DR Congone. #engdrc

As I was saying...

Kane is able.

That's the ticket; mess around with this sort of nonsense and bring about a goal you miss.

Have a hydration break, have a hydration KitKat.

Goodwin's latest bile is, by my estimations, something like 96 or 97% of the way to his saying "only white people deserve to live, work and be taken seriously in the UK". If he did say that, we'd still find a hardcore of apologists claiming he wasn't being racist.

Next time Farage is quizzed, the journalist had better bloody well properly interrogate him on Reform candidate Matt Goodwin's latest racist outburst, after they've asked him again about that £5m bung. And pin him down not just on if he'd have used those words but on if he agrees with the sentiment.

Goodwin is a disgusting bigot. It's hard to imagine how this guy could have integrated and adopted British traditions any more than he has. So it's pretty clear that Goodwin, whose argument seems to amount to nothing more than refugee = bad, is pushing racism, pure and simple. What an absolute cunt.

Who will football fans in the Republic of the Congo be supporting tonight? Are they like the Scots, Welsh and Irish who support anyone but England, where their England is the Democratic Republic of the Congo?

To quote Gerardus Mercator, the Democratic Republic of Congo is absolutely fucking vast, by the way. Here it is dragged up to the same latitude as the UK using the thetruesize.com mapping tool.

I can’t help feeling that William Bedwell would have benefited from an editor, perhaps one who was an expert in comma usage and when to cut your losses on one sentence and start another.

Of course, as speakers of British English keen to avoid dreadful Americanisms, we should really call it the Fspanner team. #fraswe

I'm watching #fraswe. I can't offer anything insightful about football so am fervently hoping commentator Ally McCoist says something appropriately foolish that gives me an excuse to come back here and say "hahahahaha, he's McCoist by his own petard". Also not insightful but extraordinarily witty.

Who'll be victorious - Serena or the 44-year-old's bad knee? On the nose way for the BBC to bill it but I'm tuning in!

Last Living Millennial Dies

It's almost like conservative US Supreme Court judges pick and choose elements of the Constitution to uphold or ditch according to whether they align with their Trumpian ideals.

Farage earned £270k as a "brand ambassador" for a gold bullion firm, I've just heard on #bbcpm. All credit to the newsreader, who barely disguised his contempt when saying those words in inverted commas. Tbf to the company, if I wanted to convey the idea of money for nothing, I'd choose Farage.

Flowery verge in Alexandra Park.

Construction started on the White House 233 years ago. It took me about 20 seconds to establish this fact.

I know this plays into racists' hands but this stupid £10k represents a fairly small part of the legal, accommodation and welfare costs of the average successful asylum seeker who, years down the line, applies for citizenship. Demanding it isn't about balancing the books; it's tokenistic cruelty.

I am looking to chat to someone weighing up whether to buy a flat as their first home or hold out for a house. Are you worried about flats holding value? 5 minute recorded chat. Please email [email protected] if you can help - and please share if you can. Thanks Team Bluesky!

I for one hope that wherever Shabana Mahmood ends up after any reshuffle she's able to effect changes to other societal strata. Take UK-born children growing up in poverty and subsidised in social housing at tax-payer expense. Once they're working, they should pay £10k or face deportation or prison.

One more thing: the presumption, based both on principle and on empirical evidence, should be that asylum seekers are genuine. Policies should be based on that presumption, not the presumption that they’re bogus, lying cheats.

Unconventional spelling. Also, it’s bullshit. I felt like I was being enticed through the door and yet when I told them that, as invited, I’d come in to browse, they insisted I leave because I was making the other customers “uncomfortable”.

We get c90k asylum seekers/year. Let’s assume ALL their applications are successful, ALL successfully apply for citizenship when eligible and ALL earn money. Is that £10k debt we’d saddle each of these poor wretches with really worth it for the <£1bn we’d make? Scrap this performative cruelty, Andy.

