I would like to declare that this account is an absolute delight and should certainly have more followers.

We went here for a week in the last year of primary school and pretended to be celts. Including plucking fish off of hooks hanging over a tarn, bacon off the back of a wooden pig, grinding our own grain and spinning our own wool. My lifetime adoration of youth hostels began here in the late eighties

One of my most whimsical Dream Burnham plans is an exchange scheme where folks get to go and live for a week in a town or city that isn't their own in a region they didn't grown up in and get a trophy or award if they tick off five from the list. British born people generally don't travel enough

The intensity of the passion and conviction in a straight man's contortions to do anything but carry a basket in Lidl

A prickly line of sweat covers enthusiast's forehead as the realization hits him that the same government him and his now dead neighbor voted for and backed and talked of on cream porches have tricked him into their war #fallfriday youtu.be/1DXBR3oxlr0?...

I really quite like the idea of trying to change government being thought of as a place to being thought of as a function.

When people ask me if I have any good stories from when I used to interview rock stars for a living my mind often goes a bit blank, and to be honest a lot of it was quite ordinary and unremarkable, but on the other hand there is this.

I keep thinking about the way that mobile phones have been assigned some kind of special malign power in the common imagination that no other technology has to deform children's minds; thus distracting from the fact that governments are too scared to treat tech bros as the selfish children they are

Social media was the first and only place I saw trans joy and knew a world was possible for myself beyond the narratives shown in police procedurals.

It's just occurred to that stuff we do as teens has a huge effect on how our lives turn out. I'm really interested in what folks did in their teens who are now in their thirties, who had adolescences that fell in the post financial crisis world in the time of cuts.

Found a telly in the street then immediately had a aura migraine. So swings and roundabouts really.

I'm really fascinated by the question of whether the musical taste of politicians ever makes it into the style or substance of the policy decisions they make. I know that the music I love (and will love in future) hugely shapes and shaped my orientation to the world but what of politicians?

Really pleased that we got our four monthly newspapers off to print this week and got them back from the printers and out on the streets in the week of pavement cracking heat. An amazing performance from the team

A tune, this one

Preparing to say goodbye to the mighty BBC Radio 4 Long Wave broadcast. The first service began 101 years ago. The transmitters at Droitwich, Westerglen and Burghead will be switched off at 0100 BST on Saturday. The 200 metre long AM signal at 198 Khz goes right through you and sounds fabulous!

I like having a Mayor that is prepared to say 'no, air pollution is not good, actually' in the face of people who love to say it somehow is.

God bless the cold winds and its refreshing consequence #fallfriday youtu.be/PMNmPrX8984?...

Thinking about Boards of Canada: has anyone ever put together a really good album of actual examples of that VHS burble / seventies and eighties 'sort of electronic stuff that was never intended for listening outside of soundtracking something else' music?

Father and Son off of the new Boards of Canada album sounds, in the best possible way, like one of those versions of Steamed Hams

The horror of climate change is what was once livable becomes unlivable. Humans have a narrow goldilocks zone in which life is viable. We have technology and built environment to expand that band, but climate change will make that insufficient or the wrong type of technology and built environment

All of this 'why don't brits get window AC' stuff reminds me of when non brits have to draw comics set in the UK and always make the buildings too tall, the rooms too big, the streets too wide, the pubs like bars and the dimensions of the built environment all wrong. Not everywhere is the same place

I spent the summer of 1976 at my Aunt Meg's cottage on the surface of the Sun, where me and my dog uncovered a gang of smugglers and were rewarded with a Chopper bike with asbestos wheels. That just wouldn't happen now.

This is worth your time

My low stakes conspiracy theory: much of modern music is mixed for playing loud on speakers on phones and bluetooth speakers by reverting to being mixed for mono and bass because many folks in music industry have progressive hearing loss and tinnitus and songs that hit just happen to fit the tech

I know there's a million reasons why this man is a solid gold shit, but this is another one. There's always some cock in a suit who wants to bring back institutionalisation for cost reasons and they are always doing so because they are a solid gold shit.

I keep thinking that everyone (including me) has lots of great ideas about how not to do UK government but fewer concrete ideas about how to do UK government. As you'll have noticed, this isn't 1997 and things have changed a bit. So, what does 2026 need?

