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Some awfully British reasons to cry...

Last year, us Brits admitted to being a nation of whiners. Research showed that 56% of us admitted to a daily moan and one in five (19%) confessed to moaning more than three times a day, resulting in 10,168 minutes of moaning a year. A Sunday scroll through Twitter led me down a rabbit hole and into a thread which got me belly laughing at some of the things we're actually moaning about. #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry, of course, had much mention of Brexit, tea, fish and chips, the increased price of the Freddo and the pronunciation of scone.Here are some of my favourites, I hope they cheer you up if you’re having a dull day…

@shallowseal / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry Shelling out for a train ticket for it to not be checked.

@AndrewRoberts66 / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry The sandwich you wanted isn’t part of the meal deal.

@DistantValhalla / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry Half the digestive crumbled off into your tea.

@taesvnte / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry When it says ‘unexpected item in bagging area’ for the fifth time.

@CuriosityRocks / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry Woolworths.

@MRJGrist / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry Boris Johnson.

@PatWilliams18 / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry The queue in the next check out at the supermarket goes down quicker than yours

@Ianshad / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry You pay shit loads for Sky Sports and the footy’s on BT Sport.

@wildbunchtags /#AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry Microwaved tea.

@kurtaytoros / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry The weather.

@tavistockgirl / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry Someone left the big light on…

@BakemanMouse / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry Buffering.

@annette_xxxxx / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry When plans you wanted to be cancelled go ahead…

@JackGriffin1945 / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry When your next door neighbour changes his Wifi password.

@PaulPJB / #AwfullyBritishReasonsToCry The queen never flushed after sitting on the throne.

For more reasons to laugh (not cry), here's the twitter thread: https://twitter.com/hashtag/awfullybritishreasonstocry

-Emma

Have you ever thought about the colours in your name?For some people with the rare sensory trait called grapheme-colour synesthesia, this is the way their brain ‘sees’ letters and numbers. For those who don’t know, grapheme-colour synesthesia is a condition in which people associate specific colours with particular letters and numbers. I remember learning about the condition in a college art class and found it fascinating. I stared hard at black words on white paper and just saw black words on white paper, so I never gave it another thought.

Until a few weeks ago when I came across a blog, that led me to the colours of my name. Designer and artist, Bernadette Sheridan, who has grapheme-colour synesthesia, has built an online, interactive tool that can generate the letters of your name into a colour sequence. The colour sequence is made up of one specific colour for every letter in the alphabet and identifies how people with grapheme-colour synesthesia see your name.

Bernadette created the tool to allow us to understand how she experiences the world and so we can see our names come to life in colour. After Bernadette created the synesthesia gallery, made up of the names of everybody she knew, she noticed a pattern in which the colours of their names matched their personality. “The colour of your name triggers an overall assumption based on how light, dark, saturated or dominant your name appears, a lot of that is based on the vowels in your name.”, Bernadette writes in a follow-up blog.

I’m not going to lie, I was very excited to throw my name into the generator and see what colours it spat out. Optimistic Emma was expecting something bright, cheery and unusual (I like to think to match my personality). Emma is made up of the three primary colours. Kind of bright, kind of cheery but nowhere near unusual.

Find out what colour your name is...

-Emma