Worried your life is flying by because we’ll be halfway through the year at the end of the day? Don’t be! It isn’t and we won’t be. The halfway mark is at 1pm on Thursday 2nd July, not midnight between Tuesday 30th June and Wednesday 1st July.

"Ah! Hello, Steve, my Brummie friend. Have I ever told you about my weird uncle who spends his time autographing French cheese at the supermarket?" "Signs bries?" "No, Morrison's."

Good start from a new LinkedIn contact in a DM I've just been sent, the first, I hope, of many highly-personalised messages.

Anyone else who's trying to stream the #brajpn match analysis got a frozen screen that's still loading?

I was in two minds whether to post this image because I think it’s both a little niche and a little arch.

1/2 A poignant episode of The Good Life they aired in honour of Penelope Keith on BBC2 earlier this evening in that it highlighted Margo's self-awareness of her lack of a sense of humour, yet she still enjoyed her friends' company. I feel like that when watching international football. Hear me out.

Classic Good Life at 7pm on BBC2! (Thought you'd like to know if you didn't already.)

I know you shouldn’t but it’s hard not to compare yourself to others. Take my old school friend, Alan, for example. He’s sold nearly 2 million albums. Then again, I wouldn’t really want to have spent 30 years working on the tills at the Oxford Street HMV.

“Vows” 😐

From someone who mocks Bridget Phillipson's response to "hurty words", those words being the baseless and historically moronic suggestion she acted like a Gestapo officer, you might expect more resilience to accusations of people she apparently thinks are on her side being labelled "far-right".

I still haven't recovered from this. These people - the people who write these ridiculous stories, or at least those behind the scenes making them do it - seem to think it's hypocritical to exist in the society that does exist, not the one you'd like to exist. By that logic, I'm still in the EU.

1/3 One of the problems of regional devolution, something I’m broadly in favour of, is where to draw the line. I live in London but grew up in Hertfordshire, a few miles north of the M25. London was always my home city, so to speak, my family gravitated towards it, and I was ‘from’ the south east.

This will ring true for anyone who’s helped their daughter with her Year 7 maths. It’s not that it’s impossibly hard; it’s that they’ve added so much to the curriculum that wasn’t covered at all a generation ago, so you have to teach yourself it. Methods of determining prime factors, lowest common…

Just eaten several tasty, succulent, fully-ripe blackberries. A lovely little treat but that shouldn’t be normal for June, should it?

Margo gone. RIP, Penelope Keith, a wonderful performer.

I think this would be true even if you skewed the appointments towards authoritarians. Who are often much more empathtic on an individual level than in the abstract.

An interesting theory. I hope it’s not true if Burnham’s grand plans happen, but we don’t know yet. To an extent, it all depends on how much the north at large is lifted as a direct and - crucially - noticeable result of a partial power-shift to Manchester. But this relies on voter rationality.

I’m not entirely convinced that Reform’s assessment that Andy Burnham’s proposals are “all talk, no action”, reported in #r4today’s headlines alongside other parties’ views of them, are fair when applied to someone who isn’t yet prime minister.

My cautious opinion is that I hope the Ed Miliband-as-Chancellor rumours come true. If so, it's a sign that Burnham is at least setting out with the bold intention of not worrying too much about the press, which will be negative regardless. Thinking about the press is fine. But only up to a point.

People are rightly criticising Phillips's stupid analysis. It's not that the policies he highlights aren't disliked by some people; those people would always dislike both Starmer and those policies (or perceptions of them; Starmer HAS been tough on migrants). It's that he's alienated natural allies.

Who was it an impression of and how many lazy ethnic stereotypes did it draw on?

Does anyone who voted for Farage in Clacton really care that he’s never there and does nothing for their constituency? I doubt it. We need to get to grips with the fact that, subconsciously or otherwise, the bulk of Reform voters vote for his party not for what it’ll do but how it makes them feel.

Industrial action from our best players? That's the last thing we need.

Hydrangea break.

Jude the OBS* cure. *OBS = Ooh, Bad at Sport The Sun can have that on me. #paneng