Where's a decent pub in London zones 1-2 that does nice pub food? Not fancy, but competent?

Richard Dawkins writing a novel just might turn out to be the catastrophic event which kills off the 'celebrity as novelist' species altogether.

Maybe Dawkins can go for the FIFA Literature Prize instead.

I always find the reader-nominated Waterstones 1997 list of the 100 best C20 novels fascinating in this regard. It also has Tolkien at no.1 but includes a lot of titles fashionable at the time: *Trainspotting*, *Sophie's World*, *Captain Corelli's Mandolin.*

On to series 2 of *A Very Peculiar Practice.* The scene about training new lecturers reminded me of my own training course, in which at one point the two seminar leaders had a hissed argument behind a flipchart as to which bit to do next.

*Infinite Jest* is apparently the 31st best novel ever written, according to people. www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

Surprised to see on jobs. ac. uk that there are 15 literature jobs currently on offer, until I saw that most of them are schools/colleges advertising for GCSE/A-Level 'lecturers'. It feels as if this misuse of professional titles should be illegal in some way.

But the association of Reform with rioting isn't new. Have the Guardian already forgotten the Farage riots of 2024? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Watching the BBC cricket highlights and wondering, as always, why test cricket isn't on the list of sporting events that must be shown on terrestrial TV.

Fairly recently I read something which referred to Noel's House Party as "hauntological", which made me realise how far that idea has become unmoored from Derrida's original concept.

I think I'll have to admit that my AL-Star is simply a faulty product. I've flushed it several times, with no lasting effect. The feed is stuck in the housing, which seems to be full of ink so clearly there's an issue with the feed. I've had it too long to get any kind of refund. Annoying.

Once again, I am asking journal editors to send the request to review a submission first and *then* the notification that an account has been created for me in the review system, not the other way around.

My first ever conference paper was at Keele, at BAVS 2004. I stayed in Holly Cross and on the first night got into bed to find I was sharing it with the hugest spider I've ever seen. I took that room apart like Gene Hackman at the end of *The Conversation.*

*A Very Peculiar Practice* is spectacularly good, but it's made me realise that I've never had any business at the University of Birmingham, so I don't recognise any of the locations.

Shedding 608 academic posts but creating 75 new managerial posts. No clear answers as to what those posts are, who they will go to, and why we need them.

Good that BBC South Today have correctly identified Tommy Robinson as a "far right activist", whereas on the national news he was merely an "activist".

Oswald Mosley was barred from appearing on the BBC for 34 years. Surely they can manage to avoid Goodwin for 34 days at least

I see the far right Restore/Reform nexus are calling for capital punishment again. Every year I do a seminar on Derrida's *The Death Penalty* and the first thing I do is ask students if they're in favour or not. I can confirm that execution is not a vote winner among the 18-24 set.

The subtitles weren't actually from *The Sopranos*, but from *Camilla Parker-Bowles Meets Kwasi Kwarteng*.

Bernie Quatermass getting tanked up in the airport bar before boarding for Malaga.

If this matters to you in any way whatsoever, it is a good sign to begin a full reexamination of what matters in your life, and why

Not a specific teacher, but as an undergraduate I remember going into the education section of the library and spotting books on PE. It was at that point I realised with a shock that PE teachers had also been to university. I'd always assumed they'd just collected tokens from crisp packets.

May's reading.

On a mat, a peer.

A final proofread this morning (and catching a few final errors) and... it's off. Well, off to my university's research office, who will then submit it to the AHRC this week. The main thing is that after years, it's off my desk. Do I get a second celebratory pub visit?

"You took your time, you bastard!"

The great thing about watching repeats of Fortean TV on @talkingpicturestv.bsky.social is that you can Google where these people are now. Corky Ra, who was just on talking about his mummification process, died in 2008 and, yes, his body was mummified.

I was doing A-Levels in 1995 and the Penguin 60s (orange and classics) were an amazing series. I think I've got most of them but always on the lookout for the others. Was the second orange series ever released in its entirety?

Will be shortly pressing send on a £750k AHRC bid which has taken pretty much a decade to draw together with collaborators across the UK and Europe. But first, the pub.

Has anyone here read Claire Dederer's *Monsters*? I'm 70pp in and wondering if the remaining 200 are really worth my time.

We could spend a whole year on Outlook alone. The arbitrary way in which it decides whether an email has been read or not. The inability of the search function to find emails. Declining an event and then having the invitation completely vanish, so you can't explain to the organiser why you declined.

Really enjoying *A Very Peculiar Practice* on BBC4. As a bonus, it turns out I already own a Lowlands University scarf as it's the same as my old place. @world-of-telly.bsky.social

A university that does not understand the value of physical libraries staffed with real librarians is a university that does not understand how knowledge is kept.

Re-reading Dickens' *Pictures from Italy*, and struck by how uncanny Dickens finds the place, especially his deja-vu at Ferrara. Interesting comparison here to Freud's story in "The Uncanny" about being lost in an Italian town, and my own being completely creeped out by Fiumicino.

That the present government would let this enormously valuable sector collapse is unforgivable. But they’ve done next to nothing.

My surname frequently gets mangled into 'Prittard', a surname that does not actually exist (recorded instances of it can invariably be identified as errors for someone with my actual surname). I had hoped that (3rd?) cousin Alison's fame during COVID would finally kill it off.

"This is why being an AI booster requires you to debase yourself. You must accept becoming a dogshit dealer that loves accepting and receiving low quality goods"

Seems a good time to say that my first ever vote, in the 1997 general election, was in a seat which was a contest between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, so fortunately I'm not taking any responsibility for this. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

A "heat dome" you say, BBC News?

"We also ranked *The Great Gatsby* above *Bleak House.*"

Also people don't realise that most academics enter the labour market late, having done higher degrees on minimal pay

I suspect that a lot of the lack of concern about sweeping academic redundancies is the perception that academics come from upper middle class backgrounds and can simply fall back on family wealth or trust funds. Nope. I live solely on my job like, y'know, almost everyone else.

But 34.8C *isn't* exceptional in summer. It happened in 2025, 2024, reached 33.5 in 2023, was exceeded in 2022, reached 32.2 in 2021... I expect the weather amnesia of "Britain doesn't get summer" from a bloke in the pub, but not from the Met Office.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that the main effect of Restore is to normalise the Tommy Robinson fan club that is Reform.

//Naomi Wolf mode on// Surely only if they were gay! //Naomi Wolf mode off//

Everyone's talking about that error about Shabana Mahmood's height, but I remember that time the Guardian casually announced that Victorian schools used to execute their pupils.

The "more reasons to shop at Morrison's" ad campaign is the very worst example in a long history of advertisers not understanding the basics of scansion.

A reminder that the abandonment of Twitter was not primarily political but technical: it had become simply unusable. Every other post was an advert; unless you paid for it, posts got seen by five people. It went the way of Facebook.

Book shopping bonanza in Bodmin yesterday. All this for £7.

Just a reminder that both seasons of A Very Peculiar Practice are now available on iPlayer. Once you've seen the series, please consider taking a look at our recent podcast about it: youtu.be/FFxzLa67PC0?...