Who needs manuals anyway! Doing DIY without looking at the handbook gives men a 'masculinity boost', study finds
But doing DIY or completing a project without using the handbook makes blokes feel like 'real men'.
According to a survey of 2,000 men, 38 per cent experience a masculinity boost when they complete a job around the house or garden.
A third feel like an alpha male when they don't use the instructions, and a similar proportion feel a lift when checking the car's oil, water and tyre pressure before a long journey.
Some 18 per cent responded that they feel superior when carrying three pints from the bar without spilling a drop.
For one in four carrying all the shopping bags in from the car boot in one run or fixing something is what heightens their machismo.
And another quarter said that taking control of the barbecue makes them feel more macho.
Other top 'man-mode' moments included sounding knowledgeable when chatting to tradesmen (21 per cent) and assembling flat-pack furniture without any help (18 per cent).
The report, by men's deodorant, shower gel and skincare firm Rock Face, said: 'While once it might have been about beer runs and bravado, today's men are recognising that being a good partner and a solid all-rounder is what really matters.
'From handling household tasks to staying calm under pressure, these man-mode moments reflect men showing up in ways that count.'
James Wilkinson, Rock Face chief executive, said: 'These everyday achievements might seem small, but they add up.
'Being the guy who sorts things out, supports those around him and takes pride in his role – that's modern masculinity.'
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The Guardian
9 minutes ago
- The Guardian
At 19 I had to flee my country, afraid for my life – without even saying goodbye to my family
For three days, Mohanad had been lost at sea in an overcrowded wooden boat. Travelling across the Mediterranean from Libya to Europe, he and the other passengers had run out of food and water, were running out of fuel, and had mixed their remaining sugar with sea water to see if they could drink it. 'It was madness,' he says. Weak and exhausted, passengers began drifting in and out of consciousness. Mohanad kept waking up an Ethiopian man – who was nearer the edge of the boat – worried he might fall in. At night, there were large waves, and Mohanad slept for a while himself, but was woken by a loud splash. People began screaming the Ethiopian man's name. He had slipped over the side into the water. They turned the boat around to look for him, but he had drowned. On the morning of the third day, the sea was calmer, but no land was visible. A white object appeared on the horizon. It got bigger and bigger. When the people on the boat with Mohanad saw the letters MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières) on the side, they got up to shout and cheer. 'I cried,' Mohanad says. He urged the others to calm down, and to think of the women and children on board, as their boat almost capsized in the excitement. The larger vessel was a search and rescue ship called Geo Barents, which was operated by MSF. On board, they were given nutritional supplements and water, before being taken to a migrant centre in Bari, on the coast of southern Italy. Mohanad was overwhelmed with relief, and says it was like being born again. 'I just kept remembering, I'm not going to go back to Libya.' His hope on arriving in Europe was simple: that he would start to be 'treated as a human'. Mohanad grew up in Darfur, in Sudan. His family are Zaghawa – one of the non-Arab ethnic groups in Sudan, targeted by both government forces and armed militia. 'In my country, there's a massive amount of discrimination,' he says, describing the persecution his people have faced. The Janjaweed militia, which evolved into the Rapid Support Forces, has carried out mass killings and ethnic cleansing in his region. 'They don't just murder people, it's the way they do it,' Mohanad says – describing rape, mutilation and other UN-documented atrocities. 'Wherever you go, they ask, 'What is your tribe?' That will determine what happens to you, and how you are treated.' Four of his uncles were killed by snipers in an attack on their village when he was a child. 'I witnessed a lot of horrible stuff,' he says. His family escaped on a lorry – he still remembers seeing swollen bodies by the road, and ransacked shops. From then they were often on the move, going from city to camp. He remembers a child who got sick in one of the camps where he lived. The child's mother couldn't afford to pay for basic medicine, so the child died. He also remembers visiting a large hospital, overflowing with patients, but with only one doctor to treat them all. He decided he wanted to become a doctor. Mohanad was clever; his mother had worked as a teacher before the family was displaced, and she encouraged him to attend school wherever they were. He continued to study while he worked to help support his family – selling food, drink, sometimes clothes. When he was 18, he was accepted into a medical school in a town near the camp where they lived. 