Genuinely think it'll need a high profile politician to do a McAlpine and mass-sue hundreds of people for posting or sharing outright libellous allegations. Would be unwise for Burnham but might make sense for Sadiq Khan, who's politically secure and whose haters tend to be outside London.

What a weird week. The heat makes everything feel weird and wrong, much the same as it did in the weeks running up to the 2016 EU referendum. My thoughts as much as they stand on the Starmer version of Labour is that it was a government outwardly still fighting the last election, not the next one

As the conditions no longer exist to fully cement any one idea in the collective mind of British people there will only be one hot summer that ever happened (1976) and it will be 'lovely' and 'no one complained' until global warming submerge every single Waitrose and Iceland in the land and beyond

I feel like modern superheroes do not do enough vaulting. Vaulting seemed to be a really big marvel thing. Kirby often vaulting. I wonder if the physical presence of superheroes ie how they use space and objects has changed as more moving images of said heroes fed back as visual reference

This is fascinating. AI has not overcome the laws of physics and computing power and now people are getting pissed that the supposed 'free work doe-er' is in fact quite an expensive work do-er because someone has to be paying for all of that computing in the end.

Smashed three car windows already to save dogs from the heat. Haven’t found any yet but I’m not giving up.

Back on the other site, years ago, there was a thread about the most pretentious thing people had ever overheard. Someone said they witnessed a guy at an ice cream van asking for 'two Magna'.

May be heat fevered, but imagining Andy Burnham on a Blues Brothers style road trip to get the New Labour band together. Song and dance numbers in think tank foyers, ecstatic dancing in the commons tea room.

It's all gone a bit Ballard. Might bunk off work and create ever more intricate patterns out of rocks and pebbles on a parched football pitch before setting up some kind of perpetual motion machine in the stained green bottom of a derelict dry lido. Day, hour, year all one, sleep wakefulness same

Good piece on the extremely poor building design of the last two decades. As noted recent changes to building regs have changed this

I’m obsessed with this, back in 2015 a junior person could reliably get a story in front of a genuinely mass audience very quickly. (Brexit negotiations were massively shaped by the existence of linear Twitter, in a very bad way.) Now audiences might just encounter it as “news” a month later.

I did always think that any incoming labour government would be monstered form day one in a way no previous Labour government ever had. I did not think that that government would build a policy platform on trying to make the monstering go away by giving into it and fawning in the hope it would stop

Nothing beats the total joy someone who likes shouting exhibits as the weather get really hot and they get settled in for a good solid couple of hours of shouting

I took Set Piece on my first ever trip abroad to Australia and lay on a bed in a rented apartment listening to the alien to me sound of Australian crow calls and cried my eyes out at Ace's departure.

This is a great little piece on what LLMs are and what they aren't and how so many AI magicians come to believe that there really is no rabbit in the hat until they wave their wand and it appears.

Kind of feel that the worst prime minister is usually the current one for the general public but that politicians have more detailed political memories but also different judging criteria. It must sting to get a a high score from both groups.

I think that people do have visions and intentions for what they do in politics, even if what they do is really unpopular with us, the public, and their colleagues in their party. The wrong vision is still a vision.

Starting a petition to demand that when commentators talk about the number of British prime ministers since 2010 they have to point out a) they were changed for difference reasons and b) that sometimes those reasons were not exactly synonymous with the will of the British people

I reckon: minimum legal tree density per square kilometer in towns & cities, incentives for people with gardens to plant trees to meet density, more acceptance that hot weather in transit to work constitutes grounds to work remotely, aircon as publicly funded health intervention for vulnerable folk

As the conditions no longer exist to fully cement any one idea in the collective mind of British people there will only be one hot summer that ever happened (1976) and it will be 'lovely' and 'no one complained' until global warming submerge every single Waitrose and Iceland in the land and beyond

Give everyone in the country regardless of age a free theatre ticket, good for one performance in the next three years. Reimburse the theatre when the ticket is used.

Just saw a hedgehog in the garden! Such a snuffly snout and little black pin head eyes! I had been saying for a while that seeing a hedgehog was the next thing I dreamed of in my little urban nature drama and then there one was.

As was foretold: