I made a traditional E-card. Maybe try opening it with Notepad.

I like to catch up on games I’ve missed at this time of year. Found ‘and Roger’ very moving. It’s only a couple of bucks and a couple of hours long, but it’s incredible.

Inspired by all the British comedians with bestselling poetry collections I try my hand and standup and drown myself in a shallow river on the way home.

Imagine having a list of favourite cookbooks of 2025. Imagine having had time to cook even a single recipe from a single cookbook in order to have *one* favourite cookbook of 2025.

Hello, yes, I’m looking for the kind of pâté that killed the Medicis

My uber is coming in *19 minutes*. This is because someone gave me less than 5* because I wouldn’t invest in his mail order trees start-up. It just didn’t seem like a viable business.

Posting the equivalent of an Out Of Office email on social media is such an endearingly self-important thing to do. Unless this is your job. I guess for some people this is their job. Whatever, don’t let me tell you what to do.

I’m reviewing a novel that’s like the prose equivalent of slow cinema. It’s brilliant, but I keep feeling like I should just gradually put some cutlery away or languorously peel an orange and it would be a similar sort of experience

Birmingham launch for Black Bag in March! At my favourite bookshop!

It is late in the year, but my goodness the new John Stammers collection (his first in some time) is just amazing, and full of the kind of deeply funny and sad and magnanimous poems that somehow *should* take a decade-plus to really nail

At just over 14,000 pages Kennard’s 4th novel proved off-putting to readers as it seemed to require them to read nothing else for several years and was also impossible to store, turn pages of, or fit through almost any door in the country

Ah I used to watch this with my sister back when YouTube was still a home delivery VHS subscription service youtu.be/uRzhd3eUyO8?...

Do they still do that thing where they get you to initial for cashback and then give you the receipt that you initialled?

Experts say the snow could hit Orkneys as far south as the Holm of Papa!

A good way of shaming yourself for eating a whole giant bag of crisps is to pour them on a plate and it also makes it easier to eat them

1. Bug Boy and the Nasty Attic 2. AXE 2: You Have the Right to Remain MURDERED 3. Thursday Morning at the Skull Cafe 4. La Wall et La Sky (Un Roman)

In all seriousness if you are trying to find a present for a DAD (or an ADVENTURER) you will not find better

No shade intended, but I cannot quite believe that people are blogging again. It just seems like a kind of selfhood and performance of selfhood that died with the minidisc player.

You don’t actually need a Chair+ subscription to unlock soft mode for the cushion fibres. You can flash linux to the chair through the hidden microSD slot in the front left leg and unlock it for free

I got a DM from a clearly AI-generated account asking me a specific but kind of empty question about my writing and now they’re bullying me because I haven’t replied.

So many songs just reveal the inner paucity of the lyricist. “Blah blah blah / Xmas / another year older / And What have you done?” A bunch of things, actually - I have a meaningful life

The new Knives Out is roughly 700x better than the execrable 2nd one which I hated so much I lost two long-term friendships over it.

My girlfriend: what's happening now Me: *peering through the curtains at the front of the inn* so the pregnant lady is still on the donkey. Oh the man's coming back out. He's shaking his head. Omg there must be no room for them. Aww I feel bad

I think the best hangover song of all time is REM’s ‘How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us’. That’s like my hangover anthem. Scott Walker’s ‘Farmer in the City’ a close second.

Stateside pre-release write-up of my next novel from Publishers Weekly! www.publishersweekly.com/9781638933380

Just had a “pulled turkey” sandwich because I was like, oh wow you can *pull* turkey? And no, having eaten it, no you absolutely can’t, and they should have stopped pulling it the moment that became clear.

Once again EXCLUDED from the Ondaatje Prize because apparently THE LIFE OF THE MIND does not count as a PLACE

-As poet laureate of Birmingham this is your seventh poem about Uniqlo and people are starting to ask questions. -We’ve needed a Uniqlo for *so* long. If people don’t like it they can take it up with Uniqlo.

I’m workshopping why, in a strong field, I despise the rat pack Christmas songs most of all

Ah well, it’s only £11bn of our money that we earned in our jobs that we have to do all the time, and then gave to the government - let’s just write it off the way you do when one of us doesn’t pay a bill or something

I appreciate the ecological gesture, but the design of a liquid soap bottle is *very* precisely calibrated to its viscosity, and if you water down the last bit it will JET OUT at an acute angle into the user’s face and top

Well that’s just not going to be true for *anyone*, is it, Outlook?

My 2025 of the year

I guess the first thing you should know about my just-published book is that this is a bunch of things that were bothering me 3-5 years ago and I can’t really even remember what most of them were now.

My kids’ generation are in this enviable position where there’s no pressure whatsoever to be on social media because it’s *so shit*

Treading in dog shit is one of those situations where you’re allowed to feel very hard done by for about 2 seconds but then it’s entirely *your* problem - you’re the cause, the source, the spreader,

On “FAQ Reddit”, starting a new thread like, ‘Guys, I’m thinking of getting into frequently asked questions, like I want to start asking some frequently asked questions - where should I start?’

One thing paying £280 council tax a month during a full year of bin strikes has taught me is the power of love

- Hi, I’d like to buy these groceries, please. - Link in bio. - Oh, in that case I don’t think I’ll bother.

Top 10 alleys in central Birmingham to hide and eat a hotdog you put too many toppings on

Bespattering my mate’s flat with murals to the exact point that he has to pay mansion tax

Guy who emphasises the first syllable of kangaroo

I almost bought the Ltd edition gingerbread flavour Doritos but I kept thinking about Liz Lemon getting addicted to Sabor de Soledads.

You never heard of elf on the shelf now get ready for endless variations on something else you never heard of

I'm excited to share my piece in Los Angeles Review of Books @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social, which examines OpenAI's claims about ChatGPT's creative writing skills, Big Tech's weaponisation of grief and nostalgia, and the collapse of the academic humanities. lareviewofbooks.org/article/lite...

Lmfao most of us would happily lay down our lives for our children without a moment’s hesitation, but go off, I guess

“There is a special place in hell for people who misattribute quotations to get Instagram likes.” - Franz Kafka

The audiobook of my 2nd novel has been missing its last chapter for five years, and has now been sorted 🙏

Welcome to Stratford station, London, where we don’t BELIEVE in the stuffy numerical order! Platform 1, 14, 8, 10! Don’t get it confused with 10a now!

Meteorologists, what is causing literally just Birmingham to be -1 degrees at the moment? Everywhere else I’ve been from London to the Highlands is positively balmy.