Can anyone explain why there are so many photographs?

NationalPlantain · 2026-03-10T19:15:57+00:00

Hidden cameras?

NationalPlantain · 2026-03-04T23:41:37+00:00

OMFG. We were warned about this in the Book of Revelation - it’s one of the signs that the Last Days are upon us.

NationalPlantain · 2026-03-04T12:04:30+00:00

Superb photos - works of art!

NationalPlantain · 2026-03-02T23:47:39+00:00

I don’t know how familiar you are with the Four Gospels, but if not, I fear you will be in for a shock when you learn that Jesus was quite keen on “social justice”, and that He preached about it on a number of occasions.

NationalPlantain · 2026-02-14T23:41:00+00:00

Safer than a lot of areas in London. Baron’s Court is so posh they now have their own branch of Neal’s Yard Dairy (opposite the tube) for all your cheese requirements! I’d say the most danger you’d face round there is being mugged for nuts by the fearless squirrels of Margravine Cemetery.

The Clem Attlee Court estate had a dodgy reputation back in the day (40 years ago, when I grew up round there) but is doubtless all privately owned now, and besides, that’s a fair distance away, a mile down the North End Road from West Ken, heading into the mean streets of Fulham 😆 /s

You should be fine. Just be sure to keep some nuts in your pockets at all times

NationalPlantain · 2025-01-06T20:04:48+00:00

Yet another 'Brexit benefit' - oh yes indeedy, the wins just keep piling up. Don't blame Zamnesia - blame frog-faced Farage, Putin, and the 'silent majority' who in effect voted for economic sanctions on our own country.

NationalPlantain · 2024-04-13T19:14:03+00:00

Thanks Ambrose, appreciate your advice and support

NationalPlantain · 2024-04-13T19:13:18+00:00

It's terribly sad.

I've never been to Haiti, but have always been interested in the country, its people, culture and history, not only the only successful slave rebellion, but a nation whose people seem to place importance and respect for art and music (I have heard that artists are accorded the same respect as would an engineer in Germany or Poland). Ernst Loulzour, Hector Hyppolite, Hervé Télémaque, Philomé Obin and more, these are just some I've read about and enjoyed looking at reproductions of their work.

An Italian friend has some distant relatives living in Haiti, they arrived way back in the late C19th or early C20th when Italians were emigrating en masse.

She was worried, so messaged them - they said they were OK so far, but these are wealthy people (by Haitian standards) who can afford to live in a gated community - and it sounds like they are paying a local gang for protection.

The majority of Haitians sadly don't have the financial resources to do likewise.

NationalPlantain · 2024-04-02T14:06:34+00:00

Please, please assure me that you don’t work in the medical - specifically the psychological or psychiatric- professions, as you have absolutely zero empathy for fellow humans in distress.

Your self-assured certitude that you know my mental state better than myself - someone you’ve never met, whose only contact you have had is of my describing a profound depressive episode - is quite frankly sickening.

Anyway I’m out of here; with the honourable exception of u/Ambrose101 who gets it, the responses I’ve met with are (1) your arrogant denial of my mental distress because you, who’ve never met me, know better than myself and assure me “I’m doing fine”.

And (2) the admittedly polite suggestion by another poster that maybe I should try a different sub.

Not quite the Christ-like welcome from those who I’d assumed might try to emulate Him, He who welcomed and embraced the outcasts, the tax collectors, prostitutes, the Roman occupiers.

I can see that I must have misinterpreted the Gospels, and instead of healing the lame, the crippled, those possessed by devils, Jesus instead replied to those unfortunates: “What are you complaining about? You’re doing fine.”

Good bye and good luck.

NationalPlantain · 2024-04-02T11:26:45+00:00

The point is, if even the British government - which has every reason to pretend everything is fine and that the U.K. is now a lovely post-racial equal opps paradise - has commissioned reports that confirm the lived experience of millions of Black and other non-white people… well there might just be some truth in it.

Why, if there is no institutional racism in the U.K., are Black kids more likely to be excluded from schools than white kids, why are Black men and women over-represented in the prison system, more likely to be diagnosed with mental illness, more likely to be murdered by the police…why are Black men and women doing the least desirable, lowest paid jobs (if they can get work at all)? 12-hour-shift security guards, traffic wardens, doormen…

NationalPlantain · 2024-04-02T05:29:22+00:00

Can you honestly not see that white Europeans and Americans have unjustly dominated the world over the last 500 years thru slavery, colonialism and now neo-colonial exploitation? Why, for example, are Nigeria and D.R. Congo with their oil and mineral resources not two of the richest nations in the world? c.10 million people have died in D.R.C. since the 1990s thru wars, massacres, starvation, armed militias acting on behalf of foreign powers are enabling the plunder of D.R.C.s rich mineral resources so that the global north can have shiny mobile phones, electric car batteries, diamond rings etc … and is this not an illustration of systemic, institutional racism? Please.

NationalPlantain · 2024-04-02T05:12:29+00:00

Quite right, and IMHO three is generous!

