If you’re not able to do a switch backside alley oop double rodeo 900 on the half pipe I’m just not interested, yeah?

Good to see the Future Leaders Fellowships are now up on the UKRI site. Does anyone know when the Abandoned Past Relics Fellowships go live?

Trying out the new Starbucks ultragrande latte today

there's a new found footage doc about J. G. Ballard out this month by B.J.A. Samuel, and it's free to watch on YouTube here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj0V...

There’s a man in back of here. He’s the one who’s doing it.

podcast pitch: Speculative Bollocks Hour, in which Chris Mason, Laura K and Henry Z, impersonated by former contestants of RuPaul's Drag Race, sit in salon chairs + gossip bitchily about Jenrick's hair, Starmer's tight-ass walk and the size of the Russian bulge in Richard Tice's pocket.

Mondays are always a bit weird, but I really wasn't expecting an email from a garment maker in Milan asking for my measurements so that they can make me a bespoke vampire cape

Monday, 8.05am email: Tell us about your forthcoming submission to Academia Mental Health. Ok: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRGGGHH

Zürich #CorridorDread

My view of the Barbican towers from my window suggests the concrete is reacting poorly to this weather

The Essex town where I grew up. There was a lot of National Front activity there in the 1970s; decisions to let forms of social mobility like universities go just gives the town back to a swell of Reform support. Complacency in govt is going to bite them (and the rest of us) quite hard quite soon.

This week I’m going to Switzerland to go up a mountain to give a talk at the 50th anniversary celebration of Club Dracula. All this seems fine and completely plausible and I foresee no problems once I have sorted out the fact that my ticket was accidentally booked in the name of Jonathan Harker

Mandelson commissioned the Browne review which led to the current mess in English HE ...

Fascinating early science fiction just as impressive as his late noirs, written in that distinctive, radically clipped prose. A writer really worth checking out. RIP.

I wish the UKRI would stop talking about research buckets, particularly when future plans seem to imply the AHRC will feature largely under the section ‘Bucket, Kicking the’

It’s not remembered now of course but Christopher Walken’s hairstyles won several acting prizes of their own in the early 1980s, as here in The Dead Zone

#CorridorDread Glasgow

Lovely little mock-doc by Bo Wang on MUBI, An Asian Ghost Story, presenting a compelling case about why all that long dark hair might be haunted. TV News interview with a pontianak worth the entry alone!

Professorial book chat about mainstream contemporary literary fiction

Rewatching Sinners: doesn’t quite have the hallucinatory weirdness of first viewing but my god the craft of it is breathtaking

The Topography of Terror in Berlin opens with a detailed early history of how German police forces, law courts, employment law and paramilitaries were steadily aligned in the early 30s to create the National Socialist state. I think it was meant to be a warning, though, not a blueprint

Call me old fashioned, but wouldn’t it be great if Andy Burnham just followed through on what he always said about being a metropolitan mayor who actually got some things done instead of being yet another disappointing Westminster politico destined to also fail

Tomorrow (Jan 23) at 12:00pm EST, tune into a virtual event with @theprofrog.bsky.social, author of Graveyards, hosted by Smithsonian Associates! Come hear about the cultural history of graves and graveyards, from the earliest known burial sites to today’s green burials Get tickets: buff.ly/U5WiGEc

… for £4.20

Live feed from Davos

Wednesday

Amazon just asked me 'did Combined and Uneven Apocalypse meet your expectations?'

Soundtrack forJanuary

If Europe has to negotiate after all, could Macron suggest an exchange of Greenland for reversing the Louisiana Purchase and restoring the state to France? They had boats there, also

Has anyone thought about reviving the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award, then we could offer that to Trump too?

At the end of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple my friend leant over and said “Someone should lock Alex Garland up.”

And yet still David Willetts keeps failing upwards! Lord Disaster of Catastrofuck

i.m. my mother Sally Luckhurst, who would have been 94 today, but who took her own life aged 58, on the day Margaret Thatcher resigned in 1990 — beat that for a juxtaposition. I am always slightly haunted by her lack of digital trace, so here’s one of the few photos I have from happier days, c.1958

I would listen to this interview with Michael Gove on Radio 4 a bit later, but I suddenly remembered that I have an appointment to have my ears sewn into Jeff Bezos and fired into space

Always great to see one French writer being really bitchy about another French writer!

Tough day

'Have you looked at our logo recently? ... Are we the baddies?'

We apologise for the disruption to the usual Monday morning emergency fluffy kitten service

A hematologist just said to me: ‘You look like the sort of person it would be difficult to get blood out of.’ #dry #dessicated #donnish

If you’re looking for positive news, I can report that my freakishly swollen elbow has settled down a bit and I now have two elbows of roughly the same size and consistency for the first time in 2026

Today I did a spot of editing in the morning and then after lunch entered into the first bumpy foothills of the next world war. How about you?

Alarming email for a professor to receive

I’ve only ever walked out of one cinema showing in my life and that was a Bela Tarr film. If violently not for me, this is a probably a measure of proper art, as I’m poorly educated and have no taste. RIP

Monday morning emergency fluffy kitten

‘In Paris with a bizarre elbow injury” was not a sentence I was expecting to write this early in the year. Still, it allowed a splendidly dismissive ‘Pffff!’ from a pharmacist early doors for 2026 too

Online talk for the Smithsonian — coming up on 23rd Jan, lunchtime ET smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/pr...

email this morning from Keir Starmer, of all people, telling me that everything is going to be fine in 2026, so that's a relief because it was looking a bit dodgy back there for a while.