Absurd. How little does this Government care about the climate? Squeezing out 100k more flights a year won’t improve people’s daily lives. Investing in a growing green economy to lower bills, create high-paid jobs and cut deadly air pollution will! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The Green Party now has 78,000 members. Thats 10,000+ new members this month alone who want to draw the line. I know there are so many more people who want to take a stand. Join us: join.greenparty.org.uk

‘[R]ecognition is a kind of knowing that *should incur* the responsibility to act for it to have any value beyond personal epiphanies.’ Today this feels especially true. Isabella Hammad is right that recognising Palestine is necessary, but it is not enough. ‘Another act must follow.’ #CeasefireNow

😁 we have been growing by about 500 members a day for the last 10 days… and this figure, I am told, is already out of date. 💚 a party already exists that is campaigning for a liveable world against climate-wrecking corporations and billionaires. You know it makes sense… join.greenparty.org.uk

✊Londoners turned out to let the POTUS know where we stand… #trumpvisituk #trumpnotwelcome

Out and about. #trumpukvisit

🤩 so I got an art exhibition for my birthday - and a bunch of fabulous friends there to celebrate with me! Thank you to Alan Abrahams and all the team at SPACE Studios Ilford for the excellent launch of ‘Transitions’ today - and to all my friends who came along for pints and a curry after.

🥳 birthday weekend kicking off with a night seeing Nish Kumar at Cadogan Hall! #livecomedy #nightlife

🙏 it has been a soul-warning experience reading @samanthaellis.bsky.social’s account of her ongoing relationship with her language and culture as an Iraqi Jew. 👏 For such a brisk read it covers enough ground in such rich detail that you will feel, as I did, deepened and delightfully surprised.

🩵back into non-fiction for a bit, this short but stimulating dialogue from one of my favourite novelists and a professional translator scratches just the right itch. 🤔 quoting Hölderlin: “what is native to us needs to be learned… as well as the foreign,” and reading this is a profound education.

Huge congratulations to @zackpolanski.bsky.social elected as the next Leader of @greenparty.org.uk 👏👏 Greens are on the up. We have already achieved so much, but there is more to be done offering a true alternative to this dire version of Labour. Let’s get to it! 💚

Draw the line. Join the Green Party today ⤵️ join.greenparty.org.uk?utm_source=s...

👏 👏 👏 GO ON MY SON!!! 🥳 @greenparty.org.uk has a FINE new Leader this morning, and there is a GREAT deal to be pleased about with these Internal Election Results. 😁 very nearly punched the air while in Court before a Judge… celebrations are warranted today! join.greenparty.org.uk

🙏 thank you once more to Mark Ward of #impossiblearchetype for giving one of my poems a home - go to the link below for the full issue! impossiblearchetype.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...

‘a shoobs belongs / to a lineage of shoobs’ 👏 a very fitting climax indeed to #thesealeychallenge as Caleb Femi’s ‘The Wickedest’ sends us partying into the new dawn looking for breakfast somewhere as the sun rises. Magic. ✅ and with that, 31/31 - we’re done! For now. 😉

‘[N]obody gets out of it alive, but as long as I live, come to me…’ 😌 Emily Berry writes in a mode of modern mysticism which, I will admit, I had to be persuaded of the merits of. But it was an illuminating journey. ✅ 30/31 for #thesealeychallenge - one more before the end of today!

⏱️ voting closes at midday for the @greenparty.org.uk internal elections! 🗳️ My last vote was for Deputy Leader, and it was a doozy, but given that I’m hoping for an outcome with two deputies, my Top 2 went to: ✅ @ashrouth.bsky.social; and ✅ @anist.bsky.social 👍 keep voting folks!

🗳️ another day of voting in the @greenparty.org.uk internal elections! Today’s 1st preference vote goes to: ✅ Thomas Atkin-Withers for International Co-Ordinator. Now it’s all uncontested votes save for the last tricky one - Deputy Leader! More on that tomorrow. 👍 for now, keep voting folks!

🌕’I heard, I swore, some words between them, / the dangling moon to the dawn’. 🤔 Erica McAlpine is obviously skilled. Her form is excellent; her poems are clever, wry and occasionally very moving. I very much appreciate all this… yet somehow I don’t *love* it. ✅ 29/31 for #thesealeychallenge

🗳️ right, back to voting in @greenparty.org.uk internal elections, and we’re on the Policy Development Committee! With 5 vacancies, my top votes go to: ✅ Fer’ha Syed; ✅ @joshalston.bsky.social; ✅ Francesco Piscitelli; ✅ Matthew Spoors; and ✅ @rayharding.bsky.social 👍 keep voting folks!

