Next Friday. 7PM Ruskin Park. There will be photos proving snake attacks in SE5. Other than that it'll just me wham chatting about South London parks, their folklore and history. www.thecityoverthewater.com/events-and-a...

there is a alarming contingent on here who seem about one more day away from calling their firstborn Andiburn

This is the right image to use for a heat wave; not one of children playing in the fountain or people frolicking on the beach.

I dropped my wallet yesterday evening somewhere on Brixton Water Lane. After a sleepless night fretting about what I needed to cancel, I went to Brixton police station - and someone had handed it in! The guy at the desk said stuff is handed in ALL THE TIME. So much for London becoming a war zone

Is he putting the opening of nominations late enough he can make it to the World Cup Final as PM if England make it?

The attacks in Edinburgh, in which an armed bare-chested white man terrorised Muslims, leaving five people injured, don't feature on a single newspaper front page this morning. Two tier journalism

More of that 'pure cold rage' they called for

Now up to number ELEVEN on the @blackwells.bsky.social bestseller chart. With one more push, can we move past various books about Michael Jackson, "dark hockey" romances and having sex with elves, and get into the top ten?

Every single Prime Minister since 1974 has either taken office or left office mid-term, between general elections. Sometimes even both. Starmer being replaced mid-term is not constitutionally unusual. What would be unusual is if he fought and then lost a general election having been elected at one.

A man has been running around stabbing people on the streets of a UK city and large elements of the nation’s media are strangely not interested The Mail ranks a story about Gordon Ramsey’s daughter being pregnant higher. The Telegraph is more interested in a voracious pufferfish. I wonder why?

Take That look like they've airbrushed the other one out, perhaps for ideological deviations of some kind

This case involves the same build-to-rent firm that already operates at Elephant Central and will run the new Elephant Quarter homes on the old shopping centre site.

I love this kid vomiting up FIFA

I was privileged enough to have tickets for Deborah Warner's production of Peter Grimes at Covent Garden last month (in "cheap seats" in the Amphitheatre), but I think the sound balance on this BBC recording is better than what you heard then from any seat in the house, including top priced boxes.

I see we are still encountering difficulty using the T word when it comes to violent racist rampages by white men

Keir Starmer was hanging out with the Murdochs last night, according to Politico

Liberal England: The Major Oak is dead and Phil Harding has discovered another ancient site near Stonehenge

Just putting this out there again… #ElectionNight

If they'd run this campaign in Gorton they'd have won there.

Your reminder that fairy tales are full of stepmothers because women once routinely died in childbirth, from postpartum sepsis, or from other infectious diseases and left behind housefuls of motherless children. Stable nuclear families are made possible by vaccines, antibiotics, and safe abortions.

‘Legimate concerns’ is a weasel phrase for ‘understanding’ violence and thus, by proxy, giving it some legitimacy. The brutal stabbing hasn’t brought immigration into sharp focus -it has brought orchestrated loyalist violence against nurses and care workers into focus. Wise up.

there goes every cool and informative drawing tutorial which has made kids *profoundly* better than I was at their age. there goes every play along piano tutorial, which miniboyd's music teacher often points them to. keir starmer is a sentient ham sandwich running a government full of clowns

What if Ofcom's rapid evidence study concludes the only way to tell if someone is over 16 is by every adult verifying their age? What then? www.gov.uk/government/n...

Great to see Keir Starmer banning kids from social media as the first step towards tightly regulating all these tech companies to protect the rest of us from hate, incitement and radicalisation!

Putin’s idea that the people of Ukraine will become divided by destruction of its history is only making them more hardened to defeating him…Russian strikes kill nine and set historic cathedral in Kyiv ablaze www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

🇺🇦💔 Zelensky: As of now, 28 people are injured and four have died in the capital. Due to the Russian strike on Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the Assumption Cathedral burned down - a church whose history began in the 11th century. 1/3

You know what's a really, really bad thing? Terrorism. It's so bad that we've passed laws against it sixteen times since 2000. And we still end up locking up old ladies for holding a sign. But I'm sure banning something really terrible like "Looking at the internet" will work out fine.

Keir Starmer has the power to determine one very important thing - the nature of the transition to his successor Don’t fumble it, @drhannahwhite.bsky.social and I say www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/keir...

I’ve posted before about how useful this book once was.* Even by the generally illiberal standards of UK politics, it is remarkable how far Kier Starmer has come to today’s proposed bans. [* like everything else @legalactiongroup.bsky.social—a charity—publishes: go and buy some stuff from them.]

It's all there in Stanley Cohen’s famous book: ⁠Folk Devils and Moral Panics. This is stage 4 when government makes sure it's being seen to act - and the result is usually ineffective knee jerk policy. In phase 5 everyone loses interest and starts to worry about something else.

Starmer just said infinite scroll "stops children doing their homework" ahead of banning all u16s from being able to access YouTube to do their homework.

It's almost as if the whole point of the past seven years of law and policy on this issue was neither protecting children nor fixing social media nor curbing big tech, but building both a domestic surveillance tech sector and a captive market for it. internet.exchangepoint.tech/the-dog-that...

Also it's clear now the UK's response to the teething problems with the Australia ban was not "the whole concept was the problem," its response is "Australia isn't enforcing hard enough, so we'll nerd harder with compliance" which in this case means all users being facial scanned + IDs etc.

Politico reports "The full package of measures isn’t even ready just yet. The PM hopes he’ll be coming back next month to announce further details … such as a curfew to prevent older teenagers up to the age of 18 from doomscrolling after 8.30 p.m." Like I thought. He's leaving a mess for Burnham.

On tech policy, just follow @heatherburnstech.bsky.social - spot-on again and again, sadly.

"But sending sexually explicit pictures to and from children – that’s not free speech, that’s basic protection." Says the man who has taken zero action on a social media platform producing a distributing child sex images for a year. Tough on teens, laisser faire on white supremacist billionaires.

If Keir Starmer leads Labour into the next general election*, a seventeen year old will not be able to use YouTube to watch party political broadcasts and their screen would cut out half an hour into the debates, but they can vote in the election afterwards. *He won't but bear with me

Time for me to repeat one of my ‘sayings’. If you try to solve a problem by passing a law, but people don’t obey the law, you now have two problems where you used to have one.

David Hockney (1937 -2026 ) 'Yves-Marie in the Rain ' 1973 ♥️

Rest in peace, David Hockney. 😢

A very substantial part of the electorate think that there is no point in paying billions and billions to 'defend' a state and public realm that's trashed in the process.

Northern Ireland, functionally, has no immigration. Net immigration last year was about 8000 people in a population of 2 million, and that was a record.

The Times view on pogroms.

The government quitting Twitter won't stop Musk (but they should do it anyway) takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/displaceme...

Call me cynical, but nothing says “I was waiting to see if I was offered defence secretary” like waiting the best part of six hours after your boss has quit to resign.

A hundred years ago today: the Daily Mirror calls for a Bazball-style approach to Test matches (with added smoking).

Coming soon to BBC2: Lucy Worsley’s ‘Visiting Posh Houses While Drinking Cider’, follows historian and national treasure Lucy Worsley as she travels by train to Britain’s poshest houses, while drinking cider. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

So glad that Luqman Saeed - an academic at Ulster University - has written this piece about the Belfast riots. I hope I could write this clearly and perceptively were I under similar pressure right now. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...

Wonder what taxes Burnham will be raising or services he’ll be cutting to pay for this £10.5bn pledge.