'I was so excited,' he says. Those first weeks at university were the 'best of my life'. It was a big chance for him – very few people from the camp got to study at this level. But, like others on the course, he was disappointed by the poor teaching, the lack of basic services such as water or electricity, and the focus on subjects such as Arabic studies, at the expense of community medicine, which was covered in only a few days (in other parts of Sudan, the topic was taught over a whole year). 'We said, if they don't teach us properly, we can't help people, it will put lives at risk,' he says. He was threatened by the vice-chancellor, who told him to keep quiet, or he would be 'silenced', but he kept asking for improvements, sending messages to the university, and attending demonstrations with other students. He was arrested twice for taking part in protests in 2018, and, he says, treated more harshly because of his ethnicity. After being detained, 'some people disappear, no one knows what's happened to them, but they are probably dead'. He doesn't want to go into details about the prison he was held in, but says, 'the point is, you will be worried after that'. He knew, once he got out, that he had to leave immediately. He didn't dare to even say goodbye to his family. He was 19. Now the authorities had his details, he was worried he'd be caught at one of the many checkpoints and sent back to prison. 'You have to leave in secret, you have to choose an illegal route, just in order to leave the country. I would never, ever have been allowed to fly, the government would have arrested me.' Mohanad knew a truck driver, who transported sheep, okra, tomatoes and kidney beans. He hid among the vegetables and spent three days travelling from place to place via remote roads, heading north, hiding at every checkpoint, until he made it over the border into Libya. He was unprepared for what he found there. In Libya, Mohanad was kidnapped repeatedly – he lost count of how many times. 'We migrants call it hell on earth,' he says. 'They will capture people and call their family and ask for money.' The first time this happened was not long after he entered the country. He was in the middle of nowhere, in the desert. A man offered to help him, and he said yes, without hesitation – he thought he might die out there. The man took him to a farm, and locked Mohanad up, before transferring him to a place with many others. At this point, he was told he had to pay thousands of dollars to be released. He didn't have that kind of money. So they kept him, and he worked for free, for six months, barely fed, mixing concrete and carrying materials, on a series of building sites. Sometimes other people came on site, like engineers. 'They didn't know we were victims of human traders,' he says. He tried to ask them questions, to find out where they were, but had to do this out of earshot of the gang members. After six months, he escaped by asking one of the visitors for a lift to a nearby town, pretending he wanted to get some cigarettes. He had learned enough of the local dialect to get by, and after this he sometimes managed to evade capture for a few months, but it kept on happening. Sometimes he was caught travelling between cities, sometimes he escaped by bribing the police or jumping out of a car. The kidnappers often began by promising him work. 'Then when you get in their car, they start swearing at you, they show you their pistol, or their machine gun.' He was beaten hard and saw people shot in front of him. 'It's a sequence. If you get lucky you escape, or someone you know pays for you. If not, you may get killed, punished, burned with liquid plastic on your back, or they pull out your nails.' He spent three years in Libya – most of the time trying to get out. Some Sudanese people helped him for a while, offering him food and a place to stay. He applied to the United Nations to be resettled as a refugee. 'If they sent me to another safe African country, I would have gone,' he says. But he waited, and nothing happened, and then he was kidnapped again. After a while, risking the dangerous sea crossing to Europe began to seem like his only hope of escape. 'You have no choice. In Libya you will never be safe, and you can't go home – so going over the sea becomes the least dangerous option.' Mohanad had friends who had died trying to leave Libya – shot while they were trying to escape armed gangs, or drowning at sea. More than once, he was cheated by smugglers – he paid money for a place on a boat, but when he went to meet them, they tipped off another contact, and he was captured again. 'We were just victims of their business … They'd say on the phone, 'I have 70 heads' – they don't even call you people.' It took him a year to save up for that last boat trip. 'The guy, he was OK. He put us on the sea. It was a small boat but there were a lot of people, and it couldn't take us all.' After he arrived in Italy, he was taken to a huge, overcrowded migrant centre near Bari. 