During a Twitter thread springing off the legitimate contention that prior to mass vaccination programmes there are a lot of tombstones for babies in graveyards - or at least, records of very young children on the family memorials.
So somebody contends that In Ye Old Days children were not loved then because parents did not become attached to ( Read more... )

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie apparently helped two writers who went on to insult her online (her full essay is here).
And what particularly ratchets the whole thing up is that one of these writers apparently, and without asking or even telling her, used her name for publicity purposes for her own book (if her publishers dunnit, she could have said no, ( Read more... )

Apparently, '#dogging' was trending on UK Twitter yestere'en.
This was because, allegedly, the new lockdown rules being invoked for London, Tier 2, imply that couples who do not reside under the same roof, may not have visits for ye conjugalz indoors.
At which inventive minds immediately turned to dogging, even though the season is hardly, um, ( Read more... )

Every so often there is a hoohah online, and I think back over incidents in my own life over the years and sometimes I give a relieved shudder that, well, at least that was not All Over The Internet...(for some value of 'all over')
And that it is also lost in the mists of time and there are not virulent tweets being stored up in the Library of ( Read more... )

Have, yay, sent off the review that has been on my conscience for far too long.
And find myself Not Totally Irrelevant - my Xpertise solicited over several historical areas in which I have form, via Twitter, this week.
Admittedly, one instance was, 'able to contribute vague recollection of something that was said when I met the person in question ( Read more... )

So, last week when I was ordering the shopping online, because we had got a slot!!! (and we have a slot again this week, yay!!!), and meal-planning, I ordered an avocado.
And for reasons due to availability and so on, I was obliged to order a package of 2 avocadoes, supposedly 'Perfectly Ripe'.
Well, one of them was, in fact, ripe and fit for the ( Read more... )

Have been trying for some while now to Write A Review -
Edited volume, chapters covering a range of disciplines and a wide time/geographical spread -
I will admit, there has been a certain amount of procrastination on this, but also, a certain amount of, I think I have set time aside to crack on with it and -
- the temporary cap on my recently ( Read more... )

We will concede that Jonathan Jones has significant form for exposing the seedier contents of his id under the guise of performing art criticism - it was only last year that he outed himself as upskirting in imagination the artists' model whom he believed to have posed for Courbert's L'Origine du Monde when she happened to be painted fully clothed ( Read more... )

Can a friendship app, a digital neighbourhood noticeboard or Facebook really help me discover a new bestie?
Well, I'd think probably not, but what do I know, also I am a cynic that thinks that those cuddly friends groups that are always hanging out together and organising parties for one another are a sitcom/romcom trope and probably very seldom to ( Read more... )

Today I have been struck by several things which manifest a certain, shall we say, unmooring from linear history?
And some of these are trivial, indeed, only the sort of thing a nitpicking pedant such as myself would bother with even noticing, and at least one has serious real-life implications.
To dismiss the minor and trivial: blurb for a romance ( Read more... )