I advance-ordered my copy of “The Gift Gatherers” and it arrived safely a few days ago. I’ll open it later today and celebrate with the #SpringEquinox #Badger

The Spring Equinox Badger is here to welcome in Spring and to wish you joy on this bright sunny day where day and night are equal. Spring is here! It is also the day the Gift Gatherers story begins. Spring is Here 🌼🌞🌼

St Cybi’s Church in Holyhead will welcome visitors on Saturday 11 April for a series of talks exploring the rich religious history of Holy Island. bangor.eglwysyngnghymru.org.uk/newyddion/20...

♠️♣️♥️♦️On my patreon today, 1930s Bridge Sandwiches — how to effortlessly make them for a springtime Bridge Luncheon or Supper! Join for this and thousands of other stories and recipes ♦️♥️♣️♠️ patreon.com/posts/bridge...

82% of Labour voters said they supported "Britain rejoining the European Union". Just 12% were against. - Labour needs to stop chasing Reform voters! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Labour aren’t doing anywhere near enough. Please help. world-heart-federation.org/news/covid-1...

Barley Hall in Coffee Yard, as seen from the tower of York Minster. A medieval hall with several later additions & snicket passing though it. #ArchitecturalIllustration #PenArt #drawing #ArtShare #ArtYear

“Any idea that this is part of some time-honoured English tradition is absolute rubbish. This is an almost wholly unregulated industry. I am glad to see it being licensed.” I spoke to the Times on why we shouldn’t let landowners release 50million pheasants per year: www.thetimes.com/uk/environme...

entered York, but the Vikings counter-attacked trapping the English army. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports a massive loss of life for the Northumbrians, including the deaths of both kings. The victory secured the Vikings' position in the north, and York (Jorvik) became the capital of their kingdom

the two rival kings, Ælla and Osberht. Taking advantage of the division, the Vikings captured York at the start of November 866, rebuilding its defences and using it as a base. In March the following year, Ælla and Osberht united to fight the invaders. The Northumbrians breached the city walls and

🧵3 posts The Battle of York, 21 March 867, saw the Viking "Great Army" decisively defeat Northumbrian forces, Unlike previous raiding parties the army was a larger-scale invasion force that landed in East Anglia in 865, aiming for conquest. Northumbria was a weakened region due a civil war between

The Wandsworth Shield - an Iron Age shield dating to the 2nd century BC. It was found while dredging the River Thames at Wandsworth in South London during the first half of the 19th century. Now part of the collections at the British Museum. 📸 My own. #FindsFriday #IronAge

Here’s the Battersea Shield, a masterpiece of Celtic bronzework. It was found in the Thames in the 1800s & was probably a votive offering. Has to be one of my favourite items in the museum. I could stare at it forever following those sinuous lines & curves. 🏛️British Museum 📷 mine #FindsFriday

There's a great story by Khadra Ahmed about the detective work, incl in the latest Foyer newsletter. readfoyer.com/article/meet...

It is lovely that the Art Gallery of Ontario can now name the Black woman in the gorgeous #18thc portrait they acquired 6 yrs ago & also date the painting. It's from 1775. She is Eleonora Susette, enslaved by the Dutch governor of Guyana, accompanying his widow on her return to the Netherlands.

#IronworkThursday Battles between English + Danes at London Bridge in early C10 were stuff of legend. Found in 1920s nr north end of bridge, were these #Viking weapons lost in battle, or tossed in Thames to celebrate victory?? Hope they'll reappear in new London Museum opening in Smithfield, 2026. 🏺

Unusually Mouse spoiled for gate and overthrow choice at #StJamesBristol. As if the bold blue of those doors needed further highlighting South porch (left) and south aisle #Thursgate #IronworkThursday #AdoorableThursday

#ironworkthursday #Schaffhausen

Weirdly, however, there was a period when the #NHS (or another public health body) did realise the airborne danger from #Covid - remember the TV “covid spreads like smoke” advert?

With Nick Timothy back in the news, it is worth remembering that a very large proportion of the decade of harm - economic and social - that #Brexit has inflicted on the #UK stems not from the #Referendum itself but from the catastrophic “red lines” speech he wrote for then-PM Theresa May.

When then-PM Theresa May announced that Britain would leave the #SingleMarket “Not only had [her speech] not been preceded by any kind of national consultation exercise [but the decisions] were taken, in essence by 2 people, [May & Nick Timothy]. The #Cabinet certainly had no chance to debate them.”

Photos of the 'Eagle Ward' ceiling within the Great Hospital, Norwich. This late C14th ceiling features 252 painted eagles, honoring Anne of Bohemia. Before its conversion to a ward for elderly residents, this was the chancel of the church of St Helen within the hospital grounds #heritage

Yearning for the Wall country, but unable to go just yet, & my last trip in November feels like years ago. Last stop on the way home was @vindolandatrust.bsky.social & their wonderful wall reconstructions. Looking forward to new trips later in the spring! #RomanFortThursday #PlaymobilInfestation

📢 What can you do? Tag a friend, share, and check out our GP & patient leaflets—developed with the Royal College of GP’s and backed by the Clinical Post Covid Society —to help #pwLC get the care they need. longcovidsos.org/gp-leaflet

🚨 Mythbusting #LongCovid with Dr Amir Khan🚨 Long Covid is real. It’s serious. And it’s affecting millions. On #LongCovidAwarenessDay, #DrAmirKhan joins us to bust harmful myths. Watch, learn, and share—because the more we talk about Long Covid, the harder it is to ignore.

