I swear, I did not at any point set out to live somewhere that looks like a secondhand bookshop that's had some unfortunate accident.
(Sometimes I think they are furtively breeding in the corners.)
This brought to you by the response on Twitter to the guy who assumed that people who lived with books were sending Some Sort of Deliberate Message ( Read more... )

Apparently Some US pontificator of whom I have never heard in some organ that I suspect to be Of The Right, claims that 'the monarchy represents: tradition, authority, virtue, duty, love of country, and biblical religion' and the Those Awful Liberals are trying to tear it down.

Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the history of the British ( Read more... )

Came across some advice column thing recently where somebody the person writing pretty much would have been quite happy to hear had painlessly vanished from the face of the earth had been (or so they said) Doing Some Work On Themselves, and as part of The Process had written a letter to the person which really, DID NOT WANT.
I did wonder if the ( Read more... )

But when I read, I read to read the book I'm reading. It's not a performative act...
I’ve always loved reading where people can watch me read. (And not to get me started on all those rom-com visions, because I have visions of someone coming up with intrusive queries of 'is that a good book?' or mansplaining why I should/should not be reading it or ( Read more... )

I daresay I am not the only person sighing and rolling my eyes at the intelligence that the humble and ancient art of breadmaking is being disrupted: bread-baking in America has, of late, found a friend in the unlikeliest of people: engineers, technologists, and the Silicon Valley-centric and adjacent.

I.e. blokes who need a whole lot of very ( Read more... )

- but just exhorting people to *SMILE* is not going to do the job.
Honestly, this one keeps coming up in various forms again and again, and it may say something that I'm almost inclined to say about this one, well, at least he's not advocating spontaneous *HUGS*:
#SmilesOnTheLines: 'Angry' commuter launches campaign to get Londoners smiling on the ( Read more... )

I was at A Thing earlier today in relation to a projected performance thing relevant to my spheres of interest -
(no, it's not 'Sid: The Musical!')
- and we all took part in a free-writing exercise, which in my case turned out very free indeed, more like word associations, very little that might be considered coherent phrases or sentences -
Which ( Read more... )

Fascinating thoughtful post by
( Read more... )

As a result of a train of thought which need not detain us further (especially as I am unable to reconstruct it in any kind of detail, but riffing off from seeing The Marriage of Figaro at the weekend*) I came up with the band name The Amorous Butterflies (?Cherubino and the -? or just The).
But find it hard to imagine what kind of band it would be ( Read more... )

I don't think I've ever walked the entire length of The Mall as far as Buck House, though there is a photo of me aged 4 or so under the Victoria Memorial.

The bit I have had most occasion to stroll along is the stretch between Admiralty Arch (o tempora! o mores! about to become a luxury hotel) and Grade I listed Duke of York Steps, mostly on my way ( Read more... )