logo
Tributes paid to 'inspirational' scout leader and hike organiser

Tributes paid to 'inspirational' scout leader and hike organiser

BBC News3 days ago

Tributes have been paid to a scout leader, hike chairman and community volunteer who "inspired generations".Terry Davies was chairman of the Longmynd Hike and Group Lead Volunteer at 2nd Longmynd Scout group in Church Stretton.He had been awarded the Silver Wolf, the highest honour in scouting, and was invited to Windsor Castle in recognition of his 50 years' service.He passed away at the age of 71, leaving behind his wife Angie and her two children, Jennifer and Geoffrey.
The flag was flown at half mast at St Lawrence CE Primary school, in Preston Upon the Weald Moors, where Mr Davies volunteered, taking children on outdoor activities.A social running group he started held a minute's noise in celebration of his life.Mr Davies lived in Church Stretton all his life and worked as a local butcher before he retired.His father, George Davies, founded the Longmynd Hike and Terry was passionate about continuing the 50-miles in 24-hours challenge.A legendary fell runner, he ran the hike twice, back-to-back, to celebrate the event's 40th anniversary in 2007.
Nickie Phillips, Shropshire Borders Scouts district lead volunteer said he was a "respected and much-loved figure" and that he "gave tirelessly, always with quiet strength and a generous spirit".He was awarded the Silver Wolf for his "exceptional service and lifelong commitment to scouting" and she said it was "a moment of great pride and richly deserved recognition for someone who embodied the very heart of what scouting stands for".Ms Phillips said Mr Davies was a man who had "inspired generations of young people with his kindness, wisdom, and deep sense of duty". She said he did everything with "grace and humility" and left a legacy of "service, friendship, and profound impact"."Terry has Gone Home, but the values he lived and the lives he shaped will carry forward for many years to come," she said.Terry's wife Angie said: "I have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of love for Terry. He was renowned for his tireless community work, generosity and kindness."He was a friend to all and was never happier than when he was surrounded by children inspiring and encouraging them to achieve their potential."
Follow BBC Shropshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

My jealous husband always assumed I was cheating… so I eventually slept with my boss
My jealous husband always assumed I was cheating… so I eventually slept with my boss

The Sun

timean hour ago

  • The Sun

My jealous husband always assumed I was cheating… so I eventually slept with my boss