‘Weep and remember / love above all and put your war-boots on.’ 🤯 by the gods, these poems from @katyevansbush.bsky.social are something else. These poems are a fire that can keep you warm or tear through a government building. Savage and beautiful - read them! ✅ 28/31 for #thesealeychallenge

‘our buoyancy / is terrifying without hands to hold us.’ 👍 did it change my life? No. But I had a very pleasant time with Jasmine Cooray’s ‘Inheritance’, and its dance with legacy, the good and the bad, did refresh my perspective very nicely. Worth a look! ✅ 27/31 for #thesealeychallenge

💍’A husband, a wife. Consumed by all we hungered for.’ 😳 there is a burning menace to the poems of Isabelle Baafi’s ‘Chaotic Good’ that few books I have read can match. It will plant a horror in your guts that you do not see coming, nor its brilliant redemption. ✅ 26/31 for #thesealeychallenge

🎨’The sand / I stand on is not my own but a congregation / of distances.’ 🤔 I admit that it took a slow reading for Tim Tim Cheng’s delicate, sometimes uncertain poems of distance, memory and selfhood to take. But take they did, and I am glad I spent time with them. ✅ 25/31 for #thesealeychallenge

‘what we want, no-one has ever had before’. 📚 there is a stark, sometimes brutal energy to Matt Broomfield’s collection, wherein he describes a revolution that is ‘living, ugly, beautiful, writhing… and utterly worth fighting for’. It is a challenge worth meeting. ✅ 24/31 for #thesealeychallenge

🌊’Landing here, even once, is to find yourself / shaken into being. // Or, so we imagine.’ 🙏 Niall Campbell’s third collection ‘The Island in the Sound’ is the best book of poetry I’ve read this year - and now one of my favourites ever. Life resounds newly. Read it! ✅ 23/31 for #thesealeychallenge

😮 ‘may all your nights open with bee-bread / and honey, release you from grief’ 👏 it will be a shame if we see no more long-form poetry collections from Fly on the Wall Press because this one from @rachelbower.bsky.social is something special, highly recommended! ✅ 22/31 for #thesealeychallenge

😠 Am encountering some frustration, friends: does anyone know who to call to get rid of an old metal bathtub and taps? 🛀 Our council doesn’t seem able to collect it, and I am hunting around for scrap metal dealers who do home collections (I do not have either a car or a van).

✅ all caught up! 21/31 books as of today for #thesealeychallenge 📚 and so via @carolinebirduk.bsky.social, Liz Berry and Tom Hicks and Darren J. Beaney - on to the final leg at a leisurely pace!

📚 as #theseeleychallenge continues apace we are having an experimental day. 🔥 @internetofwords.com’s ‘DIY’ cover for their pamphlet, along with Ellora Sutton, Richard Scott and Sascha Aurora Akhtar, made for quite a trip! ✅ we are now at 18/31 - nearly caught up!

📚 carrying on the catch-up with #thesealeychallenge - today it’s Joe Carrick-Varty, @samjgrudgings.bsky.social, Redeeming Features and Gregory Leadbetter for a hell of a trip across time, subjects and styles… ✅ meaning we are now at 14/31 on Day 19. Coming up on that target…

📚 #thesealeychallenge continues with a glittering selection from @kimmoorepoet.bsky.social Rachel Matthews, Ramona Herdman (thanks again @theemmapress.bsky.social) and @helenmort.bsky.social - I feel like the day has been bookended by some fierce beauty. ✅ so that takes us to - 10/31.

📚 so I might have a very late start on #thesealeychallenge this year - but with a Sunday and a will I was determined to make up the ground! 🙏 thanks to @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social and @theemmapress.bsky.social I have had a jolly time of it too! ✅ So along with Francis’ book: I make that 6/31.

😮 I missed the 2022 revival at the National with David Tennant - but to the degree there’s ever a ‘good time’ to find out about the C.P. Taylor play ‘Good’, then sadly it might be now. 🕯️ want to know how a nice, liberal-minded professor can end up facilitating a genocide? Brace. Pick it up.

