Rounding up some translations of Count Binface that have been appearing in foreign press 🇷🇴 Romanian: Contele Tomberonez 🇫🇷 French: Comte Tête-de-Poubelle (bin-head, more accurate than bin-face) 🇮🇹 Italian: Conte Faccia-da-Bidone 🇪🇸 Spanish: "un hombre con un cubo de basura en la cabeza" (!) Cont...

I’ve just seen a woman sat outside Greggs fanning herself with a pasty. I love this country.

We went to the European Solidarity Museum in Gdansk today and it is excellent. Those sorts of museums are very good to remind you of how bloody awful real existing communism was...

Not Jill Archer! 😭 #TheArchers

I'd think more kindly of billionaires if they used their money to develop a full sized, fully functional Thunderbird 2.

Ah shit, one of the half decent airlines flying out of Edinburgh being wrecked then 😔 (And, no, I don't want to hear your stories about being delayed with them, especially if you live in London so actually have choices with who to fly with)

Continuing my theme of truly excellent development proposals* for Edinburgh, I propose that they build the Tam O'Shanter experience on the Debenhams site - a 50m tower topped with a revolving restaurant in the shape of the eponymous hat 👍🏻 *demolish the castle; it's in the way

"Tyler always joked her family would never let her become a diva...her “most outrageous” act occurred during an interview in Denmark when, convinced her big 1980s hair was a wig, a rock critic gave it a painful yank. “I was so angry I grabbed him by the balls and said: ‘Are yours real?’"

TOP BORING FACT: the French use the word Poubelle as it was the name of the Mayor of Grenoble who first installed public waste bins to try and clean-up the city. There's an interpretation panel about it in the place outside L'Hotel de Ville there

fascinatingly* the French news is translating "Count Binface" as « le Compte Tête-de-Poubelle » rather than « Visage-de-Poubelle) which is, in fairness, more accurate (his entire head is a bin, not just his face) typical British media not asking the important underlying questions * ta gueule

I can't help but raise an eyebrow that a building owned by Criterion Capital is ablaze...

It's annoying, as a tourist, being hassled by touts when you're wandering along minding your own business, but being hassled by touts for strip clubs in Gdansk just now was really infuriating...

How strong is that fan?!?

CERN broke the universe and we're trapped in a singularity and the more we get stretched to infinity, the less sense the world makes... Exhibit 373737

Our far-right leader campaigns against a man with a bin on his head, your far-right leader campaigns subject to a nighttime curfew enforced by an electronic tag. We are not the same, but we’re both pretty weird.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

A sudden wave of American lefties have started following me...

Go Arthur Fery! 🎾

To what question is this the answer: "visit an incomplete former Nazi holiday camp that's now become luxury holiday flats!" (wrong answers only)

Do the German armed forces do something at this time of the year? I have never seen so many soldiers in all my years of travelling around the place

We're deep in the former GDR now, and looking out the train windows, every town of any size has a few Plattenbau, and the whole place just feels a lot emptier and depressed compared to the old west

We enjoyed Lübeck's Moroccan population* celebrating this victory driving around the altstadt 😁 * two cars tooting their horns

Yay! Go Visma Lease-a-Bike!!! 🚴🏻‍♂️🎉

I was just about to post about local government, but then I remembered I'm on holiday. I'm growing as a person.

We're having a very nice lunch in a cafe in Lübeck that serves quite a few things with rhubarb and it's all getting a bit Rabarbarbarbarabar and we are failing to keep straight faces

I'll give DB some credit - they're very good at telling you exactly how late your train is 👍🏻

What's German for "Delay repay"... 🤔

One of those where an academic career has taken me to most of them. I reckon it's Leicester and Portsmouth for me

Our first proper DB experience on our Interrail odyssey - ALLLLLLL our trains are delayed 😁

We've invented a new variant on the "European or gay?" game: "retired social worker or Dutch?"

I'm sitting in the sun in the "Skybar" of a cruise ferry, sipping a beer, and it's bloody lovely 😁

Is this her one act as Culture Secretary that she'll be remembered for?...

When I was, I think 7, we got Miss Butler, straight out of her PGCE. She lasted three weeks with us 😬 We turned up one Monday and she'd just gone. No notice. Just left. This was the 1980s, so they just combined our class with the other two, and I spent the year in a class of over 35

Our holiday starts with an overnight ferry journey, so I'm listening to Khachaturian's Theme from the Onedin Line to get me in the mood 😁 Also get grateful that the ferry isn't going through one of the red bits of the shipping forecast...

[gong]

DR Congo getting their own back for all that Sunlight soap we made from their exploitation...

Inbox almost empty! *slams laptop shut for three weeks*

The local pharmacy is 60 years old and I have to ask: when did mould, off-white and intestinal flux become the go-to colours of jubilant balloon celebration?

I was listening to a thing yesterday that reminded me that at its height WH Smiths owned: WH Smiths, Our Price, Waterstones, Paperchase and Do-It-All www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Venus and Serena, or as they're collectively known, the Tennisy Williams

I don't think the bisexuals on YouGov's panel are particularly representative, as that level of support doesn't track with the data we get from other surveys that suggest bisexuals would be more likely to vote Reform...

We limit the speed of ebikes "for public safety", yet this study shows we'd need to limit SUVs to 5.7 km/h for them to pose the same risk to other people #motonormativity findingspress.org/article/1587...

Kettle Chips are back on special offer at Morrisons 🙌🏻

Oh that mouthful of tea almost wrecked the laptop....

This is why I feel comfortable here. It's like Fire Island, or Pride - you just assume everyone's queer and then you're pleasantly surprised when they come out as openly heterosexual

I don't mind them that much, but I just wish they wouldn't force heterosexuality down our throats so much and just be straight in private.

I'm off on holiday for 21 days from tomorrow. Let's see what howlers I've left not-done in the nether-reaches of my inbox today.....

If you can't kill people with a press release, then you're just not trying, is what I say to Ben Wallace

Poor Stan Wawrinka. The man for whom the phrase "a face only a mother could love" was invented

It's The Muppet Show with our very special guest star The Rosetta Stone!