DEAR DEIDRE: MY jealous husband always assumed I was sleeping with other men. So eventually, I did. I'm 34, my husband is 43. We met through friends 12 years ago. It was love at first sight for him. I wasn't so blown away but he eventually persuaded me to go on a date. That date lasted a whole weekend. We barely left the bedroom and married a year later. Within a few months of the wedding, he started questioning where I was going. He put tracking apps on my phone and I caught him checking my car's mileometer when I'd been away to see my mum. He also stalked my social media, double-checking my locations and zooming in on people in the background of my photos. His first wife had cheated on him and he feared history would repeat itself. I tried to reassure him but it never worked. He'd be secure for a while then something tiny — like the sound of my text notification — would set him off. When our youngest child was five, I was so tired of my husband breathing down my neck that I went back to work. My new manager was gorgeous. He was the same age as me, single, and we had lively banter. I was keen to get ahead and not keen to go home, so I often stayed beyond my hours. One evening, my husband rang me 15 times to check if I was really at work. Hearing all the calls, my manager came to check I was OK — and we ended up on the sofa in his office. As his mouth moved over my body, the only thought in my mind was, 'My husband thinks I'm doing this, so I might as well.' I do feel guilty but I can't confess. So, what should I do? Call both relationships off? DEIDRE SAYS: There is a third option. You and your husband could work on his jealousy and try to overcome it for good. Unfortunately, his doubts and untrusting treatment has prompted the very behaviour he was so threatened by. As you've discovered, the more that you try to explain yourself, the more that your husband will believe his worries are justified. I'm sending you my support pack Dealing With Jealousy as a starting point. Read it together and decide between you what changes you can put in place. But you'll need more help. Counselling could work wonders here. It would be good if you can go either alone or together to discuss how his jealous and insecure attitude is driving you away. My support pack How Counselling Can Help explains how you can find a reputable therapist. BROKEN BY MY WICKED STEPMUM DEAR DEIDRE: FOR me, life is like the Cinderella fairytale – without the happy ending. When I was three, my mother died giving birth to my sister. My father quickly married another woman. She really was an evil stepmother – we were physically and emotionally abused from the start. This woman begrudged my father spending money on us, so we wore hand-me-down clothes or shoes that were painfully tight. Her own son was treated like a prince and got everything he wanted. I left home as soon as I could and brought my sister to live with me when she left school. But the abuse didn't stop. My stepmother guilted me into sending money. At first it was small monthly amounts but she soon started demanding large sums that I could barely afford. She'd blow that money on flash holidays. I kept up a brave face for my sister's sake – but last year she died in an accident and I can no longer cope. My stepmother did nothing towards the funeral. I organised everything. At the wake, my dad stood up and made an unexpected speech. He said he wanted to thank the woman who had arranged the ceremony. I thought he was finally acknowledging me – but he was talking about my stepmum. Now I'm 25 and broken. I don't know if I'll get over my sister's death and my horrific childhood. Can you help? DEIDRE SAYS: You have been through a very tough time and the death of your sister must have made you feel even more isolated. It's not too late to get support in coming to terms with your grief. The Compassionate Friends ( 0345 123 2304) could help. The charity also has a leaflet specifically about losing a sibling. It sounds like your stepmother has made you into the 'black sheep' of the family. She has focused any negativity and ill-feeling on to you in order to deflect it away from herself. This allows her to feel blameless and is a way for her to strengthen her hold on others. To better understand this toxic dynamic, read the book Families And How to Survive Them by Dr Robin Skynner and John Cleese, published by Vermilion. Surround yourself with people who make you feel good. You can't choose your family but you can choose who you want in your life. Don't be afraid to cut ties. Family is important but your health is your priority. LEFT HEARTBROKEN AFTER SEX DEAR DEIDRE: SINCE we stopped the 'benefits', I haven't seen my friend-with-benefits for dust. We're both lesbians. I'm 32, she's 28. We started dating casually a few months ago but I completely fell for her. She kept dating others and eventually met someone at work that she really liked. I still believed we'd end up together so I wasn't too worried, especially as we kept having sex. But the sex fizzled out and now I hardly hear from her at all. I'm heartbroken. We had always promised that we'd stay friends whatever happened. Was that unrealistic? DEIDRE SAYS: Are you upset to lose her as a friend? Or were you secretly trying to keep the door to a relationship open? That might explain why you feel heartbroken. She has moved on and, as hard as that might be to accept, the best thing you can do is to focus on yourself again now. I'm sending you my support pack called Moving On which has lots of advice on building a positive, happy life. SEX CLINIC DEAR DEIDRE: IS it normal to lose your sex drive after having a baby? I'm 35 and my husband is 37. We've been married for five years and had our longed-for baby son four months ago. But ever since, I have no libido at all. I shudder when my husband comes near me. It's starting to affect our relationship. The path to motherhood has been very traumatic for me. I had four miscarriages before my son. I also lost a baby girl at 35 weeks with my ex which was devastating. I struggled to recover from it, which is one of the reasons that relationship broke down. I feel I should be happy now I'm finally a mum. My husband is already a kind, helpful father. But when he tries to get close to me in bed, it's like I totally shut down. I really can't stand him touching me. Before the baby, we had a great sex life. I'd love us to get back to that. Is it possible? DEIDRE SAYS: It's very common for a woman to lose her sex drive after having a baby. Research suggests that only a third of couples resume sex within two months of birth – most couples take three to five months. It's even more common when you have experienced loss or trauma in the past. Even though you've now had your baby son, it would still help to talk to someone about your miscarriages, especially the emotional toll they've taken. The Miscarriage Association ( has a live chat service and a telephone helpline. There's no reason why you won't get back to enjoying a fulfilling sex life with your husband. I'm sending you my support pack called Sex Problems After A Baby. It goes through all the reasons why you might be experiencing libido loss – from tiredness, to stress, through to hormonal changes – and offers solutions and tips. The best way to get through this time is to take things very slowly together. Make sure you keep talking and cuddling to maintain a strong emotional connection. SHE WANTS TO DUMP ME DEAR DEIDRE: I'VE found out my girlfriend has been asking her friends if she should dump me. That's not a good sign, is it? We met at college and have been official for a year. Everything is great, except I have a temper and sometimes say things in the heat of the moment. We had a huge row last weekend then, this week, she showed me something on her phone and a message flashed up from her group chat. I read the whole thread. She'd told her friends the angry things I'd said during our row and asked if she should dump me. Most of them said she should. DEIDRE SAYS: Many people seek outside advice about relationship problems – like you're doing now. It's a positive sign because she's clearly still attached. Learn to manage your anger. We all get heated but it's never an excuse to lash out. It could be classed as emotional abuse. I'm sending you my support pack on Managing Anger. Focus on that, otherwise this pattern will continue into your future relationships.

