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Do you want your medical records shared not only with your medical advisers but others, as from 1st July 2021? If not, you'll need to register an opt-out form via your GP before 23rd June.

The official announcement of this plan, early in April, wasn't actively reported and there's been no individual notification of patients, but its downside was reported on the Today programme this morning.

NHS Digital's advice to the public, which no-one will have found for themselves, is at https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/data-collections-and-data-sets/data-collections/general-practice-data-for-planning-and-research/advice-for-the-public. That advice is not objective at all. It's very clearly slanted to persuade us to let our data be scraped - but it includes the telling comment, "We do not allow data to be used solely for commercial purposes." (In other words, the data can be used for commercial purposes as well as medical and/or other research purposes.)

The link from that advice to the opt-out form doesn't seem to work but there's an effective link to the form in the FT article at https://www.ft.com/content/9fee812f-6975-49ce-915c-aeb25d3dd748 .

Santander Cycles will be free today until midnight as part of this year’s Car Free Day campaign in London, which hopes to raise awareness of the capital’s air pollution crisis.

From The British Museum:

We're delighted to announce that we'll be able to welcome visitors back to the Museum from Thursday 27 August.

We've been working hard to create a safe and welcoming environment – we will be introducing a new timed ticket system to limit numbers in the Museum and ensure visitors can keep a safe distance.

Tickets will be available to book in advance from Wednesday 12 August – don't worry, entry is still free!

You'll be able to explore an exciting one-way route along the Ground floor galleries that leads you on a journey through two million years of human history.

Read more about reopening on our website: https://www.britishmuseum.org

An enthusiast from our local gardening group went to Seedy Sunday in Brighton recently and has just shared her notes of the talk given by Professor Dave Goulson, the bee specialist and author. Some of his tips will be familiar but others, less so.

Mow less.

Get involved in re-wilding community spaces – see the Road Verge Campaign.

Think of weeds as wildflowers and give them space in your garden to encourage biodiversity (many bees and insects need native wildflowers such as nettles and dandelions to survive).

Don’t use any pesticides or chemical fertilisers.

Choose to grow flowers which attract pollinators ie. open old fashioned roses not the closed kind which offer up no pollen. Avoid annual bedding plants which offer up little to no pollen.

Plant insect friendly perennials like lavender, catmint, hardy geraniums, borage, comfrey, laburnum, apple trees, viper’s bugloss (echium).

Grow from seed to avoid buying plants from garden centres which are often grown using pesticides and peat-based compost.

Do not buy peat-based compost.

Install a bee hotel, a wildlife pond or a fly lagoon.

Do not use Advocate flea treatment on your pets as this carries toxic insecticide that can be washed off into waterways and kills insects far beyond the occasional flea.

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This scheme takes a kind of Secret Santa approach to make Valentine's Day feel more universally inclusive.

You sign up and are allocated someone to whom to send a card (either a handmade or a non-romantic commercial one), while someone else gets your name and address to send you a card. See https://mentalhealthcollective.org.uk/greatbritish-valentine/ for links and details.

NB Registration closes on 4th February.

Anyone on here ever get in the Nelson?

Got an A4 page of scribbled words through my letterbox this evening from someone named Lana, pointing me in the direction of this site, encouraging me to get involved. Got here, guess what? Nothing!

Waist of time.

Tried posting this got asked to “verifiy your email”. You couldn't eve spell verify properly!

Hi,

i need someone that knows and would like to install the oven i just purchased.

Suggestions how to recycle the old oven are very much appreciated.

Lmk as i have a small budget

I'm seeking a piano teacher in Hoxton area
my rate would be 30 pounds for 45 minutes twice a week

Dom-Elec in Kingsland Waste repaired my vacuum cleaner and washing machine for many years but have disappeared, with no forwarding address that I can find. Does anyone know if they've moved or simply closed down?
Meantime, my old Dyson needs repairing and one can't any longer even buy a replacement power cord for it (which the online Dyson repairman says is almost invariably the cause of breakdown). Is there anyone locally who does this kind of repair, who might at least assess it for me? I really don't want to have to throw it out and get a new vacuum cleaner, if the old one can be fixed.

I've just joined ScoopLoop and been finding my way around the site. I had to correct its strange attempt to designate me as being in Kingsland, since I live well within the ward of De Beauvoir.

Then I noticed this weirdly inaccurate map of "De Beauvoir Town" that the site is using. Had anyone else spotted that the shaded area is utterly unlike the reality of where we live? De Beauvoir has had a very identifiable community history since its whole area was first sold for development in about 1820, so such a mistake is very odd indeed.

Apparently the map had been imported from some "third party database" (I'm guessing, Google Maps), so is supposedly not within ScoopLoop's own control. But when I asked SL for that database's owners' contact details, with a view to getting the shaded area on the map corrected, my concerns got referred to their tech folk. So let's hope that we end up with our home community being accurately depicted, sometime soon.