Goodbye to my favourite boots, which have taken their final steps due to a broken sole. In the past years they have walked me through more danger and adventure than would fill ten normal boot lifetimes. Thank you, dear boots. Adieu.

Have bitten off more than I can chew. Feel like I'm in a pinnacle verse of 'Went to Mow a Meadow'.

Who has written the best essay/big footnote on the wordplay/concept 'nothing' in early modern literature?

Bewitched by the romance of a Belgian garden ft.trib.al/ZuoUXuR | opinion

For other Nan Goldin superfans, Ballad of Sexual Dependency is showing at the Gagosian currently. I have loved this photo-essay since I was a teenager. gagosian.com/exhibitions/...

I've sung it a couple of times but not for ages. As you'll remember it's not the notes, it's the total concentration that is key. If your attention goes and you slip from the score you NEVER find your way back in. It's like being inside 16th century Phil Spector wall of sound.

SCREAMING. Just learned that the first man to play Mr Blobby was a classically trained Shakespearean actor. BLOBBY OR NOT BLOBBY? ET TU, BLOBBY?

Publishing in the Humanities:

I don't know anything about D. H. Lawrence's writing, but his delivery company is a joke.

First day back in the office and my computer had died by 10, going out with this glitchy, ominous message.

We got in the habit of having brandy cream in our coffee over the holidays, a habit I am finding hard to break.

I would like to report the death of a game. Or the disinvolvement of my house in one. Each year, when my boiler is checked, the plumber prints a little receipt-like report and puts it on the boiler with one of my magnets. It is stats about how the boiler is working, but in among them he types,

This painting is very notable as it earned Ireland our very first OLYMPIC MEDAL in Paris in 1924, when painting was an event

Love the sound of these rewilding plans but cannot read about them without thinking about the fact small donors are raising money to hand over £30m to *one chap* who has inherited a tract of land *the size of Athens*. Very British story, somehow.

Take a look at our blog on the essential contributions of women to fungal biodiversity data in the early 20th century. Meg Burgess discusses the importance of the history of mycology & how it affects understanding of scientific, working class, & domestic cultures. www.york.ac.uk/anthropocene...

I am going to miss the hand lettering here. It gives everything such a human feel. #handlettering #typography #signpainting #trinidad #tobago

I'd like a lifetime's supply of Epoisses. Assuming this is Santa's cheese wish engine.

In the south aisle of Beckley church (Oxfordshire) are remarkable medieval wall paintings depicting the fate of souls.

Chat GPT is very close to human consciousness because it complements me and is also a lady.

On St Giles in Oxford the christmas light theme is murderous teddy bears with red, glowing eyes.

I wanted to repost this as soon as it came out. Anna Ciaunica's work is so interesting to me, I think she's right.

I just wanted to say that I hate people saying 'financials' (financial details, accounts) and 'socials' (social media accounts).

I haven't been on here much. The top inch of my phone screen has stopped working, thereby weaning me off all technology that involves pressing 'send' or 'post', ruining my career as a carrier pigeon and most of my friendships.

fold one dish

So love wobbegongs. Everything is good about the wobbegong. Its name. Its flattened Oscar the Grouch face. Its frondy bits. Its lazy life as a hungry rug. And it’s a shark. Outstanding animal 10/10

Do I know anyone working at TNA over the next couple of weeks, who'd be willing to call up and take a snap or two of this document for me? discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C5...

I knew it was out there. Me in an am dram Arcadia when I was 18. RIP Tom Stoppard, sorry we murdered you.

A polymathic visionary, Sergio Pitol (1933-2018) was a towering figure in Mexican literary history, whose work is highly influential, while also being singularly his own. As the writer Daniel Saldaña París puts it: “he is a literature entirely of himself.”

To begin with today, happy 117th anniversary to this entirely reasonable cat

LOVE to see an F-bomb in the FT, many thanks to the OBR www.ft.com/content/e67c...

I think it is very good that the BBC is defining metaphors used in politics.

Missing from the book piracy debate is any mention of predatory academic publishing conglomerates like Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, De Gruyter Brill et al: all of which are massively profitable and don't pay anyone (authors, peer-reviewers) who made the bulk of their money extorting libraries

Really had to pause over this image that came up when I tried to look up some quite prosaic information about a gym. Like an AI borked version of Klee's angel of history. 10/10.

When will it stop raining? Asking for a cat.

Have you ever seen a cooler book?

A radio programme like the Shipping Forecast but it’s called Bin Day and it just reads out every single council in the country’s bin schedule

Hello, my name is Olivia’s neighbour and I like standing in the street banging my silly little bin like a drum at midnight.

The 2018 World Chess Championships logo was something else.

To add to our list of wonderful public lectures this term, we're delighted to announce our next Professor of #Poetry lecture by A.E. Stallings @aestallings.bsky.social Rhyme as Experiment/ Rhyme as Alchemy 26 Nov, 5.30pm Examination Schools, Oxford ALL WELCOME! No booking required.

It has been a nice year for me in which a lot of good things have happened, but my highlight is definitely my children saying I reminded them of the dad in Danny, Champion of the World.

How ill do you have to be before people stop telling you to have a whiskey?

It is a shame that every time I get ill the whole infrastructure of the area collapses in empathy, because it means I have to listen to diggers and drills instead of resting.

I once went to a wine tasting evening at an Oxford college. My answers to ‘what does it taste like?’ were wrong, I was told: the scope of appropriate vocabulary was quite small: ‘cherry, vanilla, tobacco’ and not my ‘satchel, pining, storm’. I was already seeing things other people weren’t. Then…

Enjoyable exchange from a trashy ‘if you got a PhD and left academia what do you do now?’ thread

What might the category of brain fog (cf. trauma) open up and what might it foreclose? Thanks @dialogueshg.bsky.social for the opportunity to respond to @davidjbissell.bsky.social's article on brain fog/'being out of it' journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Anyone with a USS pension, do you know what ‘retirement income builder pension credit’ means? Is this the amount you get yearly when you retire? Another inscrutable letter

I love the fact that ‘sublingual’ just means literally under the tongue, and not a set of primal noises or telepathy.

Writers, friends. For research for my new novel, I need to see the Marie-Antoinette exhibition at the V &A. sadly it is sold out for when I am in London except for members of V &A. I'll be in UK 19-21 Nov in case anyone can help. DM me. Mercciiiiii. Please RT.