At 21, Madison Griffiths dated her university tutor. It was legal, consensual – and a messy grey area
At 21, Madison Griffiths dated her university tutor. It was legal, consensual – and a messy grey area

The Guardian

timean hour ago

  • The Guardian

At 21, Madison Griffiths dated her university tutor. It was legal, consensual – and a messy grey area

At the tail end of 2023, author Madison Griffiths posed a question on her Instagram: 'Has anyone here ever been in a relationship with a professor or a tutor?' Hundreds of responses flooded in. There were those who revealed that their parents had met, many decades prior, in the lecture hall. Younger women reported they'd recently been involved with a university superior. Their experiences were diverse, but what united those who messaged her was gender: no men came forward to say they had been in relationships with a professor or tutor. In Griffiths's inbox, at least, it was all women. For Griffiths, the question had been a personally motivated one. When she was 21, about 18 months after she'd been in his class, she asked a university tutor she had a crush on out for a drink, attracted by his intelligence and charm. They started dating and spent the next five years in an on-and-off relationship, Griffiths changing her university major to avoid winding up in his class again. They were only separated by a handful of years in age but in the time since their breakup, Griffiths found the afterlife of that romance 'convoluted and complex in a way that I hadn't encountered in other relationships'. 'From 19 years old, my dynamic with him was one where I put him on a pedestal and I wanted him to really 'see me'… and I think that had everything to do with the implicit power imbalance that operated right from the get-go,' Griffiths says. 'It wasn't until the relationship's fallout that I started reflecting on these things.' The conversations she had as a result of that Instagram post snowballed into something bigger. Both Griffiths's own experience and that of four of the women who reached out after her Instagram call-out would form the basis of a new book, Sweet Nothings, which explores the ethics and mechanics of 'pedagogical relationships': those between student and teacher, and a phenomenon Griffiths regards as highly gendered. Griffiths spent a year speaking to her four case studies, women now in their 30s and 40s who had 'lived lives well and truly outside of these relationships' and were now able to reflect on what had been. She readily admits that she was probably subconsciously 'looking for women that reminded me somewhat of myself, or could help me make sense of my own [experience]'. In her quest to understand these dynamics, Griffiths also spoke to male professors and tutors who had slept with a student – but not the ones who'd had relationships with her four subjects, to protect their anonymity. (Her subjects are also given pseudonyms and minor elements of their stories, like placenames, were fictionalised to obscure them.) Sweet Nothings is being published into a cultural moment that feels perhaps ready to begin reckoning with professor-student relationships. It arrives just ahead of A24's Sundance winner Sorry, Baby, about one woman's residual trauma from such a relationship, and not long after both New Yorker fiction and Diana Reid's bestselling novel Love & Virtue on the same topic. Perhaps most importantly, it comes in the long shadow of the #MeToo movement, as the conversation has expanded, sometimes uncertainly, to consensual relationships that feel not-quite-right – and what, exactly, in the arena of sex deserves our condemnation. Griffiths focused specifically on relationships that happened at university, where both parties were adults, and no abuse involving minors or high school students. What makes these relationships interesting to Griffiths is the grey area they operate in. Sex between a student and a professor is not against the law and, in many cases, not even expressly against university policy – yet these relationships can leave a lifelong mark on the women who enter them. 'I was particularly interested in sex that was 'problematic' but not necessarily 'bad',' Griffiths says. 'Every woman I spoke to was of the age of consent – [but] well and truly nursing a unique harm. The women that I was in conversation with didn't necessarily feel as if something completely, egregiously untoward took place within the framework of consent. It was something else entirely.' What unfurls in Sweet Nothings is an examination of the way men in positions of authority can appeal to women when they are younger, at a moment in their lives when they perhaps feel that youth and beauty afford them a power of its own. Instead of flat condemnations, Griffiths wanted to highlight the agency a lot of these women had in procuring these relationships and explore their own desires. But she found that some men appeared over time, as one character notes, 'vile, dull and obvious' for using their sway in the classroom to get with women, sometimes many years their junior, who wouldn't look twice at them in a pub. A complicated shame and anger often bloomed as women looked back on these relationships in the rear-view mirror, their memories of university forever soured. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Two of her subjects had seen their former professor or tutor go on to date other students after their own breakup. The revelation that they may have been part of a kink, 'as opposed to necessarily someone who met the love of their life in the wrong outfit, in the wrong place, in the wrong time, did quite severe harm to these individuals' sense of self,' Griffiths says. So too did realising that a man they once idolised, who has a mastery of the field they aspire to work in, had made their relationship about sex when perhaps what they were really craving was to be told they could 'be him one day'. It perhaps won't surprise you to hear that Lisa Taddeo's Three Women, the 2019 bestseller about the sex lives of three real American women (including one who, at age 17, had a sexual relationship with her high school teacher), was an inspiration for Griffiths. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion But another book looms much larger: Helen Garner's The First Stone, mentioned directly in Sweet Nothings as a book Griffiths finds both compelling and aggravating. Garner's 1995 account of two University of Melbourne students who accused a residential college master of sexual assault has been critically re-evaluated in recent years for its often-scathing cynicism towards its female subjects. Garner herself had an affair with an older tutor while at university, she revealed in The First Stone – but didn't view it as an abuse of power, and regarded the young women's decision to lodge a complaint with police over being groped as a 'heartbreaking' overreaction and affront to feminist ideals. Griffiths read Garner's book twice while writing her manuscript, determined to do her own differently. Garner didn't interview the women involved in the case for The First Stone – they had declined her interview requests – and Griffiths found the absence of their voices distracting. She very deliberately made her female subjects the centre of her story and is happy to be writing in an era when 'we can speak in less sweeping terms' about gender and consent. 'I think older generations have a very cartoonish view of an assailant and his prey,' she laughs. But even 30 years on from The First Stone, Griffiths found she and her subjects still brushed up against an attitude of, as she puts it, 'Well, what did she get out of it?' Despite typically being in only their late teens or early 20s, Griffiths found that uni students are seen as capable and headstrong, and therefore unable to be victimised like a high school student who is just a couple years younger than them. That disregard for uni students, paired with the innate respect professors enjoy, has muddied understandings of power and allowed men at universities to do what they like. 'There is certainly a class dimension to all of this,' Griffiths says. 'I think professors are held to high esteem and are able to operate in [this] way throughout a cultural understanding of them as quite esoteric, niche, unconventional genius. Genius men throughout history have gotten away with a lot.' Sure enough, while two of the four women featured in Sweet Nothings filed complaints against the men they had relationships with, there have been no repercussions for any of the men. There are rules around student-teacher relationships at most Australian universities, Griffiths says, but 'they are open to interpretation'. At many universities, guidelines only apply to relationships between teaching staff and their current students; for Griffiths and two of her subjects, the relationship began after they were in the same classroom. The order of events didn't change the power dynamic. 'One thing that I found was the origin story of all of these relationships, having once met in the classroom, pervaded the relationships at their core. It never went away,' Griffiths says. The women she spoke to remained eager to impress or prove themselves to their former teachers, forever affording them the upper hand. For Griffiths, now aged 31, that has proven true. 'I guess at the core of my almost childish want with him was to be taken seriously,' she says. 'I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a shadow of that in my relationship to my work more broadly.' She hopes that if her former tutor reads her book, he will see that she is able to look at their relationship academically now – 'with the fine-tooth comb that perhaps he didn't teach me'. Sweet Nothings is out now ($36.99)