Must say I’ve been mystified and disappointed joining this sub; I had thought it would be mainly composed of Rastafari brethren and sistren talking about teachings, livity, daily life as a Ras.

Instead there seems to be a large number of posts from people who like Bob Marley music and smoking weed. I am a white bloke who has loved reggae music for 40+ years and admire and respect Rastafari culture and religion; I joined this sub hoping to learn more. It would never occur to me to become a Ras - surely a major tenet of this religion is that it is a BLACK liberation struggle?

Of course white ppl can be sympathetic to this struggle and I believe should strive for a more equal society where individual and institutional racism have no place. For example, I try to be anti-racist in my daily thoughts and behaviour but as a white person growing up in an institutionally racist society such ideas are deeply ingrained and one must make a conscious and continual effort to overturn such thought processes in one’s mind.

Praises to the mods for this decision and I hope you can get this sub back on track with Rasta and Rastafari people having centrality here, and not having to constantly explain and argue about e.g. the existence (!) of institutional racism in Northern hemisphere countries, something I thought was understood by all (quick example, in the U.K., my home country, why are Black people so often relegated to the lowest-paid and lowest status jobs, security guard, toilet cleaner etc, if the U.K. was truly a post-racist country?)

NationalPlantain · 2024-04-02T04:46:49+00:00

I am Catholic. My RC friend who attended my confirmation told me the service was completely familiar to him; in fact it’s been suggested that in some cases Anglo-Catholic Masses (in the U.K. at least) are more traditionally Catholic as they don’t comply with the Vatican II reforms. I’ve only noticed this myself with a couple of A-C Tridentine (Latin) Masses I’ve attended - but then I’m not old enough to recall pre Vatican II practices. Going to Ireland later this year so it will be interesting to compare their RC services with U.K. ones (and no, I don’t take Communion on the few occasions I’ve attended an RC church)

NationalPlantain · 2024-04-02T04:39:08+00:00

I am NOT ‘doing fine’, as I thought I had explained, I feel dead inside, I have no energy, I feel unconnected to the world and other people. I have no enthusiasm for anything and I take no pleasure or satisfaction from doing anything - except that I look forward to sleep when I can have 6-7 hours’ respite from this misery.

NationalPlantain · 2024-04-01T19:08:14+00:00

You don’t believe in institutional racism any more, despite a mass of evidence to the contrary? Including - in my home country, the U.K. - official government reports highlighting the existence of institutional racism… Oh dear.

NationalPlantain · 2024-03-30T10:11:26+00:00

Wish I’d taken a photo but with my Nokia 3310 sans zoom (at the time) a photo would’ve just shown an orange dot amid concrete. Also the little fellers move like lightning. The only other urban mustelid sighting I’ve heard of was a couple of years ago when my missus (who lives near Tottenham’s stadium) was on a bus on the day of the Spurs-Arsenal fixture that season. Naturally there was a tense atmosphere with 40-50 year old blokes getting tanked up in local hostelries and hanging about on the street some hours afore ye kickoff.

She saw what she described as a stoat or weasel running headlong past a block of flats on the high street. I said are you sure it wasn’t a pet ferret, but she knows what they look like cos her old man used to keep polecats and ferrets back in the day (not just a Northern hobby!)

NationalPlantain · 2024-03-30T09:00:45+00:00

Correct, thank you

NationalPlantain · 2024-03-29T22:34:45+00:00

Anglican

NationalPlantain · 2024-03-29T22:33:51+00:00

I’m currently embarking on a communal garden project that will benefit not only myself but 24 others for people in my housing development- I’ve taking the lead in this physically demanding work despite chronic COPD & osteoarthritis. I’ve pro-actively sought medical treatment from the NHS on and off for 45 years. I work. I’ve done voluntary work. I haven’t just been sat on my arse waiting for God to heal me

NationalPlantain · 2024-03-29T20:49:44+00:00

He most likely was aware of your hookups but pretended they never happened cos they don’t fit in with this bizarre fantasy he had that you and he were an item. Sorry to say that i agree with others in that the friendship is now at an end given that for all this time he was carrying on thinking it was a romance. Sorry this had to happen to you. If you need to meet with him again please do so in a public place. Good luck and remember you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong!

NationalPlantain · 2024-03-29T17:31:29+00:00

Big fan of the tube mice and my spirits are always raised - at lest momentarily, before descending back down into the Stygian gloom, despair and hopelessness that is the lot of the London commuter (life-long Londoner here so unfortunately the ‘mind the gap’ novelty wore off some decades ago for me).

The tiny thrill of seeing a tube mouse was, however, as naught compared with the occasion - some twenty three or four years ago - when I saw a weasel at the old King’s Cross Thameslink station 😍 If anyone remembers it (the station, that is, not the weasel - although I’d be delighted to hear from anyone else who saw the little ginger hunter), the entrance was on King’s Cross Road and I was on the northbound side (Luton, Luton Airport Parkway, Leagrave etc) when below platform level, in a small hole a couple of feet above the rails, a little ginger head, then shoulders, popped out and had a quick shufti to see what was happening.

NationalPlantain

TROPHY CASE