Ash Ford-McAllister

  Depression isn't "just feeling a bit rubbish."  Depression isn't "suicidal thoughts and extreme emotional pain." Depression will be different for  everyone, but it's also different as individuals progress through it. Because depression is  something you progress through. It won't always be the way it starts out, and I feel that's an important thing to discuss as mental health is increasingly centred in Western society, and conversations become more open, and more commonplace. I have depression. For me, if we were to use a mental health version of the pain scale, which might look something like: 1. Everything's great! I'm really positive and motivated, with plenty of energy! I'm actively enjoying existing hobbies, and exploring new ones. I'm focused on how good things are going to be in the future, and I have pleasant memories of the past. 2. I'm feeling positive and motivated, and enjoying my current hobbies. I have things I

                                                                                 On Friday 20th September 2024, it was revealed that the UK’s national debt was equal to the income the UK was able to generate; in short, debt was at 100% of GDP. This last occurred in the 1960s - and resulted in the following decade, the 1970s, being extremely difficult for ordinary people, with standards of living declining sharply across all demographics, something which, inevitably, hit those who were already experiencing poverty the hardest. The 1970s saw a massive loss of manufacturing in Britain - historically, the one sector that had been able to pull Britain through the downturns of economic cycles, because the UK used to be known, and respected for, exceptional quality of its manufactured goods, and many countries around the world were keen to purchase what were considered premium brands from Britain.   Manufacturing is also a very forgiving and open sector for employment, with low barriers to en

  There's a lot of very impassioned discourse, particularly online,  about how "problematic"  age-gap relationships are, and the "dangers" of women under 25 dating men who are any more than 2yrs older than them. (Interestingly, there is very little said about men  under 25 dating older women , and nothing,  beyond the bigots' 'justifications' of their homophobia, about people in same-sex age-gap relationships - I have ideas on why the focus is on young women, but that's another blog post!) Personally, I feel that peoples' attitudes to age-gap relationships, like peoples' attitudes to many things, are determined by their experience; my grandparents and my parents both had a 10yr age gap, with the man being the older party - in my grandparents' case, my maternal grandmother was 19 when she married my 29yr old grandfather; their relationship lasted for 43yrs, until her death in 2004. Two sets of my parents' friends also had a 10yr ag

  If you've taken a moment to have a look at my  publication history , you'll notice that my writing to date has been published under the name Ashley Ford-McAllister  (as was my previous blog, that I lost the login details for...) So - why the move to Ash Ford-McAllister?  It's a very small change on paper (which it technically isn't - Ashley is still my legal first name) but a huge change on a personal level, and one which reflects a lot. Ash  was a name that, at 9yrs old, and with an absolute certainty that the answer to the question of "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was "a man", and a belief that the "change" people kept warning me about would be when I'd get the same genitals as my Dad had (yes, a female puberty came as a hell of a shock. Such a severe and upsetting one, in fact,  that I just assumed what was probably severe endometriosis was "just normal girl stuff" - PSA: if you're bleeding for 6+ days, a

  I want to start this article by mentioning just how long  it took to find a picture of a genuinely 'fat' person where they weren't miserable, engaged in a gym workout, or standing on a set of scales. There were almost no photos at all of full-bodied men. Eating disorders are skyrocketing in the UK , including among children and teenagers.   A lot of commentators place the blame with social media, and heavily filtered, professional, fully employed, paid 'influencers' (many of whom are instructed by the media companies which pay their wages to present themselves as "ordinary homie done good" types, representing their regular, paid  job, complete with purchased followers, paid-for likes, and a vast marketing budget available, as "a wild bit of absolute luck") presenting unrealistic beauty standards. Others go back further, blaming catwalk supermodels, and routine print magazine airbrushing of women who were already very far from even well-nourishe