I gave up at the hour. Private equity owned shit. #DoNotDX

#DXDelivery are unutterably shit. I have ordered a mature bare root tree, specifically NOT to arrive today as I’m on holiday until this evening. The delivery was scheduled for Thursday and then this morning it was changed to this morning. I’ve been on hold for 31 minutes so far. Don’t DX it.

Real talk from Stacey Abrams We in trouble, y’all.

Wow. More info via Instagram:

I’m not American and I’m no expert but I recall thinking this at the time: nice guy, but what happens if a bad guy gets in?

I once brushed shoulders with him in the lobby of Trump Tower, in 1988. I still feel dirty.

I’m just old enough to remember it - and hated it. Decimalisation made maths simple.

Nothing but respect for MY president, wishing a happy Presidents’ Day to all 🇺🇸

Lawfare reforms dropped for fear of lawfare. What a bunch of cowardly cunts.

In 2010, I was earning £110,000. But I didn’t feel I was doing anything useful. So I gave up, spent a year earning nothing and paying £8,500 for the privilege, then started as a teacher on £20,000 a year. Best move I ever made. I look back on my time as a teacher with pride.

Hey Siri, where can I buy a small, portable set of tyre shredders?

Paddington on the Southbank

Also reminder that I am running to provide support for queer and gender non-conforming kids in the UK borough with the highest level of child poverty.

Drop an album that was important to you when you were nineteen.

Bondi has sucked all the youth out of Leavitt.

We’ve had some great Welsh lessons with our waitress at the hotel this evening: “Cachau bant, pen pidyn gawsog” is a great way to start a conversation next time you walk into a pub.

There’s a Western Hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) in the front garden of a house where we lived 25 years ago. I love to pass it and see how its present owners keep it pruned to a three metre high bush, not knowing that it really wants to be a mighty seventy metre giant.

fyi 🏉 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

When I saw the words “Men’s Skeleton”, this very clearly manly skeleton picture came to mind: a former colleague put it on LinkedIn after his hip replacement.

This. THIS. It’s bloody heartbreaking.

Narrator: it is, in fact, the role of the governing party to make and/or change laws. Parliament, not the judiciary, is sovereign.

Meanwhile on #TerfIsland…

My love for Sam Ryder could light a thousand suns, and tonight I was sitting so close to him as he sang at the Parenthood concert at the Southbank Centre that I could swear I heard his voice under the amplification.

Mine: and yes, verrrrrr class-revealing.

✨Making Her Mark: A Celebration of Women in Art✨ Discover a powerful new exhibition at Penlee House (30 April – 27 September 2026) celebrating the impact and legacy of women artists - over 50 remarkable works spanning from the 1850s to today. Find out more: penleehouse.org.uk/exhibition/m...

To be clear, the Home Office has always been a bunch of cunts. One of my former civil servant colleagues once joked that the only thing that united the police, probation service and prison service (before MoJ split off in 2007) was their hatred of the Home Office.

A billionaire’s face on another billionaire’s creation. Both soulless.

One of my former colleagues conducted a review of the student loans scheme in its early days. The review concluded that it was likely that loans would never be paid back and that the scheme didn’t make financial sense. But hey.

My (Scottish) family’s history is littered with fathers forced to put their names on birth certificates. My great-grandmother, an unmarried single parent, put her head in the oven and gassed herself. My grandmother was brought up by two aunts, with the help of a rich ‘uncle’.

What is your favorite Disney movie?

A bit long but here’s Marx from the 1844 manuscripts providing an exposition of Goethe and Shakespeare on the power of money that all happens to sum up exactly where we are right now. (Reminded of this passage by Epstein’s capture of prominent academics.)

NEW: The Supreme Court are arses. I have a dairy intolerance and pay 50p per cup extra not to get ill. I want to drink stuff that doesn’t make me feel ill and not feel like a freak for doing it. Having a choice of milks seems a pretty cool thing, unless you’re in Big Farming.

“I’ve reviewed over 50 sticky toffee puddings” is an incredibly powerful way to begin a video

Prep involves drinking pints of mango gloop and shitting water a lot. Procedure may involve fentanyl. Outcome may involve not dying. Taking everything into account: getting off my tits on fentanyl *and* not dying is a pretty good deal.

This makes me feel warm every time I hear it. BBC Soul Music did a lovely programme about it. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

A friend once told me, “Georgian kidnappers will hide you in their house and feed you well, but your Chechen…” pause for effect, “will cut bits off you to send to your family. You get to choose which bits.” Our country has been kidnapped by racists and we’re being asked which bits we want cut off.

Yeah but tell me how supporting non-violent protestors counts as terrorism in the UK.

Proud and humbled to have shared this on my LinkedIn timeline. Fucking charlatans, the lot of us!

Nightmare for the Tories because he’s just a little bit more right wing than they are. Go on Labour: self-destruct.

So lovely. So doomed to die young. Such a shame she didn’t die younger. www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118730991...

“His father Lorenzo, brother Jose Luis, and other Saikhon strikers tried to aid Rufino, but they were kept away for more than an hour by continuing gunfire from the foremen.” Scum then; scum now. USA - plus ça change.

Yes. A friend, a respiratory specialist who quit after the lockdowns because he was getting too angry with the NHS, told me, “What we see in the lungs is just the most visible aspect of Covid.”

“We’d like you to see our proposals for ensuring that you’re no longer disturbed by cockerels. Just step inside.”

DWP has always been a bunch of cunts (speaking from 2005-7 experience).

The cabinet breaks ranks…

Aberdeen, February 2003. Daughter, aged 8, walking with me through town, wearing warm clothes and her woolly South American hat. A stretch limo passes by with barely dressed hens hanging out of the sunroof. “I love yer fucking hat!” one shouts to my daughter, with the broadest Aberdonian vowels.

I love this idea!!!

Lady in Red