Lottery results and numbers: Lotto and Thunderball draw tonight, June 28, 2025
Lottery results and numbers: Lotto and Thunderball draw tonight, June 28, 2025

The Sun

timean hour ago

  • The Sun

Lottery results and numbers: Lotto and Thunderball draw tonight, June 28, 2025

THE NATIONAL Lottery results are in and it's time to find out who has won a life-changing amount of money tonight (June 28, 2025). Could tonight's £7million jackpot see you handing in your notice, jetting off to the Bahamas or driving a new Porsche off a garage forecourt? 3 3 You can find out by checking your ticket against tonight's numbers below. Good luck! Tonight's National Lottery Lotto winning numbers are: 16, 17, 22, 38, 40, 47 and the Bonus Ball is 04. Tonight's National Lottery Thunderball winning numbers are: 01, 04, 09, 10, 11 and the Thunderball is 02. The first National Lottery draw was held on November 19 1994 when seven winners shared a jackpot of £5,874,778. The largest amount ever to be won by a single ticket holder was £42million, won in 1996. Gareth Bull, a 49-year-old builder, won £41million in November, 2020 and ended up knocking down his bungalow to make way for a luxury manor house with a pool. TOP 5 BIGGEST LOTTERY WINS ACROSS THE WORLD £1.308 billion (Powerball) on January 13 2016 in the US, for which three winning tickets were sold, remains history's biggest lottery prize £1.267 billion (Mega Million) a winner from South Carolina took their time to come forward to claim their prize in March 2019 not long before the April deadline £633.76 million (Powerball draw) from a winner from Wisconsin £625.76 million (Powerball) Mavis L. Wanczyk of Chicopee, Massachusetts claimed the jackpot in August 2017 £575.53 million (Powerball) A lucky pair of winners scooped the jackpot in Iowa and New York in October 2018 Sue Davies, 64, bought a lottery ticket to celebrate ending five months of shielding during the pandemic — and won £500,000. Sandra Devine, 36, accidentally won £300k - she intended to buy her usual £100 National Lottery Scratchcard, but came home with a much bigger prize. The biggest jackpot ever to be up for grabs was £66million in January last year, which was won by two lucky ticket holders. Another winner, Karl managed to bag £11million aged just 23 in 1996. The odds of winning the lottery are estimated to be about one in 14million - BUT you've got to be in it to win it. 3

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store