There’s this kind of spiritual and moral sickness that seems to afflict a lot of people where they start to believe that they are NEWS

One of the funny side-effects of pervasive AI book scams and fake messages from authors is that if an actual celebrity were to write to you, your brain wouldn’t let you believe it

Ooh an email from a big poetry festival in Paris! / Oh, right, it’s telling me about *other writers* who have a reading there. Other writers who, critically, are not me.

I love the way printers refer to printing a document as a “job”. It’s sweet because it’s their only job and they’re so, so bad at their job.

My youngest would love to go to the Undertale symphony and it’s so great that it’s coming to Birmingham, but taking him and his brother would run to about 400 bucks after “booking fees” and “commission”

On AI in higher education, via Nabokov’s novel ‘Pnin’ (published 1957)

IT guys be like, “What do you mean you can’t start your mandatory training? You just click on ‘View Enrolment’ > ‘Other Details…’ > open as a new window rather than tab > scroll to the VERY bottom of the page > ‘Launch’ > then the next time you click ‘View Enrolment’ it starts the course automatical

Delighted and humbled to announce that I got a slot at Kings Norton tip on a Sunday. Someone in the queue must have died.

Saying “big step” to my 14yo son who is taller than me as we disembark from a train

Overheard some guys who’d lost their friend at the UK Board Game Expo: “It’s not like we can get them to announce we’re looking for a man with glasses and a beard.”

Oh yeah, right, Tesco I’m going to save that for fucking *2028* like some kind of 3rd century desert-dwelling ascetic

He was a very private person so we have no idea whether he suffered fools gladly or not

Something about the way the media talks to us about the economy always reminds me of Homer Simpson’s “Money can be exchanged for goods and services!”

This is so true. And hilarious when held against the pro-AI art rhetoric. It has achieved *less than nothing*

I chose my laptop (out of an abundance of useless, baffling surfeit choices) because it said it had 1TB of memory, but over the years it’s become clear that that 1TB is the WRONG KIND of memory, and my laptop is always full and can’t do shit.

Does anyone want to come on a drive for several hours just for the aircon

If you’re a man who doesn’t usually wear shorts you can just stay in. You must stay inside. Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.

“meet apathy with apathy” - brilliant article

Sitting in the sun without a shirt like a big hairy bowl of rice pudding because some part of me internalised the shame of having a ‘t-shirt tan’

This poem is too difficult try to write a poem that would appeal to the people who used to pick on you at school

“We realised we can basically just get away with charging whatever the hell we feel like for anything and you don’t really have much of a choice but to pay if you want to continue to be alive,” said one expert. “It’s great!”

I love real salted butter because I know at some point - and maybe fairly soon - they’re going to take it away from me, they’ll say Luke is butter really more important to you than a long and healthy life?

I go on stage at a book festival holding a big sign that reads GOOD WILL which I semi-competently proceed to tear into shreds (it’s laminated so it’s hard to tear)

Delighted to be starting as head of PR for HS2! I’m so glad to be with you all on this “journey” haha! Shall we brainstorm some celebrities we might ask to be on the ‘maiden voyage’?

They should release a range of half biscuits to promote their new show Half Man. “Eat them while you watch! You can eat twice as many!”

Since the 90s I’ve never been comfortable with a “zip file” - they always do some weird shit like saving to your Systems folder or something

Over the years I’ve accumulated so many jackets that I sort of don’t like very much

Still find it very funny that higher education marking software *doesn’t allow us to use italics* in our feedback

Wow, people really get to go to town on their grievances on Substack don’t they? It’s like Twitter used to be but the Tweets are terrifyingly huge

I’m a bit hyper and I’m not doing my work. If I had a classic office job I’d be in so much trouble with my supervisor - he’d be all, “KennAAAAARRRRD”

🎵 Paranoid Putin / Puts up some teeth on a beach where some tourists have been / Internecine

About a year and a half into the bin strikes in Birmingham now; the misery augmented in my area by the council embarking on a 5-year renovation project of the local tip, making it VERY DIFFICULT to ever get a slot there.

Oh fab, *love* the rich, can’t wait

If May thinks it can compensate for its generally poor performance with this nonsense improvised medley of the crappier weathers and desert-coldness at night, it can fuck off, frankly. Go away and let June have a go.

I think it was John Carey (one of the greatest book critics who ever lived, R.I.P.) who said one of the trickiest things is just giving a good enough summary of the plot

Cannot believe the 100 best novel was Radiohead’s OK Computer again

The “2 cups / 3 cups / 4 cups / 6 cups” scale on the side of a kettle need to be given an award for ‘Wrongest Thing in the World, 3,000BC - 2026’

I have such humility as an artist that if I got to make a Batman film I’d call it ‘A Batman’

The Equalizer 2: Don’t Know What Happened the First Time, Sorry

Said yes to too much other stuff during marking season going insane

Hey! We’re getting in touch six weeks in advance to see if you’d rather not receive promotional Father’s Day emails! We’ll keep asking regularly during this season of Father’s Whitsun, in the year of our father, fatherty-father-fatherty-farth!

Worcester City council has formed a coalition of EVERY other party to boot out Reform after a year of incompetence and corruption 😂❤️

I am back in Exeter - a very attractive small city that boasts the fewest independent businesses in the world!

For some time I’ve been trying to find a source for the line, “Finding that lightning didn’t strike him down…” e.g. you do something ‘bad’ and, in the absence of immediate punishment, divine or otherwise, keep doing it. Or worse.

If you try to wake your computer up from standby without a pure heart it doesn’t work

Wrote about the elections for the paper (which went to press last night): www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Doomsday Breakfast eaters solemnly begin to eat final sausage

Who was it who decided VEVO owned all the music videos? You never hear anything about them. They just quietly bought every single music video, past, present and future

There should be at least 8 layers of Junk Mail folders, like Dante’s Inferno

[EXT. GATES OF HEAVEN] ST PETER: Just to let you know that’s not part of the meal deal, alright?