I can’t help thinking that when, in future, people ask what UK political leaders said as it became undeniable that US saw European liberal democracy as its no1 strategic foe, Starmer and others will regret that the answer is “not much, shuffled awkwardly, looked at their feet”.

'Skull of St. Thomas Aquinas being transported to Fossanova Abbey.' Photograph by Daniel Ibanez

Adverts for Valium from a 1971 Graphis magazine feature on La Roche pharmaceutical company’s advertising campaigns

Suggested this to coughing relatives with disappointing results

The bones of Santa have been leaking liquid for 1,700 years.

Decision in the Sandie Peggie case. She was not directly or indirectly discriminated against, her claim of victimisation fails entirely, her claim of harassment fails largely and her claim against Beth Upton fails entirely. www.judiciary.uk/judgments/sa...

Thames looked floody today, so close to the Millennium bridge you could hear it gurgling

Martin Parr (1952-2025). Disparition d’un photographe extraordinaire : celui des gens ordinaires et des bords de mer. 🖤

Car le running, c'est épuisant ! #Photography #Dog

Scotland drawn against Brazil again. What were the chances

According to French media reports the 🇫🇷 navy last night shot down five drones flying over the Ile Longue, in Brittany, home to France’s SNLE nuclear-armed submarines, the naval component of France’s nuclear deterrent

Nearly missed my flight due to Ryanair helpfully sending me a push notification to go to gate 25, instead of gate 4 at the other end of the airport

Quite breathtaking story - military grade drones at Dublin airport which flew on the path Zelensky's plane took. The drones reached the flight path of his plane exactly the time it should have been there, but just missed it because Zelensky arrived ahead of schedule:

Buccleuch Street channelling the 1900s this morning

Charity shop playing a jolly C&W number 'Hang me, oh hang me'

Lost toy elephant 🐘 Crystal Palace Station platform 2.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Overseas students drop by 52%

The BBC doing a story about a cut down tree framed by two cut down trees. (For balance)

So in love with this BBC archive report from Nationwide. It’s called supernatural hat maker’s fantasy world, it’s like a little giallo written by Beryl Bainbridge, every frame looks like this, how you could you fail to be smitten? youtu.be/2u-K7sM-xgk?...

'Santa's key worker was discovered on the dunes of Formby beach using thermal binoculars' - Buddy quite a tech savvy reindeer, probably part of his job

One of mum's neighbours is walking her dog with an anorak over her nightie, bare legs. I might have to wear two pairs of trousers inside. Must have gone soft in the south

Strains of Bela Lugosi's Dead from the High Street over the choir in St Giles. Uber Gothic

I just don't need to know what the Telegraph has written about Dungeons & Dragons. It's a newspaper for people who are frightened of samosas.

Just been told a pair of trousers are unisexual but they're not that hot

“Woman-loving”.

After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is a bleak book - it seemed romantic when I read it in my twenties

Every case study like this should be balanced by one such as a 15-year-old with suicidal ideation unable to receive any help because CAMHS has been cut to virtual non-existence.

Eat your heart out Schrödinger

Autocorrect changed Mozart mass to massive. My new name for Morningside

‘It had partially severed a nerve in my spinal cord and missed my aorta by about a centimetre. When a doctor told me I’d come close to dying, and that the play had to stop using real knives, I remember thinking: “You just don’t understand theatre.”

Truth coming out of her cup o’noodles to shame mankind

I'm going with either the Ark of the Covenant or a Betamax VCR.

In the Cycle Shop waiting for my fixed bike. A lady walks in with a puppy Jack Russell, which gets free and runs about; she sniffs me, darts away, back to sniff, retreats again. “Don’t be silly Molly. He’s a nice man. A safe man. Look..I’m stroking him” And this stranger starts stroking my jumper.

Sitting in the emergency exit on the flight - so close to the crew that I got whacked round the head by the stewardess's dreadlocks

I know of a social worker who was suspended for using that word in 1985

BREAKING: At least 36 people killed, 279 missing after fire rips through apartment buildings in Hong Kong, official says

the detail in the story is somehow even worse than the headline suggests www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

This is exactly what the recent Trump-BBC 'scandal' was designed to achieve. The BBC is now self-censoring criticisms of Trump in the name of "impartiality"

What the actual fuck is going on?

jesus honly christ

Udo Kier 💔

Udo Kier - cinema’s fallen angel and an embodiment of the screen’s delicious power to corrupt - is gone. "I would live like the hero of Huysman's A Rebours,” he once told me. “Have no clocks, and hire two nuns to go by my window and pray at 12 o'clock each day."

Sound of penny dropping at the BBC www.theguardian.com/media/2025/n...

Is there a good language teaching app? Duolingo insisting that I'm saying café wrong unless I'm practically doing a Kenneth Williams camp version is driving me mad

There is no way to win 😪 www.bbc.com/news/article...

*lashes self to mast*

A few months ago @thelocal.to got a promising pitch from a writer with bylines in whole bunch of reputable publications—The Cut, The Guardian, Dwell, Architectural Digest, etc. Then I started investigating. Here's a story about fabulists in journalism's AI slop era. thelocal.to/investigatin...

type for books used to be set using little metal letters built into words in racks and then inked and pressed on to paper. If you had stock phrases you wanted to reuse a lot you could make a cast of them called a ‘stereotype’. The sound of them *clicking* into place, in French, is ‘cliché’

The word SNEEZE used to be FNESE, as in "He speketh in his nose And fneseth faste" (Canterbury Tales) FNESE faded out in the 15thC, superseded by NESE/NEEZE. Then an s- was added, maybe to strengthen it or to align with other nose-related sn- words Anyway I think we should bring FNESE back