Germany's birthrate is the lowest in Europe and falling, so, Germans, apparently.

That's unusual, although the number of masochists I know is quite a small dataset. They're all HUGE wimps outside a kink context.

Exactly. My second-oldest disapproved of my brief nudity of chin. "Daddy! No! Shave it back on!" Which cuteness we remind him of regular, made all the more hilarious by him growing up to be 6'6" and about 150kg of regular workouts.

This. I've long loathed Gervais as I've loathed every purveyor of cringe comedy. He sets up an obvious target and invites us to laugh, and the thing the targets have in common is that they are clearly at the very least not too bright. The point of David Brent, as far as Gervais was concerned, was that he was an…

Heh. I'm British by birth, English by accident, and Lancastrian by the Grace of A Loving God. Although Burnley is most of the way to Yorkshire, and therefore Suspect. Yon littlun isn't a northerner.

No, west midlands. Birmingham, Black Country or Dudley, but you'd need a native to tell them apart. Which I ain't. I'm reasonably precise with northern accents, being a northerner myself, and I can usually get within ten miles or so within Lancashire.

Midlands. Looong way from Cockney.

Because wrong is being done and refusing to help remedy it at opportunities - that present themselves every day - makes you complicit.

I've heard too many three-in-the-morning crying jags to offer any sincere reassurance.

Oh, certainly they do. A lot of them can't hide it altogether, though. Especially when it's 'just us guys' and they think they're going to get a friendly audience. In as much as there's a point I'm making, here, it's that men who say they don't see the problem when they almost certainly count at least two or…

Really? Surely they smell better? (Recalling a conversation over drinks with the lass that had to clean the men's sauna at a gym I used to use).

They're not THAT hard to spot. If you actually listen to your female friends about what the problem men are like.

No. There is this huge unaddressed assumption in your thinking that violence is a symptom of mental illness. It's not. Violence is done every day by mentally healthy individuals, who've been trained to it and had it justified to them (the argument about whether the justifications are valid is a separate one) in…

One theory I heard, and it's got a certain logic to it, is that after one abusive relationship, the abusee - usually the woman, that being the way these things go more often than not - ends up with quite obvious and prickly defenses that the more decent sort of man notes and backs off from out of respect, or…

No, macho dicks do, indeed, turn into snivelling spineless wrecks when someone takes their sense of entitlement, folds it up so it's all sharp corners, and hammers it up their rectum. It's HILARIOUS to watch.

This. My partner and I are technically open, right from the start (both with a background of shitty experiences made it make sense at the time). We've since discovered that we're both FAR too busy/lazy.

No, it's not hypocritical. There are plenty of things that fill a need and don't hurt anyone that people not involved probably don't want to see. Morris dancing, and that thing where one party lies under a glass coffee table while the other takes a shit on it, to name but two.

People will fail to maintain standards. Standards are the basis of civilisation. What's a few road traffic accidents against our descendants living in the howling waste where once stood proud cities, subsisting on the meat of rats and cockroaches and telling tales of the long-ago-before-time?

There's no right nor wrong for which side of the road to drive on either, but there's a rule for it so everyone does it the same way on the same road network. And, yes, I take my hat off when entering a private, indoor space. Feels a little more optional these days in a public indoor space (and having a flat cap on…

Thing is, you have to do the 'Duh!' studies because sometimes it turns out that stuff everyone knew stood to reason is actually total and utter horseshit.