Plastic flowers and foliage picked up from Cornish beaches.

Bluesky’s really fun, I think you’d like it.

Saw this on someone’s account the other day. What ridiculous babying nonsense. “Without constructive purpose” my arse.

House prices have gone up in the French town of Sauté since it's become gentlyfried.

What a mess #stupidgame Connections Puzzle #879 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟦🟦🟪🟦 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟦🟪🟦🟦 🟦🟦🟪🟦 🟦🟪🟦🟦

When my mother died, the undertaker asked my sister if she wanted to bury her in the same coffin as our father. Panic ensued.

I enjoyed this incident, related by Kingsley Amis, of Enoch Powell being a dick at a dinner party.

At school we had a teach that would use the most ‘Allo ‘Allo French accent imaginable to refer to “Agincourt”, “Trafalgar” and “Waterloo” and would consistently correct anyone who tried to just say it in the way everyone else did.

Great thread! I had an extern examiner grill me in a med oral exam for saying "Chest X-Ray" and not a "Chest Radiograph" An Xray being the electromagnetic radiation and the radiograph being the image, apparently. I've never called it a radiograph before or since!

Fireworks are only good when there’s an error with the timing at a big display and they all go off in 11 seconds.

See also Elon's Megacity of Misinformation. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

Hubris meets nemesis. The best episode of Grand Designs ever. Best line, when discussing how to deal with toilet effluent in an upside-down building: “We’re going to have hundreds of shuttle cars running back and forth, picking up the sewage on retractable bridges.”

The haters said they couldn't do it. And they were right. Honestly, great call from the haters.

3 more prisoners released from prism by mistake

if you don’t spend several hours a day on your phone you’ll miss all the Crap and Bullshit

Stop the clock! I’ve found the clue!

Congratulations to @cdrose.bsky.social, winer of this year's Goldsmith Prize for 'We Live Here Now' publsighed by Melville House Press. Good work Chris!

So with Helen Garner winning the Baillie Gifford Prize, and C.D. Rose winning the Goldsmiths Prize, that’s two great results in two days. Pressure’s on for next Monday, Booker judges…

Good time to read Patrick McGuinness’s novel Throw Me to the Wolves, inspired by the case.

A bouquet of congratulations to C.D. Rose, a very deserving winner of the @goldsmithsprize.bsky.social for his brilliant, funny, inventive, cynical, enthralling, disorienting novel We Live Here Now. 👇

A great day for the golden rule of political analysis: when the right wins it is a resounding ideological victory that humiliates the left and when the left wins it is a precarious fluke that will surely end up humiliating the left. Conservatives are power’s landlords and the left merely tenants

The signature of Guy Fawkes before and after purchasing the Etsy calligraphy gift set

What in the Temu gold stencilling kit is this?

i closed out my column this week with this preemptive jab at basically every commentator currently looking for ways to say that last night didn’t count

I temporarily pause my objection to advent calendars that provide a reward on day 25 in light of the promise made by this M&S one. (Cc @joshspero.ft.com)

Thinking back to this old tweet, where many of the 90 replies were people helpfully translating or summarising the article.

is this good

The waiting is nearly over! Our judges - Mark Haddon, Megan Nolan, @simonokotie.bsky.social, and @asack.bsky.social - have read, deliberated and decided. Winner announcement TONIGHT around 7.30pm🔥

"I have four words for you: turn off motion smoothing"

Am I the only one confused over what Mamdani meant when he told Donald Trump to "turn the volume up"? Is that in an Iain Duncan Smith "the quiet man is here to stay and he is turning up the volume" way?

Hearty congratulations to Helen Garner who has won the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction with her collected diaries, How to End a Story. A glorious book - confession, analysis, memory store, comedy - which shows all the things words can do: often on the same page. AND it’s mega good value.

Interesting piece today in @londoncentric.media on veterans' non-charity We R Blighty. But it fails to address the key question: why hasn't the regulator for logo design cracked down on this outrage? open.substack.com/pub/londonce...

Turning this off. i thought this was supposed to be about an escape from alcatraz..

Does John Irving's companion novel to The Cider House Rules, stand up to its predecessor? Alas, it does not, with a lot of Irving tropes - small men and big women; Vietnam and Vienna; wrestling, prostitutes and missing body parts - along the way. Me on Queen Esther:

My grandfather on mum's side worked in a variety of different industries in his lifetime. Some of what he did during WWII was secret. We think he worked in plastics. He always insisted on pronouncing Vi-Nil as Vinn-ile. Of course if vinyl came from nylon, he was right.

Hearty congratulations to Helen Garner who has won the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction with her collected diaries, How to End a Story. A glorious book - confession, analysis, memory store, comedy - which shows all the things words can do: often on the same page. AND it’s mega good value.

I had to cover a reception at the Kandahar Club, the British ski club out in Switzerland. Every time I mentioned the name of their organisation, I got pointedly corrected. It's neither KANDA-har nor Kanda-HAR, but a sort of synthesis of the two that only the elect know how to pronounce.

Peter Hall was directing Coriolanus at The National in the 70s and insisted it was pronounced Co-Rye-Olanus instead of the usual Corrio-lanus. Two cockney stagehands were overheard moving some bits of set and one said "Let's just leave it in the co-rye-odoor" (told to me by Charlie of off Casualty)

once again struck by the way the left always has to moderate itself in left wing areas in case it puts off moderates elsewhere and the right just... never thinks about that? at all?? and no one calls them on it???

I was in the maths dept of a uni looking for a room. Asked a passing academic for room two-o-one, response: "Oh you mean two-zero-one". Technically correct but .....

I had to stop listening to an audiobook recently because the narrator has a penchant for pronouncing people's names in the accent of the country they are from. German name - violent German accent. French name - big dramatic French accent. Latin word? Italian.. then back to American drawl.

More accent confusion than arseholery but I was sat at the bar of the Peartree in Edinburgh. A rather posh English student came in and asked for a “pint of cake” Barman: cake? ES: yah. Cake B: In a glass? ES: Yah. A pint of cake B: ES: B: ES: You know! Cakey Cayla!

You can only imagine it was a lot easier to get a plumber round to your house in those days. I'm so pathetically grateful every time someone appears to fix something, they could basically pronounce my name 'Hitler'.

My mate's Evil Stepmum once did exactly this. "Lovely stew, what's in it?" "Chorizo!" "What?" "Chorizo!" "What?" "You know, that Spanish sausage?" "Oh you mean HORR-IDTH-O"

I knew an elderly aristocratic couple who declared to a guest at dinner that "we don't *talk* at the table." By *talk* they meant "small talk." Prize arseholes and I made all sorts of excuses to never be in their fucking ghastly company again.

I once said "I have a mind like a sieve" and a colleague said "I wish I had a mind like a sieve, because they retain the things you want to keep."