Decent crowd at Chelmsford for the County Championship match v Somerset. Essex 14/1.

The Necks at Café Oto, being great as usual.

The modern world in old Ladybird books. The dawn of the supermarket (1968) Artist: Frank Hampson ‘Through the ages: Food’

A unicorn (hornless variety) blocked my path on this afternoon’s walk.

There are now 10 toilets in Space International Space Station: 4 Crew Dragon Docked at ISS: 1 Soyuz Docked at ISS: 1 Tiangong Space Station: 2 Shenzhou Docked at TSS: 1 Artemis II on way around Moon: 1 This will be the first time a toilet has left low earth orbit!

This week, Brexit finally killed our family business. We cleared out our warehouse, handed back the keys, paid the final bills and said goodbye to our last employee. What was once a thriving firm died a slow, sad death, all thanks to Farage, Johnson and the gullible idiots they conned. 1/18

Scrolled the launch back (which is in itself an astonishing thing to be able to do) to record this camera angle - which looks a Victorian seance, Kirlian photography, iron filings dancing to heavy metal, and a ladder of vibrations into space. Just amazingly beautiful.

Differences between Artemis and Apollo. No 6 in an irregular series. An eighth of the two hour launch window is unusable because of the number of satellites in low Earth orbit.

A very late 60s feeling right now. #Artemis

A disgruntled, pissed England fan on the train home from Wembley tonight - ‘I’m not sure I want England to win the World Cup. We’d have to live with pictures of Trump holding the trophy with the team for ever.”

RIP Chip Taylor, who wrote ‘Wild Thing’, recorded by The Troggs in 1966. It rewired by nine year old brain.

Tonight’s gig venue - St Pancras Old Church. Polly Paulusma playing. Percy Shelley and the future Mary Shelley planned their elopement in the graveyard, meeting at her mother’s (Mary Wollstonecraft of course) tomb.

#5Debutalbums1519. Swedish band Isildur’s Bane joined forces with Peter Hammill in 2019 to release the excellent ‘In Amazonia’ - the song ‘Aguirre’ is one of the strongest in Hammill’s recent canon. There was a follow up in 2021.

RIP Len Deighton. ‘Bomber’ was one of great reads of my teenage years.

Why have I only just found out that Henry Now’s live album from Piacenza and Palermo in 2022 has been released?! Cutler / Frith / Greaves / Hodgkinson. darkcompanionrecords.bandcamp.com/album/then-a...

We have been gifted some Lord of the Rings tea towels from New Zealand. Reluctant to use them!

RIP Kenith Trodd, one of the great TV producers.

Also yesterday, two parakeets turned up in the garden. Are these harbingers of a larger, possibly disruptive flock?

On the train yesterday, my wife was physically writing a letter and I was reading a print newspaper. A woman got on, sat across from us, and opened a book. She realises the situation and wonders if this will ever be seen again.

EXCLUSIVE: At more than 30 installations, U.S. commanders told troops the war on Iran is a Christian war. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been “inundated” with more than 110 complaints. One NCO said they were told the U.S. war is to bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus…

Farewell to Dan Simmons who, somehow, in one year, 1989, managed to publish masterpieces in three different fields - SF, mainstream fiction and horror. I read them all that year and it was astonishing.

The first woman in Parliament to appear in the Guardian's 'best-dressed at Glastonbury' feature. You'll never sing that, etc...

Well, that’s good news to wake up to in all sorts of ways.

I don’t often go to gigs where I’m reminded of Bish Bosch era Scott Walker, but feeo managed it tonight at the ICA. Excellent.

Great news tonight from Eliza Carthy that The Imagined Village are reforming.

The Martin Carthy gig without him at Cecil Sharp House tonight was a huge celebration and he was very present despite not being there. Stellar stuff from Eliza Carthy, Nick Hart, Angeline Morrison, Graham Coxon, Jon Wilks, Gwena Harman and Rowan Gatherer (Goblin Band) and Finn Curran-Carthy.

Whoa. “This vaccine, what we term a universal vaccine, elicits a far broader response that is protective against not just the flu virus, not just the Covid virus, not just the common cold virus, but against virtually all viruses, and as many different bacteria as we've tested, and even allergens.”

Henley-on-Thames very much ‘on Thames’ today.

Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.

This is turning out to be a very bad day for cinema.

#5debutalbums0509 has given me an excuse to listen again to Bodies of Water’s ‘Ears Will Pop and Eyes Will Blink’ and what a pleasure it still is.

Terrifically niche Severance inspired sticker seen on a toilet cistern today when Dagenham and Redbridge played at home v Bath City (who play at Twerton Park).

Just heard on BBC News at Ten that Epstein spent £50 in a fish and chip shop in Luton.

First visit to the Bazalgette Embankment at Blackfriars. A bit cold and rainy today (and a rare sighting of dog shit) but you can see the promise as a public space.

Have had cause to look up the first use of the word ‘shedloads’ and surprised to find it was as recently as 1989 by the Nottingham Evening Post, according to the OED.

At Benington Lordship in Hertfordshire for its snowdrop festival. Also, its Norman keep.

Been to the Indoor Festival of Folk at Cecil Sharp House. Quite the day.

Any excuse to repost this peerless thread.

Yes, whatever happened to my fantasy Brexit where the all powerful UK simply swept away the superpowers, the global companies, anyone else's rules, geography, history, domestic politics, demographics, deindustrialisation, Trump, and things I don't like? Oh yes, reality. And bad Brexiter governments

#5DebutAlbums50s60s I am hopefully not the only person considering voting for the Third Ear Band’s woozy 1969 masterpiece Alchemy. Oboe to the fore. John Peel on Jew’s Harp. Terrific.

Well done Scotland and it shows up the Government’s negligence to do the same thing in England last year.

Very high water at Pulteney Weir in Bath this morning. Reminded of the 60s city centre floods which led to the weir being built.

Martin Carthy has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and cannot fulfil his upcoming gigs. What sad, gutting news. But what a great life.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Window cleaner in Farringdon, London.

RIP Kenny Morris: original punk, Banshee drummer extraordinaire. I knew him well in the Banshees and was in touch with him recently about his memoir. Which I hope will be published. God bless you Kenny

Inevitably the Restaurante El Diablo on top of the volcano in Timanfaya In Lanzarote is yet another César Manrique design, built on the spot where the underground temperature is highest - 140 degrees C ten centimetres down, 400 degrees C at six metres.

Having lunch on top of a volcano In Lanzarote.

So, every post so far from Lanzarote has been in tribute to the work of architect, artist and seer, César Manrique (1919-92), a man who saw the possibilities in the island of his birth and realised many of them, stopping over-development and creating remarkable land art and buildings.

Visited the Fundación César Manrique In Lanzarote, the home of the late architect, carved from five volcanic bubbles interconnected by lava tubes and very much a 70s dream living space.