🎭 been a while coming, but rolling up my sleeves and digging into these venerable translations of Sophocles has been enriching, rewarding and FAR more impactful than I originally thought! 😳 let the word go out - there’s a reason why ‘Oedipus’ especially can still wallop you in the guts. #reading

🎭 been a while coming, but rolling up my sleeves and digging into these venerable translations of Sophocles has been enriching, rewarding and FAR more impactful than I originally thought! 😳 let the word go out - there’s a reason why ‘Oedipus’ especially can still wallop you in the guts. #reading

😮 part the second of adventuring in Seamus Heaney translations of Sophocles, and *this* one was something special. 👏 Heaney’s full-flown mastery as a poet was allowed to roam free through this translation, and even when you know the Big Lines are coming, they arrive like thunder. 🙌 I believe.

🗳️ another day of voting in the @greenparty.org.uk internal elections! Today’s 1st preference votes go to: ✅ Hannah Tucker McLellan for Policy Development Co-Ordinator; and ✅ Imtiaz Ali for Finance Co-Ordinator. 👍 keep voting and help shape the next #GreenSurge right now!

🙏 was lucky enough to snag a copy of this handsome debut pamphlet from Francis-Xavier Mukiibi and Bad Betty Press at the last Genesis Poetry Slam - and it does not disappoint! 🖤 as probing, reflective and thoughtful as the man himself, these poems will grow through the cracks in your quiet moments.

💚 so @newhamgreens.bsky.social are getting ready to step *up* in 2026, with a slate of 10 councillors ready to stand… and they need your help to make it happen! 👇 donate to their Crowdfunder at the link below and let’s get the next #GreenSurge underway! www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/elect-ten-...

🗳️ another day of voting in the @greenparty.org.uk internal elections! Today’s 1st preference votes go to: ✅ @lauramanston.bsky.social for External Comms; and ✅ David Lloyd for Publications. 👍 keep voting and help shape the next #GreenSurge right now!

🗳️ another day of voting in the @greenparty.org.uk internal elections! Today’s 1st preference votes go to: ✅ @haydnob.bsky.social for Campaigns Co-Ordinator; and ✅ Faaiz Hasan and @nicoladay78.bsky.social for Elections Co-Ordinator. 👍 keep voting and help shape the next #GreenSurge right now!

🎭 on a Greek drama kick this week, and thought I’d check out this go at ‘Antigone’. 🤔 the result is… mixed, to be honest. Some of the more ‘local’-sounding coinages strike the ear oddly. But sometimes the approach works, and the awful brightness of Sophocles’ text breaks through.

I understand the need to build something better than what we have. But in order to be a part of that project, it’s not enough to just prop up a rotten status quo. @adamramsay.bsky.social is right. And so is @zackpolanski.bsky.social and all those who are in the fight to take our movement forward.

🗳️ another day of voting in the @greenparty.org.uk internal elections! Getting tricky as we look to Equality and Diversity Co-Ordinators, but my top 2 slots go to: ✅ @kailajay.bsky.social; and ✅ Ekua Bayunu and @kathrynbristow.uk 👍 keep voting and help shape the next #GreenSurge right now!

📚 so it seems I have somehow contrived to have in my possession 2 copies of ‘Finders Keepers’ by Seamus Heaney. 🎁 so if you would like a copy of what, in my view, is *still* the richest repository of wisdom on the writing life I have found - DM me with your postal address! First come first served.

🎲 how much are we about that #tabletoplife? Well, we sat down at a table at about 2:30 one afternoon, and stayed there until 11:30 that night, minus time for snacks. ☀️ and then we woke up and took a couple of hours to finish it the next day. 🙏 to our fabulous DM and my brilliant party - huzzah!

Green Party staff have to stay neutral during leadership elections - and rightly so. But what do former staff - the experts who know party strategy inside out - think? I'm honoured they're #BackZack. Let’s do this. 💚

🗳️ another day of voting in the @greenparty.org.uk internal elections! 1st preference votes today go to: ✅ @rosierawle.bsky.social for Local Party Support Co-Ordinator; and ✅ @jonnott.bsky.social for Chair of the Executive. 👍 keep on voting and help shape the next phase of our Party’s growth!

☀️ so, I freely admit that for many people this will be obscure in the extreme - the hot weeks in June 1846 surrounding the suicide of the painter B.R. Haydon as it wove in and out of a gallery of famous figures including Barrett, Browning, Peel and Carlyle. 📚 but this is *exactly* my kind of nerdy.