Yet just at the moment that we face a global disinformation crisis, when robust regulation is most urgently needed, Ofcom is allowing a hyper-partisan TV station to "flood the zone" with false, hateful and biased claims - and has effectively suspended its rules. /2 pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/b...

Democracy depends on accurate and reliable media. The UK's hyper-partisan press is notoriously unreliable – but for a long time the damage was mitigated because TV and radio stations were held to a much higher standard. /1 leftfootforward.org/2026/03/alan...

GB News has turned into the Reform channel. After a New World investigation found hundreds of breaches of the rules on accuracy and impartiality, Ofcom has failed to do its job and act. We've seen what Fox News has done to politics in the US. We can't let it happen here.

This is the most under watched TV series ever A flawless adaptation of a great 19C novel, with unsurpassed characterisation (imho) And a cast to die for en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wives_a...

2/ Releasing free data & maps of who owns the vast majority of land will enable greater public scrutiny of what goes on behind the barbed-wire fences that crisscross the countryside. The new Land Use Framework is an ambitious step towards making England a greener, fairer and more pleasant land.

Investigation by Alan Rusbridger claims pattern of GB News breaching Ofcom rules pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/b...

This is a game-changing, hugely important piece of work that history will remember. Hard work, diligence, resilience & tenacity paying off for the greater good. @guyshrubsole.bsky.social is a folk hero for our times. 'An ambitious step towards making England a greener, fairer & more pleasant land.'

VICTORY! Government to open up the Land Registry - bringing to an end a thousand years of secrecy shrouding who owns England. I’ve been campaigning for this for ten years: the new Land Use Framework, published later today, makes it government policy. 1/ www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Bird place-name of the day 139: CRANSFORD (Suff). OE cran + ford. ‘Crane’s ford’. #PlaceNames #birdsandplace #naturewriting

Something odd is happening to my @bsky.app tonight - suddenly, my “Following” feed is about 50% composed of posts from accounts I don’t follow! Has this happened to anyone else? I certainly haven’t made any recent changes to my settings etc.

How my book addiction is going? I've sinned again... But look, how could I not add this glorious beast to my collection??! 😍

This is such good news. Amazing, otherworldly birds. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Fantastic news in the UK today - the government has apparently ditched its plan to force creatives to 'opt out' if they don't want AI companies training on their life's work. www.thetimes.com/uk/technolog... 🧵 1/4

So, BlueSky, one of my passions is the study of tea in WW2. I need you to watch this oral history from three ex-tea ladies from the Bermondsey WVS. Because you could guess for ONE THOUSAND YEARS and you would not guess where it is going... #skystorians #history #tea

Last month I travelled from the Highlands of Scotland to Cornwall in pursuit of spring and finished a watercolour and post every day - here's Day Two at Loch an Eilein in Scotland. www.digest.andymarsh...

Companies House has put out a statement confirming that, for five months, every company in the UK was vulnerable to the simple exploit we identified on Friday. It enabled anyone in the world to view and change their company details.

Dorothy Crowfoot (1910 –1994) was an English chemist who advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of biomolecules. She received the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and is the only British woman scientist to have been awarded a Nobel Prize. #CelebratingWomen

NYT: Paula Doress-Worters, an Author of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves,’ Dies at 87 By Penelope Green She wrote about postpartum depression when it was an unmentionable like abortion or birth control, and her research on her own suffering helped countless women. Gift link!

RIP Paula "Our Bodies, Ourselves" was so important to me at 19 because it was a crucial source of honest and open information about bodies, lives, and experience in a time when such information was otherwise almost impossible to come by.

As we continually tell you all, be guided by your mother’s wishes. #HappyMothersDay

Bird place-name of the day 137 in my crane mini series is CRANHAM (Glos), OE cran + ham. ‘Crane homestead/farm’. #PlaceNames #birdsandplace #naturewriting

This is cool. The Government is set to allow plug-in solar, low cost solar panels that families can buy at supermarkets and put on their balconies or outdoor space. "In Germany over a million have been sold, helping households with energy costs and reducing dependence on fossil fuels."

So today is International Long Covid Day. Looking back, to five years ago, it's like I was a different person. Because I was. I wasn't always tired. I could think straight. My muscles didn't always ache. My brain wasn't mush. I had energy. I could do go the gym more than once a week and not crash.

“Go a-mothering and find violets in the lane” is an old saying tied to the custom of gathering violets for Mothering Sunday, #MothersDay in the UK, kept on the fourth Sunday of Lent, three weeks before Easter. To celebrate mothers everywhere, violets painted by Anne Cotterill. 💜

“Rooks are gathered in their rookeries, rebuilding the nests of last season” Artists: CF Tunnicliffe Writer: EL Grant Watson (What to Look for in Winter, 1959)