Everything happens all at once. My debut poetry collection, Little Griefs, is out in March...but available now for pre-order: www.bluediode.co.uk/product-page...

“We know that it is the right frontal lobe…which makes empathy, humour, irony possible, and helps us to communicate and express not just facts, but our selves. Here language becomes not a tool of manipulation but a way of reaching out to the ‘Other’.” — Iain McGilchrist

Characteristically acute and engaging close reading from @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social. Well worth a read.

I genuinely enjoy cleaning squid. As with filleting fish, it’s part of the privilege of being able to prepare food from scratch and understand what you’re eating. But there’s no denying it can get a bit HP Lovecraft…

I'm thrilled with this review by Harry Speirs - really perceptive and insightful - www.indiependent.co.uk/poetry-revie...

Listening to OK Computer for the first time in years, and remembering a colleague claiming with a straight face that Radiohead were clearly an Oxford band because only locals would have known that the Karma (best restaurant in East Oxford for a 20+ year window) was next door to the police station…

’90s night on Osney Island: “..from a great height / From a great height…”

Watching the almost-a-decade-old Death in Paradise episode where Kris Marshall gets replaced by Ardal O’Hanlon, and there’s a single shared scene in a car where it becomes clear that the changing-detective trope is just a different-genre version of Doctor Who.

Please be there for the online launch! And I welcome being attacked in the Q and A - www.carcanet.co.uk/events/dirt-...

Here's a thing I wrote for Carcanet about my forthcoming book: featuring toast, marmite, Tom Baker, and taphophobia

It’s also time to thank the editors/florists @kathryngray.bsky.social & @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social for their tireless effort in continuing to produce one of the most vibrant outlets for seriously good English-language verse on either side of the Atlantic, from which we all benefit.

It's almost the end of the year, and so it's time to thank all of our contributors for 2025. CONSIDER THE LILIES! badlilies.uk/poets

Happy Christmas…

In my happy place: early mass at Blackfriars; a slow run round the meadows; then the rest of the day to prep for tomorrow’s lunch (background carols not visible in the photo). I love Christmas Eve, perhaps the most liminal day of the year.

When the cats in an almost-exclusively pescatarian household discover the pan in which duck bones were roasted for stock…

“Surrounded by Tudors…”

Mishearing the words 'the big Heaney book', my wife formed the impression that the large tome I was studying was something called 'the bikini book'.

Am I the only one to think this sounds like an album track that never made it…?

A night of anxiety dreams ended with my being swapped in at the last minute to give a speech defending the humanities to a crowd of heavily-armed legionaries, using a slide deck consisting of nothing but dollar signs. I mercifully woke up at the point I was being carted off by the secret police.

Went to see the new Knives Out last night, which is excellent locked-room fun. The plot centres on murders in the Catholic church, and it somehow pulled off the feat of having me and my 3am-atheist beloved both leave the cinema feeling our (mutually exclusive) metaphysics had been vindicated.

Stir-up Sunday…

“Surrounded by losers, misfits and boozers…”

I’ve only just discovered Lucy Beckett via a recommendation, but I can’t get over how good A Postcard from the Volcano is. Humane, poignant, perfectly-judged, and with a classicist’s eye for the action’s happening offstage (in time as well as space) but that somehow making everything more immediate.

My 8yo twins are reading Harry Potter (they’re alas a couple of years too young for Ursula le Guin) and book #2 revolves around an evil snake sneaking into a women’s toilet. No comment.

My essay collection focused on ancient literature and translation will be available for pre-order in the UK in October.

Some quick googling has just confirmed that’s the joint-second worst score in #strictly history (there’s been one other 10 and an 8; the rest of the catastrophes have been 11s or 12s).

It’s the first dance of the series and it…sucks. #strictly

Ave atque vale…

Fewer than two days now till wave twenty-three of @iambapoet.com arrives on screens large and small. There's also only a week left until YOU can audition for your place in the journal in either 2026 or 2027. Find out what you need to do, and be ready to submit next week. 🤞🏻 iambapoet.com/audition

If it doesn’t already, German should have a l compound-noun for the satisfaction that a middle-aged British man feels in a central Paris restaurant when the bill arrives and he realises his flurry of semi-idiomatic French has headed off the post-Brexit Dance of the Service Charge…

I’ve always been a sucker for a casual memento mori while crossing an international border.

Got bumped onto the earlier Eurostar at Gare du Nord just as it was about to depart (excellent) then had the hilarious experience of (1) the nice woman at the gate saying we didn’t need to run, then (2) the guys on the platform saying: ‘Run!’. [P.S. we made it]

The ticket inspector on the Rome-Milan train just got excited at this and started talking to us about medieval manuscripts. I love this whole region...

Second iteration of a new invention: “Tagliatelle alla Laura in Trastevere” (slow-cooked aubergine; garlic; Gorgonzola piccante; tuna; basil). It’s a thing.

Everyone involved in this needs to read David Bentley Hart’s __All Things Are Full of Gods__. Twice. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Roman pigeons rocking the moody album-cover vibe…

Early morning run…

‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead…’ www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Trastevere

In my third year as an undergraduate, I shared a bathroom overlooking the dome of the Radcliffe Camera and assumed that this was the most ridiculous position of unearned privilege in which I would ever have cause to wash my hands. As usual, I was wrong.

In further fourteenth-century representations of present day America, we have: armed men arresting someone on the street Lorenzetti's fresco of the effects of evil government

A fascinating revelation of staying in old Siena is seeing that the background effect in 13/14th century frescoes where the city looks like a pile-up of houses with no perspective isn’t because the painters hadn’t yet discovered vanishing points, but because that’s what they actually look like.

The view from our apartment at night looks like a De Chirico painting.

Immersing myself in Siena…

“Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante…”

Looking back through old photographs I stumbled across these from May 2021 and remembered the days when it felt as though we’d never be able to go to a restaurant again, and home cooking went a bit silly.

Hugely enjoyed Rose Ruane's tender and deeply thoughtful, hilarious and grim, artful and naked novel, Birding @regretteruane.bsky.social

I got embarrassingly excited when the specials board at the local pub in Thornham said “scampi tartare”. Then I did a double-take and realised it in fact said “scampi, tartare”…

📣 Our submission window is now OPEN for the month of August. Get your blooms to us while the sun is shining! badlilies.uk/submit

Colleague: we don’t want to get hung up on individual words at the expense of meaning. Me: like “not”, or “ filioque”.