Parapentiste au Mont Mourex

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colours for the year’s turn: beeswax, brandy, candlelight, cinnamon, crémant, firework, french onion soup, gruyère, marmelade, melted butter, porridge, tea, toast

New Year’s Eve: French 75s, French onion soup, first experience of German fireworks

As the New Year rings in, Palestine Action prison hunger striker Heba Muraisi will cross over into her 60th day without food. This is often the threshold where sudden death becomes imminent. Her government knows and is wilfully proceeding, just as it has with the genocide in Gaza

Bring in the new year by watching the brilliant four part documentary Time Team put on YouTube of their 2024 dig at Sutton Hoo. If you start at 09.26 then at midnight you’ll be at moment they reveal a face - with braided hair beaten into metal by simple tool punch - unseen for around 1200 years.

I am distressed at how little attention the hunger strikes are getting. These people are being held without trial. Will we only get news when one of them dies? Will MPs laugh then?

holiday academic Bluesky (US version): here is a list of everything I accomplished this year plus I had some Thoughts about the humanities holiday academic Bluesky (UK version): I’m 80% brandy butter, 12% brussels sprouts, 8% brisk walk, what’s a university again, also I’ve forgotten how to write

this is everything an opera should be in visual terms three weirdos in teal satin stacking books on a beautiful lady's head to crush the warbling out of her. but will she stop singing? she will never 19th century stopped doing this which is why opera eventually went to hell

simply having a wonderful Christmas time [drinking port and reading Solvej Balle]

Haunting festive presence.

Give me your most interesting examples of second chances

Here’s Kerry James Marshall’s Portrait of Nat Turner With The Head of His Master. An encouragement for those near London to get to “The Histories” before it closes in mid Jan (and if you go by public transport in December the tickets are 2 for 1 tfl.gov.uk/info-for/med...)

Tried to take some pictures of our Christmas Day smoked salmon and champagne but they all look as if they’re from Christmas 1977

nobody: How was Christmas in the UK in 2025? me: My mother-in-law was showing me something on her iPad earlier and I saw the notification on the lock screen. It said: ‘”Bring back the death penalty”, says Christopher Biggins’

In this church there was a list of all the vicars from 1209 onwards and the second one was just called Robert

long cold blue-skied walk, joyful dog, thirteenth-century church, woodland weirdness

[mariah carey voice] 🎶 there is just one thing I need 🎶

when you run out of wrapping paper at the very last minute

‘It wouldn’t have been a good moment to say I was happy, and that it also felt like spiralling: uncoiling from the emergency ship’s-mast of the soul to stretch out and expand.’

dreamed it was ‘snowing (big flakes)’ / dream as quotation

dreamed I was at work, lying on my back like a beetle with both arms and legs up in the air, saying ‘I’m tired’

getting into the festive spirit [writing peer reviews wrapped in blankets on the sofa]

no queer reading

Poem of the year...

‘With the borders closed, the only way to leave Gaza was by paying a fixer $5000 or more per person, an impossible amount for my family. Our home was destroyed. We moved into a tent in a camp where I knew no one.’ Hassan Ayman Herzallah on the lives on hold in Gaza. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

necessary fuel for the last seminar and last student meeting of 2025 — just taught/held (nobody talk to me for 24 hours please)

Rather enchanted by this mid-19th-c portrait of relaxed fatherhood by François Bocion, now in Lausanne. Not sure I can recall seeing anything quite like it from the period (though I am by no means an expert here).

Excellent news. Fingers crossed we still have some universities left by January 2027. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

dreamed Henry Paker and I broke into London Zoo at dawn to free one lobster and twenty spider monkeys

Open letter to UCL student Qesser Zuharh held at HMP Bronzefield.

WTF are we doing here, BBC?

so much of adult life is just moving bits of furniture from one room to another

feast of st. lucy, 13 december

it’s St Lucy’s day, so you know what that means — time for the best John Donne poem

In the tenth century a charm to control a bee swarm was added, upside down, in the margin of an earlier mss. It's one of the earliest Old High German texts. Tim Hertogh argues in recent article it was intended as an amulet to cut out & place in a hive - explaining the margins excised elsewhere.👇

what a cover!

Christmas is green and general / like all great works of the / imagination (Frank O'Hara) Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland (James Joyce)

When will this crisis get any attention whatsoever!? A THOUSAND ACADEMIC STAFF AT ONE INSTITUTION SERVED REDUNDANCY RISK NOTICES! And that's not counting what's surely being visited on professional services staff too. This is an economic catastrophe, to say nothing of the intellectual catastrophe!

unfortunately this arrived just before i turned my out-of-office auto-reply on happy end of term from University of Essex

Not that there would ever be a ‘good’ time to tell 1000 academics their jobs are at risk, but doing it in mid-December when people are on their knees with exhaustion, and leaving a parallel decision hanging over professional services staff who find out in January adds a certain cruelty to brutality

Pictures to send to the former friend or ex of your choice! #GladstoneLibrary

A slow moving tragedy that is preventable — see also — all other public institutions.

😳

“Outside, a railway worker stopped by the picket line and offered the strikers a ten-pound note. ‘That’s terrible,’ he said when he was told what was going on. ‘Hope you win.’”

I’m ’drag myself home via the supermarket, walk through the door and within one minute drop a full carton of milk on the floor’ levels of tired, how about you

Back in October I gave a talk at one of our Banned Books Network Münster events about Nancy Garden’s 1982 lesbian YA love story, Annie on My Mind. Two brilliant M.Ed. students curated this display about the book — they put so much into it and worked so hard! Look! 💖

gorgeous, important thread on doing what we do well and with integrity and JOY

This quote by Rupert Brooke about his sexuality appears EVERYWHERE but I am struggling to pin down where he wrote it. I assume a letter but I can’t lay my hands on it in Keynes’s 1968 edition of his letters. Anyone know?

a little bump for this review, as I see it's out in the new PRQ. Looking forward to exploring the whole issue! link.springer.com/journal/1210...