Friday open thread: remembrance of things past

The first four days of my working week were frantically busy (delivering between 4-6 hours of training each day, a sudden deluge of researchers realising the pandemic would continue to keep them out of the lab and therefore pivoting to doing systematic reviews, with the subsequent realisation that they didn't know how to do systematic searching and asking me to do it for them, etc). This was somewhat deliberate on my part, however: working from home gives me a lot more freedom in managing my own time, and I've taken to cramming in as many commitments as possible into the first four days of the week, and keeping Fridays relatively free.

All that is by way of preamble to explain why this week's open thread is being posted so early in the day.

This week's prompt comes from bruttimabuoni, and the question is
do you keep any clothes/accessories that have particular memories or associations for you?

( My answers behind the cut )

What about you all? Do you have significant accessories or items of clothing?

'But ask yourself this, friends: who sacrificed *your* children?'

I am not generally someone who finds flashy public displays of individual charity (or charity by a business) to be laudable — my opinion is that if charity is necessary, it's a sign that a government has failed in its responsibility. Failing to prevent children from going hungry to me demonstrates that a government in a comparably wealthy country has utterly failed in its most basic responsibilities.

It is not the job of a young footballer to essentially shame businesses and local councils into stepping in and providing the free meals for children that this shameless government refuses to provide — I find Marcus Rashford's campaign extremely admirable, but the fact that he needs to do such a thing is a sign of the government's moral failure, rather than being uplifting or inspiring.

That being said, Rashford's Twitter feed (MarcusRashford) is making my heart overflow with emotion today.

(Title quote comes from a moment which is probably in my top ten favourite fictional scenes ever, in Philip Pullman's The Tiger in the Well, when my favourite fictional socialist revolutionary Dan Goldberg manages to talk down a violent mob by appealling to their sense of logic and justice. Leaving aside whether such acts of persuasion are anything other than wishful thinking, I most certainly agree with the sentiment that children should never be acceptable collateral damage of decisions made by the privileged and powerful.)