I have put my back out before by stretching slightly too far to open a door 
It’s still a bit ropey, but has actually improved quite a bit since I started doing strength training with someone who knows how to lift things safely - thoroughly recommend
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(Touching wood) I just have pulled my back once in my lifetime, and I was 20. It was taking a 24 beer can pack out of the bottom of a supermarket trolley for my then girlfriend’s 18th birthday party. The funny side of it is that I don’t drink alcohol. I was stiff all through that party, and not in a good way!
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Bloody frustrated.
My son has become quite attached to wearing dresses. Mostly he dresses in t-shirts and shorts etc but today he decided he wanted to wear a summer dress to school. Which is fine - if thats what he wants to do, then all power to him. We’ve talked to him about some of the negatively he might get and he’s said thats fine, I still want to wear it. So I’ll support him.
What I’m frustrated about is my mum’s attitude to this, who is down visiting. She thinks its silly, she thinks that we need to roll back all these ‘human rights laws’ and ‘wokeness’, she implied I was setting him up for failure in later life if I let him continue. So we had a stand up row for 10 mins and then I had to act all nice because the kids came back from school.
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I got the tar kicked out of me when I was 10, and had to get my pelvis rebuilt and my hip replaced. I’ve got about 20 years on my current hip, and I am dang lucky that I don’t have more problems (and to be alive), but I do get the periodic reminder that I am in my forties and my armature is made of aftermarket parts.
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Old people are frustrating, there’s no teaching some of them.
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I’m glad you’re standing up for your son - hopefully your mum will come around to the idea soon. If not you could always get a plastic knife for him to stick in his sock and tell her he’s got really into traditional Highland dress 
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Oh man. I was looking into kilts pretty deeply a few years back. I’ve got a lot of Irish but also some lowland clan in me. Discovered my lowland clan does not have a tartan, but we were “adopted” by the Mitchells or something and “allowed” to use their tartan. Bollux on that.
Then discovered both my clan and county tartans for Ireland are just marketing ploys and don’t have much history beyond the last few decades, and that history is basically tied to Americans and kilt shops.
The Irish saffron kilt does have some real history but even that was founded on an Irish desire to emulate the Scots’ strong national identity as opposed to growing out of endemic Irish culture. We appropriated it and then built some culture on top of it.
In the end I gave up as it all seemed rather forced. Well, I have a lot of Guinness in my basement. That’s pure.
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QI defended that every British person was entitled to wear Royal McDonald tartan, as you can wear the tartan of your chieftain. I don’t know if it still applies to the ex colonies… 
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Me: stands up
My knees: The fuck do YOU think you’re DOING!?
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I’ve had similar luck with my family name. The spelling of the name was, apparently, very fluid during the 19th century in and around the British Isles, so it’s hard to track anything down. It’s possible there are multiple names that all converged upon the same final spelling.
As a result, I’ve never found a tartan or crest I have enough confidence in as “mine” to actually order something made.
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Some mornings I wake up feeling like I am back in my 30s. Soon my joints remind me that I am mid 40s. Particularly my Achilles tendon on the right heel. “He” is one persistent ba***rd with very good memory.
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Apparently this is “ours”, from “The Scottish Register of Tartans”, which sounds legit (italic emphasis theirs). It is a gov.uk site, which probably means something?
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One of my grandmothers was a Wallace, if that gives me any claim to a tartan.
As with many white Americans whose families have been in the US for any length of time, I’m such a random mix of European ancestries (with other random things thrown in in very small percentages), that I’m not sure there’s much point trying to sort it out.
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I know I must have Scottish connections as per my great grandmother having a FitzPatrick Stewart surname. I remember looking it up and doing some investigation about 10 years ago before my dad’s dementia took over. I did not have as much available data as I would have today, but sort of puts me there, I guess. Even when I took a DNA test it did show the British Isles as one of the sources, so there you go…
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The clan tartans in Scotland were pretty much invented by the Victorians anyway.
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As an actual True Scotsman (ahem), wear what looks cool as your tartan. I wear a family- oriented tartan for my mother’s side, but there are lots of universal, corporate or other tartans. So if you want to wear tartan, and you can’t find or don’t care about family tartans, then find something you like.
There is a history there but almost all of it was either made up or revised from 1822 onwards when a royal visit to Edinburgh made it fashionable (and not frowned upon or downright illegal to wear as it smacked of a particular type of revolution).
Anyone who judges you on your choice is not the type of person you would want to hang with anyway!
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This is mine by the way, Clan Fraser, based on my mother’s surname.
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I am a Murphy and I have at least found my crest. There were so many of us they became two families, but I come from the one with three wheat, not the tree. Writing it down it sounds kind of prescient of future Settlers of Catan conversations.
On my wife’s side of the family connections, we have similar problems - Wongs, Hwangs, and Huangs who are all actually the same family (character) and then friends who are OTHER Wongs and such that are completely different families.
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Yet, your profile pic is a tree… 
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Numbers here are way up and on the rise. We’re back at almost 1.000 per 100.000 people in my city. And that’s with people barely testing… and me being the weird one not wanting to hug everyone they meet or even shake hands. Tomorrow I have to get on a train to meet my colleagues for the first time after I’ve been working there for almost a year. Well, no, I don’t have to, but I agreed to.
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