Typewronger All-Night Bookshop Fundraiser: How to Help! - After our last post we've had so many comments and emails with folk asking how best to support the shop, so here goes! #typewronger #fundraising #notforproffit #donate #books #bookshop #comunity

[Not crying in the middle of a co-working space] This is absolutely lovely, everyone.

100 percent you're going to see some right wing jerks complaining that Springsteen has gone woke because they never once actually listened to his lyrics before

Politics isn't working. It's time to call time on the broken culture in Westminster and have a fresh start with a fair voting system. Add your name to @electoralreform.bsky.social‬'s call to #MakeSeatsMatchVotes action.electoral-reform.org.uk/page/3782/pe...

Thole - a Scots word meaning to endure, to get through this - ye'll thole. See when everyone on LinkedIn was choosing their words and it was "elevate" or "connect" or "growth" - thole. This year, thole. We'll thole it.

A few years ago I read The Plague by Camus, during Covid, when it read like a straightforward narrative of plague. Of course for the 80 years before that everyone assumed it was a metaphor for fascism. And that works too. One must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence. Brilliant book BTW.

Today I remembered that Scottish rolls Royce factory workers in 1974 refused to fix Chilean war planes, grounded half the air force and saved many lives. Nae pasaran. I can probably do without Amazon, right?

Annually, on the last Tuesday in January- if you’re late for work and use the excuse “a bunch of Vikings & a longship were holding up traffic” it is perfectly acceptable. 😉 🔥 Wishing Guizer Jarl Lynden Nicolson, his squad and all a brilliant Up Helly Aa 2026! 🔥 #uphellyaa #vikings #lerwick

OK. So the world is dreadful and we shouldn't be distracted. But personally, I am looking forward to spending the gaps in the apocalypse watching Bake Off - Nigella Lawson and Noel Fielding on screen at the same time will be some really top quality innuendo, and that really is Britain at its finest.

Worth remembering when looking at the horrific scenes in the US right now that both Reform and the Tories have pledged to bring in ICE-style organisations to the UK if they win power

“Get it all on record now — get the films — get the witnesses — because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.” Dwight D. Eisenhower, after visiting liberated concentration camps in April 1945

A propos of nothing I was listening to a BBC history documentary about the Irish war of independence, and originally boycotts were personal. Don't buy from/sell to the target. Don't buy from/sell to anyone who does. Don't sit down with them, don't both sides with them.

Burns, on the subject of a national celebration of military victory- see alt text- happy burns night

The United States has officially withdrawn from the World Health Organization. This is a shameful move that puts both Americans and people all over the world at greater risk from disease outbreaks, which require international collaboration to contain.

So obviously I haven't read this yet, because it's not out yet. But Ece Temelkuran is a rare thinker who can look problems in the face intelligently and still write a book you want to keep reading, full of what light can realistically be seen.

Chair of EHRC seeking a meeting with Sex Matters to discuss not only ‘mutual priorities’ but also ‘ways to work together going forward’! 🤔 Utterly inappropriate from a supposedly neutral Chair of the EHRC. Interested to see what will @commonswec.parliament.uk have to say?

Also never a bad time to remind people that "just obeying orders" is not a defense when those orders are clearly evil.

It's never a bad time to mention that my grandma, who no one could call woke, was still refusing to do business in 1989 with people she thought backed the black shirts in 1939. Still hustling us across the road. There's some stuff we don't need to build bridges towards.

Appalled to your core by what Trump's fascist henchmen are doing in the United States? Well, read for yourself: Nigel Farage wants to repeat it in the United Kingdom.

‘Terrible things are happening outside… Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return… to find their families gone.’ Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

24% of people who voted Labour at the last general election now plan to vote Green or Lib Dem. 0% of those who voted Reform at the last election now plan to vote Labour.

Trump genuinely told a room full of German speakers they'd be speaking German without the USA. We're in the forking Bad Place, aren't we? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

MLK Jr. said America suffers not just from "the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people." Remember this.

Fairly sure I remember this bit from high school history. I can think of at least two major wars that started this way. If someone DOES have a large military but does NOT have any morals, and they say they want to invade, prepare for invasion.

I feel like America plotting to annex Greenland while masked state goons terrorise their own communities at will should encourage British press and politicians to reflect on what happens when you act like "far right" is an unfair slur rather than a necessary descriptor of a real political position.

