1950s Ireland, when capital was the key to matrimony.

🚨BREAKING 40 years ago Margaret Thatcher abolished rent controls in Scotland. The Scottish Parliament just passed a Bill introduced by the Scottish Greens, which will allow them once more! This will keep rents affordable and offer safety and stability to renters. 🙌

Housing Bill - latest. www.ft.com/content/9cc8...

“Hello I would like to sack many tens of thousands of workers and wreak havoc on regional economies without any real plan but ‘just to open the conversation’. I am not a crank.”

I’m struggling here to find enthusiasm to plan new research and writing, knowing that it has no obvious economic benefit. It won’t result in bills being paid, money from book sales, nor career progression, as there is currently no career to progress through.

“Asked whether there was any hope that Labour could turn things around, he [Sir John] initially remained silent, leading to laughs across the room. Then he replied: ‘The honest answer to that is no.” www.thenational.scot/news/2550267...

1 of the few statues in Scotland dedicated to a named woman is of Dolores Ibarruri, the Passionara who said 'Better to die on your feet than live forever on your knees.' It is dedicated to the memory of Scots who fought the fascists in Spain & is on the riverfront in Glasgow. /7

On a more positive note - I’m a very experienced researcher and published writer, and surely this should commend me to any project work historians, journalists or politicians might have? Hire me, you know you want to really…

Dismal job search. No vacancies, voluntary job, scary looking/incomprehensible job, no vacancies, absurdly over specified post any graduate could probably do (but no chance whatsoever) no vacancies….

A sign of the times in the takeaway.

Fire on first time this autumn.

Celebrating the 200th anniversary of the railway by travelling via Euston

Winning here with Keir. 🥀

Watched Prof Hutton’s Gresham Lectures about the cultural history of paganism. Then had the most florid dreams involving Druids.

Yaphett Kotto - a hardcore punk band from California c. 1996-2005. Demonstrating, in some way, the transnational aspect of cultures, this video is very redolent of one of the first gigs I went to Dublin, when I was young and had little real idea what was going on. m.youtube.com/watch?v=rUA1...

The @cursedobjectsuk.bsky.social auto transcription is generally very good but it has transliterated Keir Starmer as “Cursed Armour”

Latest plan by Starmer to a) Become even more unpopular and b) Upset vast swathes of people in Scotland and North of Ireland.

Car tax is unspeakable. Council tax is oppressive burden. Utility bills awful. Cost of food, clothes - terrible. Second hand books remain cheap!

‘In one of the more unintentionally hilarious sequences, Ms Guinness visits a village in “Connacht, Co Mayo” and is shocked to discover that a famine took place several years earlier and that everyone speaks Irish. These and other scenes left me crying out for a nice cold, creamy pint of Beamish.’

How endangered a species do journalists in Scotland have to become before civil society and the state step in to conserve what’s left? STV to cut 60 jobs and axe north news programme www.bbc.com/news/article...

As I continue with my allegedly relaxing hobby, a tiny drill bit snapped and stabbed me in the thumb.

“A pharma tycoon and a social conservative activist narrowly failed to reach the threshold.” Thankfully. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Never mind claims that it might be fashionable, no wonder Glaswegians flock to lochs and ponds to swim in the summer months, the swimming pool capacity in the city is just hopeless.

Some more good 19th century insults here: “He states that Miller then called out ‘it’s a damned lie, you are nothing but scum and a quack, you are an outcast of society, your very son put you off the ground, and you could not be a veterinary surgeon.”

Hi everyone! I'm currently looking for participants for interviews for my PhD research. I'm working on the history of the LGBT+ community in rural Ireland, the way being in rural Ireland impacted the community and how the community impacted rural Ireland, 1970-2000.

I’m now developing an account for my public history column, follow if you so wish:

Latest in the National: I spoke with Rachael Muir, Business Archives Surveying Officer for Scotland, who told me about her work across the country, investigating, organising, and sometimes rescuing archives. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 www.thenational.scot/culture/2548...

Still amazed/fascinated/horrified by the trajectory from 1980s gay rights activist to far-right conspiracy theorist, fascist sympathiser, extreme unionist/imperialist.

It feels as though we can start to talk about us now living through the biggest change to British politics for a century since the 1920s.

The Bonzo Dog Doo Da Band. Considering that people had recently emerged from the 1950s, what did they feel about this? m.youtube.com/watch?v=s5_t...

Alloa Inch Island. A sobering and soggy testament to futility and transient nature of human efforts. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alloa_I...

I got a ‘sorry you weren’t shortlisted’ from a job, which I was genuinely pleased to actually get, rather than being completely ignored, and it contained the detail: “Over 230 people applied for this job.” 🥲

Bizarre. Female fascist activist in Kilkeel in 1930s was a prolific novelist. “Much of her work was set in a barely fictionalised South Down, and involved the gentry, British intelligence officers, and the occult.’ en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy...

You might be forgiven for thinking that a priority for any ‘progressive’ political party in Britain would be: “For very many people, housing is just not affordable. This is what we will be doing about that.”

Really says something about the state of Britain in 2025 that the ‘Work for an MP’ website is shonky and the search function doesn’t really work.

Me, I can

This year’s Sue Innes Memorial Lecture at @womenshistscot.bsky.social conference given by @vawright10.bsky.social on ‘Housing as a ‘Women’s Issue’: Women and Housing Activism in Twentieth Century Scotland.

Well, that was the more unedifying biographies I’ve read. Effective as a portrait of a lost social world of bohemian boozing and bitchiness, the book’s subject, profoundly unhappy and certainly disturbed, staggers through life beset by alcoholic disasters, crumbling away, drowned in vodka and lime.

I wrote a cover letter For the job you advertised Believing that it would go into a heap Of correspondence unanswered Later I heard nothing back Silence.

Ultra low budget day out to Dunoon. Soon after arrival, it began to rain heavily. Most indoor attractions seemingly close at 3pm. But the local museum was friendly, and its mannequins cheered me up no end.

As the Labour right lurch from disaster to catastrophe, mired in scandal, flailing in the face of the far right, it’s worth remembering their traducing of Mr Corbyn, who, while a fairly rubbish leader, was, and is, a nice old man.

‘Petie’ gets forcibly retired. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

19th century insults: ‘He said that the pursuer was “a damned puppy and a low blackguard, a degraded, impertinent, base, vile, scurrilous, vicious, ill-conducted fellow, and utterly incapable of holding the honourable office of the Procurator Fiscal of Auchtermuchty.”

“We have a new way of understanding the social history of post-war Scotland. Our book challenges and complicates stereotypes, especially of working-class life.” Historians, Valerie Wright and Alistair Fair spoke to me about ‘Building Modern Scotland.’ 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 www.thenational.scot/news/2545606...

Over the centuries, leaders of Scotland have endured a great deal. Some have paid the ultimate price on the battlefield. But who couldn’t feel sorry for John Swinney having to try and negotiate whisky tariffs with that grotesque tyrant and be the houseguest of ‘best pal.’

The extracts in the press from that Epstein birthday card thing are parts of the sleaziest and most compromising documents I’ve ever seen in my life.

It is twenty years today since my first book Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-57 was published by @uchicagopress.bsky.social and I am feeling contemplative. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Ash Regan MSP: “You cannot drive prostitution underground. If you had a lot of women in underground chambers with a locked door, how would punters get to them?” Scotland for Decrim: “We are able to come out from our cellars for meetings with MSPs and other interested parties.”

Lovely people in the far-right. www.thenational.scot/news/2545091...