So, an acquaintance visited me yesterday. He called me and asked if he could bring his daughter... well, she is about the same age as Amiyah (a year old than Amiyah)... So I was like sure, Amiyah would love that. They came and around 4 pm, and let me tell you

(A THREAD)

18 Things I Would Do At 18:

I was a dumb 18-year-old. I thought I had the world figured out. I didn't.

I stayed up till the wee hours. Drank every liquor invented.

Partied non-stop. Woke up after noon.

Surfed the web aimlessly.

Read BS self-help.

Repeat.

If I could do it all over again, here's 18 things I would do...

PHASE ONE: GET MY MIND RIGHT

ACTION #1: Break the chains - I wish I made the decision earlier. I didn't. I was scared. Anxious. Nervous. I knew once I made the decision, there was no going back.

Don't be like me.

Make the decision at 18. The decision to pave your own path in life. To go against the herd. To choose your own adventure. To commit to whatever sets your heart on fire.

ACTION #2: Cut off every negative person in your life.

Scroll through the contacts in your phone...

Notice how the names make you feel.

Delete any and all names that fill you with doubt and negativity.

ACTION #3: Condition your mind to embrace the producer mindset instead of the consumer mindset.

Consume 20% of the time. Produce 80% of the time.

Case closed.

ACTION #4: Set an intention to make $10k a month and write it out every MORNING and NIGHT as if you already achieved it (in the past tense).

Visualize yourself already having the money as you write.

Cheesy?

Yes.

Does it work?

Yes.

PHASE TWO: EDUCATION

I'm just back for a COMPLETELY NECESSARY trip to a supermarket.

And... something dramatic happened.

So, okay, looks like we're going to have a little bit of a THREAD.

Buckle up for an unbelievable anecdote that gets to the heart of London life in this nightmarish pandemic.

(I won't name the supermarket, NOT because I don't want to shame the members of staff [I will be doing that privately by reporting their actions to the police later today - as soon as I've finished tweeting this thread], but because I don't want to give them free advertising.)

Okay, right. I'm still shaking so I'm struggling to write this out. I've opened a bottle of Campo Viejo Rioja (an underrated affordable offering which is currently on special offer at Tesco) to steady my nerves. No shame in that.

So. Yes. I was walking down the dairy aisle...

I saw a northerner.

(apologies for the delay, I'm on the phone to an upset friend - her husband of 15 years has just confessed to an affair with her own sister. It's not really the sort of situation where you can say, "Excuse me Julie, awfully sorry but I'm writing an incredible thread on twitter!")

Me and my brother visiting Stonehenge in AD 2003. Speaking of relatives in and around Stonehenge, here's a new (OA) paper with Jo Brück, @SelBrace & Ian Barnes based on findings in Olalde et al. (2018)

https://t.co/m8XOsP1rQN

https://t.co/0XaRbWKVHU

The main aim of this paper was to try to show off the wealth of useful information that can be found in the Supplementary Materials of large-scale aDNA papers, if you know where to look. These details are often not discussed in the main text, but can be pretty significant...

Olalde et al. (2018) found there was a yuge transformation (>90%) of the genetic ancestry of people in Chalcolithic-Early Bronze Age Britain (c.2450-2000) produced by movements of groups of people from possibly various parts of continental Europe.

Our chronological modelling of associated radiocarbon dates in OxCal suggests this ancestry shift was fairly gradual, probably taking between 311-472 years, or 10-16 generations.

Groups genetically continuous with preceding Late Neolithic groups continued inhabiting C-EBA Britain but we don't see them so much in the DNA data as they largely continued to cremate their dead or treat them in ways which left no archaeological record.