'They register you, and they say 'share this room', but there are only eight beds, and 16 or 17 people.' There were people who had been waiting there for months, so a group of them decided to leave – Mohanad took a bus to a border town, where a lot of people were sleeping rough. He spoke to others who hoped things might be better over the border in France. At the border, a French official asked him where he was going, and he said, 'I have no idea.' They gave him a piece of paper saying he had to leave France within three days, and one of the officials suggested going to Paris and on to Calais – he understood that there would be food and help there. At that point, he didn't even know that Calais was on the coast. By then, Mohanad was in a group of seven or eight people, from Sudan, Syria and Chad. They moved through France, sleeping on the streets, travelling on trains without a ticket, until the guard or the police threw them off. Between trains, they wandered around all night, freezing cold, in the rain, searching for shelter. They had a few biscuits from Bari, which soon ran out. In Dijon, the rain fell all night, but they met a kind Nigerian, who gave them food in his own home. 'If I had a chance, I would thank him now, it was an amazing thing that he did for us.' 'We had no idea about claiming to be a refugee or an asylum seeker. No one advised us,' Mohanad says. Other migrants directed them to Calais, where there were charities providing food, but he was sleeping rough – locals threw glass bottles at him and he says he experienced a lot of racism. He discovered that many people there were trying to cross the Channel. 'I just wanted a warm place, a safe place,' he says. French police confiscated any tents they had. Mohanad tried to help some younger Sudanese teenagers, but one of them was killed boarding a truck, and another was badly wounded in an attack. In September 2021, Mohanad crossed to the UK, hidden in a vehicle. He climbed inside, in the early morning – he couldn't see out, but knew when they started driving again that they'd reached England. They stopped in the late afternoon, when the driver began to unload his boxes at a factory near Birmingham. Mohanad jumped out and ran away, because he was worried the driver would be angry. 'The driver was very surprised.' It was a sunny day, and everything looked different – he noticed that people seemed friendlier than in France. He asked a couple of passersby for help, until a woman pushing a buggy showed him the way to the nearest police station. 'I said to them 'Hello, is this a police station?'' he says. 'They said, 'Are you alright? What's the problem, where did you come from?' I said I come from Sudan. I came by lorry.' The absurdity of it makes him smile. 'They were surprised. How did you come from Sudan, and end up in Birmingham?' He says the police were kind and offered him food. At first, he knew nothing about the system here, but after a month, when he was told about the option to claim asylum, Mohanad did so. He spent 15 months in asylum accommodation in Yorkshire, first in hotels and then in a shared house, waiting for a decision. At first, just having somewhere safe to stay and a bed to sleep in was a huge relief, but the uncertainty and not being able to work was unsettling. 'You have nothing to do,' he says. He had flashbacks, and was diagnosed with PTSD. Things improved when he started volunteering with the Refugee Council on a healthcare project, where he was trained to give advice and support to other refugees. This gave him a chance to speak to people, a bit of experience in how the NHS works, and also a sense of purpose. He says he's experienced less racism in the UK than in France or elsewhere. But he never felt fully part of the community until he was granted asylum, and was accepted as a refugee. 'When I got my papers, it was the same feeling as being rescued at sea. I thought, 'Yes, I can live.'' Mohanad found a room, and last year, thanks partly to his experience with the Refugee Council, he enrolled on an access to medicine course. He passed the science elements with a distinction, but struggled to reach the required level in English. For now, he's looking for work as a security guard or in a warehouse, but he still hopes to keep studying medicine, and has also applied to volunteer at a local hospital. Since he left Sudan, the war has spread, and he is worried about his family. 'I know war, it's not something new to me. But to see the whole of Sudan in that pain, you can't describe it. The same militia are killing and murdering and raping people. They took control of my whole region, except for one city. To see the same thing, ethnic killings, genocide …' He says he'd like the world to pay more attention to Sudan. Sudanese refugees who do make it to safety here, against the odds, face hostile policies. 'Now there's a plan to refuse citizenship to refugees,' Mohanad says. 'If I spend my whole life here, I will remain a refugee, a second class or even third class citizen. It feels as if they can just deport me. I started worrying again,' he says. 'They say we have to come here legally – so why don't you provide safe routes?' He says it would be better if there were a realistic way to apply for refugee status before travelling to the UK. There are no schemes to help people from Sudan, he points out, and getting an aeroplane, let alone securing a visa, is impossible for most. He didn't set out to come to the UK, he says – he wanted to stay in Sudan and become a doctor – but that wasn't possible, and he left to save his life. Making this journey is how he survived.
