you know I feel like we French get done in for being obnoxious with tourists but I froze and forgot one (1) verb in an entire exchange I otherwise conducted wholly in Spanish with a waitress in Spain and yes, she brought me a menu in English afterwards

sorry I know I said I was on holiday but I do need to briefly come back to shamelessly gloat about this piece I wrote basically exactly five years ago, in 2021, about Andy Burnham and metro mayors: www.independent.co.uk/independentp...

This makes me happy because Washington has finally embraced Balkan aesthetics. Every resident of Skopje sheds tears of joy at this abomination. Total North Macedonian cultural victory.

Agatha Christie once noted that she always assumed she'd be able to afford a servant but never thought she'd be able to afford a car (and this was post industrial revolution obviously)

I remember queuing behind a guy at JFK whose luggage contained nothing but miniature cheeses and pepperoni. Security informed him it was just below the amount he was allowed to take on a plane. “Yes,” he said, donning his cowboy hat. “I know.”

right I am now on holiday for EXACTLY 72 HOURS, wish it were more but we are where we are, do not mention work to me until noon Thursday, thanking you ever so kindly

I hope the next bond markets are women

enthralled by the woman next to me at the airport whose little suitcase contained nothing but cat food and packs of cigarettes

very funny that we're off to Spain on holiday for a few days today and I'm genuinely happy about this forecast

the actual defensible critiques of woke 1 imo are not about how it treated its enemies but rather how it treated its nominal friends

This guy is senior staff at xAI, fork found in kitchen, etc

watching Constantine (2005) and as someone who mostly knows the character from Legends of Tomorrow I have to say it's quite disquieting to witness a Constantine who isn't a huge slut

please imagine, if you will, being me, and finally picking up the Joan of Arc biography by Vita Sackville-West which you'd had on your shelf for months now picture yourself learning more and more about Jeanne, her life and what happened, and feeling righteous fury against Charles VII rise in you

feels bad that the guy who was chief of staff to the Prime Minister not a decade ago is now associating himself with an extreme right party! feels very bad!

so AppleTV for some reason decided never to advertise any of their shows anywhere but at least once you become a subscriber the app helpfully tells you about all those new shows, right?

Apple TV doesn’t do marketing? Do the whispers of a blind prophet in the Kabul market not count? The petroglyphs depicting the Morning Show found in the Forbidden Tomb in Giza? I personally learnt about See from a statue in Rome that spoke in the voice of a long-dead child.

may go longer on this at some point but also think it's something all left figures should think about! if you're the sort of person the press and elites will attack regardless then you cannot give anyone even an inch, your politics must be the only attackable thing about you

Me: I’m just saying, the Nazgûl aren’t good at their job Date: how did you get the accent on there verbally

boy do i not want to read any of these people’s books lol

god this is harrowing - obviously Slava Ukraini but those poor lads

as someone who now frequently travels between London and Oxford, can I just say - going to Oxford with the fast train from Paddington: try-hard behaviour, more money than sense, arriviste going to Oxford with the slow train from Marylebone: elegant, bohemian, lady of leisure behaviour

Thriller idea: man with world's second smallest penis has to stop him.

boooooring

absolute height of comedy is when they cut to the goal and you see how many kid keepers they've got

haven’t seen it this pride month yet so reposting rn, gm all

ended up feeling too exhausted to actually sleep well last night, another great victory for the human brain and body

Doctor Trivago

I will never not respect Biden for that answer, he was exactly the right level of dismissive to that dumbshit line of questioning

oh Norway losing against France is it? Norway not actually The Best Country In The World That Can Do No Wrong Ever? people in Oslo maybe finding out for the first time in their lives that things actually can be unpleasant? what a pity!

Every Mamdani scandal is like “he loves his mom and writes very well for a 15 year old”

hello from a train, where I must unfortunately inform you that it is also warm

CBS staff, you have one job and that is to incept Bari Weiss into believing she can win over Isaac Chotiner.

Pass this on. You never know who might need it and it could make a huge difference if someone is struggling for whatever reason

oh god shut up shut up shut uppppppp, Kim there's people that are dying

oh god it's too warm to receive spam like this, I'm gone, lost it

let me be the first to say: think I'm hitting a bit of a psychological wall with this heatwave and I worry I'm going a bit doolally

guys I'm sorry I say this with love but I enjoy it so much when everyone on the timeline does some silly little politics quiz and like half a dozen people pop up grouchily to say "hmmmm I just don't think this is very rigorous", like the rest of us were about to go into battle based on our results

I wrote an essay on the fact that I love not understanding football!* *I actually wrote it back in 2021 when football still felt fun but I did give it a proper edit this week youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/why-i-love... [free to read!]

sure, I'll allow it

One of the lessons of the last two years is that Labour urgently needs to stop being afraid of its own shadow. Burnham should appoint whoever he thinks would be the best Chancellor and throw his authority behind them. The Daily Mail will try to kill them anyway. So just govern.

please refrain from saying "Marie that was fucking stupid why did you do that" as I obviously realise now that it was fucking stupid but: why did I decide to go for a half-hour walk before starting work, what possessed me to do that, I feel unwell now and it's not even 10am

wait you guys don't do that too

I would prefer it if it were cooler, at 8am

have suddenly got myself into a bit of a blind panic on this - if I spent around two/three minutes outdoors within a few metres of an ebike battery fire, do we reckon I'll be okay? naturally I have convinced myself that's going to be It for me

good afternoon, guess who just threw water on an electrical fire because she thought it was just some leaves on fire but turns out they were hiding a large exploding battery lol (I'm fine, nothing bad happened, the exploding is over, it was out on the street, but oh my god the Adrenaline)

🚨🚨🚨 if you're in London and your heat tolerance is decent it's now actively pleasant outside tomorrow will be horrid again so enjoy while you can 🚨🚨🚨

I notice that with people noticing Reform's increasingly aggressive rhetoric towards EU immigrants, a common reaction - from perfectly nice individuals - is "it's awful to think you may have to go home" - when our home is so obviously here, in Britain. This angers me even more than Farage's threats.

have finished writing the first 10% of the long piece I'm working on this week