit.

If you have a guy there preventing entry, you are perfectly able to count us out there if that matters, which it appears not to as I could see no one counting us out at the Almondvale Avenue entrance.

Hence it would be an act against public health, suable by anyone infected as a result, to put on any airs and graces whatever of having in theory the power to decide to do it: and to make any other response whatever including none than to stop this oppression. The following particular responses, in taking part in autism work I have flagged up as being exploitations of vulnerabilities, then cited that because of the vulnerable groups' invisibility, that in fact establishes that these responses can never be given to any of the public at all, about anything ever. On Covid related matters, it also would be suable acts against public health to give any of these responses, instead of automatically only the answer of upholding personal fairness:

• Be noncommittal,
• Use the word "unfortunately" or any synonyms of it,
• Deny that they should do anything or answer substantively until an indefinitely deferrable eventuality,
• Ignore, or omit to answer, any of the entire content of the evidence available from the person being answered,
• Declare unilaterally that any step not reasoningly accepted as upholding personal fairness is "their decision",
• "I'm sorry but .." or "I'm afraid .." or "I/we note your comments..." or "I understand how you feel but..." a tough bruising assertion of decision not to fix it,
• Declare unilaterally that any of these types of answer, or any answer not standing up to reasoning, is a last word,
• Assert that these are what people will do,
• Give no answer at all because of being prevented from giving these types of answer,
• Declare any matter of fairness closed, or unilaterally close down contact, before its entire content has been fairly answered, and at a stage preventing this from being ascertained from logical scrutiny of answers given.

It is always right to end with that notice, passing it on until its observation by all bodies engaging with the public becomes generally established.

Maurice Frank

Jul 17. This is not an answer. This attempts to play the device of decision assertion while blaming the government for it. They are perfectly capable of including the corner exit in a footfall count. Notice no mention at all of the practicalities of using that exit, or of the face touching point:

Good morning, thank you for your email. We would advise the following points:

• In relation to the new operating procedures within the Outlet, we are following Scottish Government guidelines
• We have implemented a one way system within the Outlet to assist with social distancing
• We are managing capacity in and out of the building via automatic footfall counters
• We have sanitisation stations available throughout the Outlet, including exits
• The exit door has been chosen to support guests accessing the south car park and public services, along with access to The Centre
• The welfare, safety and wellbeing of both guests and staff are at the forefront of the decision making.

Kind Regards,
Morag Eadie
Centre Administrator – Livingston Designer Outlet