m john harrison

Ian Patterson · Miss Dior, Prodigally Applied: Jilly Cooper

‘If you set aside the “raunchy” cover pictures and the publicists’ emphasis on wall-to-wall sex, you do find something worth reading and worth thinking about, which is pleasure, that most ticklish of subjects.’

Ian Patterson on Jilly Cooper​, from 2017: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

Mining For Material — Hastings Writers Workshop A writers workshop focusing on finding material for writing

Off to Hastings in December to inspire & support other writers. Promise to smile & laugh more than the photo suggests! Please spread the word, literally & metaphorically!
@hastingswrites.bsky.social

Ruined stone barn with ivy taking root near Birtley, Hexham

ruins and roots irl

Tales of the Weird: An Autumnal Festival | British Library Tales of the Weird: An Autumnal Festival is back for a full weekend at the British Library. Inspired by the Library’s cult Tales of the Weird series of got

A weekend full of the good stuff. Looking forward to my chat with Sam Leith & Leon Craig. events.bl.uk/events/tales...

Some fine company to be in. I love Claire Keegan. Thanks!

you used to be able to wildly burn the old you at midnight, now you have to sort the fragments so they can be cast into the correct bin at the municipal dump, somehow it's not the same vibe

When a shortlist includes @cdrose.bsky.social and @benpester.bsky.social someone knows what they’re doing.

spectacular!

Weathered medieval timber frame set into a patchwork wall of brick and stone at Wirksworth, Derbyshire, showing ghostly remnants of a lost building frontage.

A joy of a sight for #ThrowbackThursday - A ghost gable 👻 - caught like a fly in amber at Wirksworth in Derbyshire

Sarah Hall and Charlie Porter among writers on ‘genre-defying’ Goldsmiths prize shortlist The £10,000 award, whose judges include Mark Haddon and Megan Nolan, recognises ‘mould-breaking’ fiction

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

I'm sick of sitting 'round here trying to write this book.

Why do I keep all these clothes I don't wear. (No need to answer that. It's a commentary rather than a question, like I'm standing in front of the clothes rail shaking my head at my own weirdness & you haven't anything you can add so you shake your head too & go downstairs & make a cup of tea.)

In the old days I could have had a three day bonfire going in the back garden to get rid of a lot of this stuff. Then I would have felt like Audsley King staring into the flames etc (niche).

Adapt or die: the architects pioneering a new wave of building reuse Thanks to innovators and smart policy initiatives, demolition is becoming more unfashionable. But is the tide changing fast enough?

on.ft.com/42X20zf Adapt or die: the architects pioneering a new wave of building reuse

Three derelict boats leaning against each other

Abandoned boats at Salen, Isle of Mull

It's one of the lethal ones with 11mil & 9mil slots, encouraging the 9 to fail when you tried to brake with it.

Check. Took the spring off in about 1978.

Such nostalgia.

Have now got rid of 4 maybe 5 shelves of books, mainly review copies 1990 to 2012. Now starting on yellowed magazines, mss, obsolete cables & plugs, dusty souvenirs & etc. I bet I keep the climbing gear, flagship of which is a 9 mil rope last used for anything at all in the 1980s.

Getting in well with Caroline Faser's Murderland.

TV VOICEOVER, SCREEN SHOWING MISTY FERN FOREST: "The pre-Anthropocene, when paleontologists roamed the Earth."

a frog holds itself upright while poking its upper body out of a manhole cover set in a pavement or road

truth coming out of her well to shame mankind

😎

if only there was a way of swapping out the soundtrack & dialogue of the former with the music & lyrics of the latter

Running a secondhand book stall in the marketplace of ideas.

Trying to type in my 6 digit authentication code before it stops being valid is what I do to feel the Adrenalin rush, to feel alive.

a graden, with trees & bushes, seen through scaffolding, early twilight

scaffolding & gate. walls. part of a lawn.

scaffolding & ladders. a view out over a garden & car park to buildings

this + thread