And you may saye to yourselfe These are not my lone and level sandes And you may saye to yourselfe These are not my vast and trunklesse legges of stone

This is 100% the perfect sign. Clear, unambiguous, helpful.

‘You Who Wronged’ by Czesław Milosz. For some reason or other this poem came to mind this morning. Written in a time of tyrants: #Poetry

Looking across the Atlantic is worrying, because we have tended to follow the US lead, and some of the policies Farage clamours for are steps on that road. What can Brits do, set up and prepare now to fight it if it comes? What networks could we mobilise if we had to?

Whenever a law enforcement officer shoots an unarmed person or even an armed person for that matter, those who would justify that behavior are doing so under the belief that the death penalty, without judge or jury, is an appropriate response.

Has anyone listened to the Reith Lectures this year? Every christmas the BBC, for all its faults, gets a thinker to just lecture. Properly. Slowly, with big words and hard ideas. This year it was Rutger Bregman and he was talking about Morals. There will be a thread...

We urge David Lammy to immediately authorise a senior official to meet with the legal representatives of Heba Muraisi & Kamran Ahmed - both on prolonged hunger strike & at extreme risk of death. Their representatives have repeatedly requested this meeting & it is now critical to prevent a tragedy.

Renee Macklin Good was murdered. Here is who she was in life - a poet, making room for wonder. poets.org/2020-on-lear...

The real political parties in UK are perhaps not the nominal ones. Regardless of supposed affiliation of ministers, Treasury will always push for certain policies, MOD will always push for certain policies, etc. Each department has their agenda. And the Home Office will always push for ID cards.

At some point I must have accidentally clicked on the advert for some trashy novel about werewolves with fated mates. Now roughly 1/3 of my social media adverts are for wretched werewolf romances with wretched nasty people- not interesting nasty, playground bully nasty. And stupid eugenics.

My son, puppies, and ahistorical discussions, a thread. My son came to me with a YouTube theory - I try not to dismiss these because a) some of them are good, and b) I want him to keep bringing them to me so I can gently debunk the ones that want debunking. This one is interesting because...

Defend Our Juries: "Mass arrests of peaceful protesters will be acutely embarrassing" for Labour on Day 1 of conference. Labour officials also rejected all 30 motions on Palestine - leading to anger from campaigners. DOJ: Most Labour members oppose the ban and the TUC recently backed reversing it.

It is possible to cherish the BBC as an institution while also saying that BBC News is failing very badly, day after day, in its duty to inform and that it always fails in a right-wing direction. It desperately needs to recover its integrity

It takes a long time to turn a shit, I mean ship. Is this the start? 🤞

It would be good if the only political pushback against Nigel Farage's plans to mass deport hundreds of thousands of our neighbours, friends, family and colleagues didn't just come from a handful of backbench MPs and one regional mayor

Tonight I have been mostly learning about Medea, the earliest example I know of bombed at the box office then became a classic, in every sense of the term. Thank you to @nataliehaynes.bsky.social It was a brilliant night.

My son tells me he is having an "uprising" in school. The teachers are using AI generated posters. He views this as unreasonable when there's a whole school full of kids who can draw posters. So he's working with his friends to quietly make alternative posters and put them up...

I saw a job advert today for a trainee @nationaltrust.org.uk Lichenologist and I want to know why no one told 17 year old me that lichenology was an option. I'm not retraining now, getting home for pick up would be a nightmare if work was half way up a mountain. But still.

21st century Britain where it's illegal to project an image on a wall but not illegal to supply weapons to mass murdering genocidal psychopaths

I still have my 'Natural Law Party' Hoodie from 1995, when I got a A+ for an essay on Transcendental Meditation.

This has affected me greatly having seen close up the vitriol coming from "Tommy"'s hate marchers on Saturday. The fear those poor NHS workers must have felt as their hospital was laid siege to by a rampaging mob must have been terrible. Meanwhile complacent ministers claim not to be disturbed.

Imagine having a message that speaks directly to people. Not sure why Starmer was never able to do this, but Polanski gets it.

And a rare Covid memorial. It reminds us to think about both what we lost and what we learned. It's peaceful. As far as I'm concerned we need one in every town centre and elected officials should have to lay a bunch of flowers at them before anyone gives them so much as an official lanyard.

And Dumfries seems good at memorials to things that others forget. Exhibit A- a memorial to the Merchant Seamen who died in the world wars keeping our food and goods coming in. Britain has never stood genuinely alone. The convoys were unarmed and targeted and broke blockades.