The Sun
41 minutes ago
- The Sun
Didn't win the £210 Euromillions? Full list of the lottery games with the highest chance of you winning
LAST night, the life of a French lottery player changed forever, after they scooped up an enormous £210 million Euromillions prize. Thousands of Brits have been left devastated to have missed out on the eye-watering sum, but with the chance of winning the top prize standing at 1 in 139 million, the odds definitely aren't in your favour. 1 So, if you are keen to bag yourself a windfall, which lotto has the highest chance of winning? Postcode Lottery Entering the Postcode Lottery is your best bet, with 87% of people winning a prize in 2024. The chance of winning a big prize (Postcode Millions, Millionaire Street or £250,000 prize) is better than one in 250,000 and the chance of winning £1000 are better than 1 in 2000. In July, 18.3% of playing postcodes bagged prizes. To play the Postcode Lottery, you have to pay a £12.25 a month fee, which automatically enters you in to the draw. The winning postcodes are announced every month, and if your postcode wins, you will get a prize. Health Lottery The Health Lottery raises funds for health related causes in the UK, and has just 20,000 weekly players (compared with 100 million Euromillions players). According to the Health Lottery website, the odds of winning any All of Nothing Prize is 1 in 4.5 and the odds of winning the All of Nothing Jackpot is £1.35 million. The odds of winning the Big Win jackpot are 1 in 2.1 million, and the odds of winning any Big Win prize is 1 in 9.7. Tickets start from just £1, and The Health Lottery is drawn five times a week, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays & Saturdays. Heartwarming moment dad who battled cancer tells son he's won massive jackpot on the EuroMillions Set For Life Set For Life gives players the chance to win £10,000 every month for the next 30 years, and the odds of winning the top prize are 1 in 15.3 million. The odds of winning the second prize (£10,000 every month for a year) is 1 in 1.7 million. And the odds of winning any prize at all is 1 in 12.4. Set For Life tickets costs £1.50 per line, and the draw takes place every Monday and Thursday. How to increase your chances of winning the lottery The odds of picking a winning lottery ticket are pretty slim but there are some ways to improve your chances . Games with small jackpots tend to have better odds, so it's worth taking notice of the difference. For example, EuroMillions is harder to win than UK Lotto. Some lotteries may have bonus numbers or other features which could improve someone's chance of winning. Looking at these additional elements and understanding them can help someone make a more informed decision when choosing their numbers. Each lottery draw is random and balls have the same chance of being drawn. However, there are some balls that statistically have appeared more often than others which could make them seem a better bet. For example, previous research has showed that number 38 was most common, 23 was second most drawn, followed by 31, 11, 45 and 25. There is another easy way of getting more tickets at the same cost and that is by joining a syndicate. Of course, you share the winnings, but the chances of matching the numbers drawn are vastly improved. Thunderball The top prize on Thunderball is £500,000, and you have a one in eight million chance of being the lucky winner. However, the odds of winning any prize at all on Thunderball are just one in 13. Thunderball draws take place five times a week, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, and you can pick up tickets for as little as £1. National Lottery A lotto ticket costs £2 (up from £1 when the game launched) and sees players select six numbers between one and 59 as well as a bonus ball. Customers have the choice of selecting a lucky dip to determine their pick or choosing their own numbers, with some sticking loyal to the same selection every week. To win the Lotto jackpot players must match the six main numbers in the draw. The odds of winning the Lotto jackpot are currently around 45million to one. However, the odds of winning any prize at all on the National Lottery are one in 54. Euromillions A ticket for the EuroMillions will cost you £2.50, with players selecting five main numbers between one and 50 as well as two lucky stars, between one and 12. The draw is open to players across Europe and has a huge jackpot prize. Accordingly, the odds of winning the EuroMillions, which is drawn every Tuesday and Friday, are much lower than Lotto at one in 139million. However, the chance of winning any prize is just one in 13.
BBC News
41 minutes ago
- BBC News
Free school uniform on offer all year at Devon charity
A Devon recycling charity is offering free school uniform items from its branches shop in Tiverton is the latest to be giving away items in an effort to reduce the cost of living for its manager Figgy Chambers said people were "really appreciative", adding: "Uniform is really expensive to buy these days, and it's difficult to find it mid-year, so we have decided to offer it all year round so people can come and get a cardigan or something". The shop said all children's toys, books, DVDs and clothes were also available free of charge to help families with the cost of the summer holidays. A similar uniform scheme started in Refurnish South Molton five years ago, and staff at the Tiverton branch thought it was such a good idea that they would follow suit, and customers were really Isla came in with her mother to get new finding out she could get them for free, she said: "We came back and grabbed some more things like pencils and pens, and a hairband, and two teddies and a toy for my little sister."
