Maple syrup’s rubbish anyway.

ARGH! 🥌

Phew! 🥌

Only three. Thank god 😬🥌

my god I need to wake up Friday morning to the news that Matt Goodwin is not an MP, I can't bring myself to feel strongly about who wins but I really, really need him to lose

I've ended up serving dinner in the second half of the curling 🤦🏻‍♂️

I'm getting very stressed watching the clock countdown while the Canadians chat tactics in the curing 🥌

Why do the Guardian cookery writers always insist on jars of chickpeas?! What's wrong with a can?!

Spot on. I wrote this yesterday about how public Services can't rely on friction to "manage" demand any more, given they have an obligation to be equitable. Given AI, something has to give. tomloosemorework.wordpress.com/2026/02/19/a...

I can't work out whether Labour members looking at a former Alba candidate who thought Ash Regan wasn't hardline enough on independence and thinking "that's our guy!" is a sign of complete and utter dysfunction or evidence that Ahmad has political skills that Holyrood has never before seen.

Today's Scottish politics news means this is the first time I've actually been interested in who the Lothian list candidates were since the days of Margo Macdonald

For some reason, whenever I'm on the Settle-Carlisle, I imagine a Midland Railway express, 125 years ago, making slow progress through the night in a storm, the passengers only aware of life outside by the glow of the gas lamps as they pass through the stations

Woohoo! Just got a pendolino from Waverley to Carlisle and got its number as we got off, and it turned out to be the last one for me to spot! #GotToCatchThemAll

Just think if we'd used all those graduates to invent robots to deliver take aways, rather than allowing crap employment rights to allow the likes of Just Eat and Deliveroo to proliferate... giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

God I love having a little bit of toasted hot cross bun with my butter at this time of year 🤤

Spoiling a lot of takes but begging a large number of other questions... "Worsening graduate fortunes, it turns out, are a particularly British problem" www.ft.com/content/649d...

Alyssa Liu so deserved that and was so gracious in victory. Just lovely

This is the ice skater you want on the dancefloor at your wedding disco 🥰

The paradox of work timharford.com/2026/02/the-... This one is quite a journey...

MSM and queers have been a bit of the canary in the coal mine for this. Sexual health was another bit of public health hived off to local authorities, who had no money to deliver it, to artificially inflate NHS funding in England. And MSM have been saying that the service has been failing for years

Um. Yeah. You're not wrong.

Getting shown up in the arena of elite impunity by *the British monarchy* is an incredible “America at 250!” achievement

I bet he's sweating now

Side point: it is literally Andrew Windsor’s birthday!

Um, wasn't the last time a member of the royal family was arrested the seventeenth century?....

Campaign for streaming services to make all episodes of drama series the same length

Cavolo nero is just a middle class ruse to try and make kale socially acceptable

I think one of my colleagues is wearing Clinique Happy! I'm back in a gay bar 20 years ago........

Open Access books are brilliant 😁 global.oup.com/academic/pro...

"We're silenced" say the GC academics, and a trans co-author and I try to use top-sleuthing to work out if a journal will instantly desk-reject anything about trans lives because they're inherently anti-trans. Sigh.

A lovely thing about the job is when a student does come to see you with problems, and you can list off the big list of ALL the ways the University can help them, and they leave feeling quite a bit more reassured that they'll get through this

Academia:

Round our flat in Edinburgh smelt of hot cross buns this morning. Falkirk smelt of burning plastic. Stirling smells of poo.

It’s also worth pointing out that concerns about new ICT being cheating machines have been levied with every advancement since the 1980s. Turnitin (and grammarly, in its defence) quelled the concerns about “copy and paste plagiarism”. LLMs made surveillance impossible. The anxiety is back. 1/7

As I was saying last night.....

I was waiting for Reform to announce they'd repeal the Equality Act. It really was testimony to how far the last Labour government had moved the agenda that the Tories in 2010 realised they had to keep it. I also think that's why Reform's support will remain at current levels, because...

My niece turned 6 today and they've gone to Legoland. The chips at Legoland ARE SHAPED LIKE LEGO BRICKS.

I did not forget the pancakes on Jif Lemon Day 😋

Happy 12-year anniversary to my favourite broadcast subtitle mistake And a happy year of the whores to you all

I can now report that the UK government has u-turned on social security policy so much it's difficult to squeeze it all into a 50 minute lecture

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHHAAHHAHAAHHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *breathes* HAHAHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHA www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I'm searching the UK Data Archive to help a dissertation student, and I've got to say, fellow academics, you are REALLY bad a depositing data. Just because you're in the UK, doesn't make your research location the UK, for a start. Oh, and learn to write abstracts...

Problem about the loneliness epidemic is, it's everywhere except in representative survey data. Let's look at where the claim comes from. 1/

It's on morning's like this, where the aluminium floor of a class 385 sucks the warmth out of your feet as your body is toasty warm thanks to the aircon blowing, that I miss the old skool electric heaters under the train seats...

Rather opportune BRAT lecture in delivering this lunchtime...

Tuesday.

Do this morning's labour market stats represent the replacement for the LFS being in the field now?

My lovely husband @tenorlead.bsky.social got me this extremely lovely, extremely enby jumper. It is ludicrously fluffy. The photo doesn't do the blue, white and pink colours justice 😁

I do agree with this suggestion, and sort of always have, but from planning history, it's one step down from what, IMO, is the key issue - land law. Land law in the England and Wales is feudal and based on rights. In 1947, the Town and Country Planning Act did the largest nationalisation of the...

So much of Bluesky can be explained by it having one population whose primary mode of interaction is jokes and another population who have taken a vow against ever getting a joke.