Miranda Emmerson/Davies

Yellow cover of book with rabbit. Called The Man on the Train.

I’m rubbish at promoting my own work but I have a story in this cracking and ridiculously diverse anthology. Just out of the launch and in awe of my fellow writers….

Sorry, mid 80s to start of the 90s…

Yes. UEFA banned English football fans from European matches in the early 90s, I think.

Buy audiobooks & support local bookstores Libro.fm makes it possible for you to buy audiobooks directly through local bookstores.

I’ve moved increasingly over to audio for fiction (this is partly because I’m dyslexic and have to read for my academic day job and just wouldn’t consume fiction if I had to read it as well!)

But I know that quite a number of my friends have moved over to audio as well.

Am trying to use Libro.fm

We came here to help, not to take Olaoluwa Elijah Two years ago my wife, our child and I left everything familiar behind. I had worked for more than 16 years in my home country, but opportunities had dried up and the economy was faili...

Important first person testimony and argument from one of our healthcare workers in Wales and what it has taken for him and his wife to join our health workforce from abroad.

nation.cymru/opinion/we-c...

There are very few industries in which Britain can genuinely still claim to be a world leader - two of them are the creative sector and higher education. You'd never know it from listening to the Tories, lol.

My English degree led to: working in comms for multiple charities; health journalism; working in accessible comms for people with a learning disability; writing novels; writing drama for the BBC; and researching the cultural construction of Britain’s national identities. It’s a great degree.

We utterly condemn what appears to have been an arson attack on a mosque in Peacehaven.

This is basically true. With the caveat ‘no *living* single person’ but I know that’s what you meant.

Portions of the right and left are both playing games with the hierarchy of victimhood (generally in different directions). It is up to all of us who believe in a multicultural Britain and the ethics of tolerance and non-violence to resist this pernicious sorting hat of guilt and blame.

It would be great to see news and social media coverage linking attacks on Muslim and Jewish spaces as violence directed at minority groups and driven by conspiracy theories, racism and ignorance - as they both are.

It would be really helpful if we could start talking in a joined-up way about the desecration of non-Christian religious spaces. Islamophobia and antisemitism rises and falls together. The far right wants to drive a wedge between the Muslim and Jewish communities of Britain but we can all resist.

It’s never occurred to me to do it though I do always flag to the platform itself.

I mean, everything is really awful but people are still making good stuff…

Trying to anaesthetise the pain of the world with art.

In the past 48 hours I’ve downed bilingual Romeo a Juliet (Welsh and English) which I really enjoyed. And seen One Battle After Another which (with normal PTA reservations) I enjoyed immensely. And read half of The Names which is excellent.

Encountering the strange mixture of sadness and riotous absurdity at the heart of this show at the age of 15 changed my life.

This is a wonderful and nuanced assessment, almost fifty years later.

She’s gorgeous but also tasteful - an impressive duo!

Amateur view. AI bubble shows that there is too much money chasing too few opportunities for genuine innovation. The solution is to take a medium/long view and put much more funding into basic science in universities rather than cutting as is happening now. (But I would say that wouldn’t I?)

Spoke to a Turkish cabbie last night, who talked about how the English left felt as if it had disappeared; how he felt unsafe and vulnerable while watching the far-right get more popular. He was in his sixties, living in a tiny flat, and called himself one of the lucky ones. Quietly heartbreaking.

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

I’m forever recommending Community to people and yet no one outside of my immediate family likes it or can be bothered with it. Totally baffled by this.

Dork Diaries; Rabbit and Bear still has a lot of pictures but is fab and funny; Jacqueline Wilson writes for different ages, something shorter by her(?); the Loki books; Diary of a Wimpy Kid; the Moomin books; and those little Usborne hardbacks with classic stories and myths in them are brilliant.

Hard relate.

At eldest’s old school quite a lot of the alpha boys were the sons of Welsh farmers/landowners and they would compete over how many sheep their fathers could move in a weekend.

‘Your father’s never moved more than a hundred sheep,’ is an insult we’ve borrowed (as a family). It may be niche…

God, I love Graham Greene (and read him when I don’t know what to read) but he’s so bad at understanding women. The End of the Affair is so beautifully written and so stupidly and clumsily misogynistic. You want to shout: ‘Bloody hell, Graham, have a chat with a woman once in a while and *listen*.’

Man who brought curry and shampoo to UK honoured - BBC News Mr Mahomed, who lived in Brighton, passed away in 1851 and was buried at St Nicholas' Churchyard.

Lovely.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

After a really tough time at school, eldest started at a new sixth form this week and is really happy. This means so much.

Probably silly but I’m so upset about Angie Rayner. I have so much respect for her. She has had to fight her way to where she got. I don’t believe she’s a bad person. I don’t believe she’s corrupt. And she was basically the only wc woman at the top of government.

Letter text reads: History written off 'I agree that the BBC’s decision, apparently a fait accompli, taken without prior consultation to refashion the BBC Written Archive Centre in Caversham (re Vanessa Thorpe’s article “Historians dismayed by ‘scandal’ of BBC cutting access to written archives”, News, last week), is very disappointing. It appears to run counter to the BBC‘s compact with the public, Our BBC,Our future, and arguably the broadcaster’s charter itself. This would have deeply disturbed my father, Asa Briggs, the first official historian of the BBC who played a key role in setting up the archive. As Adam Sisman writes in his new biography, my father rescued countless papers, broadcasts and artefacts. The archive has since provided a valuable and rich seam of research material. The plan to step up the release of material in themed batches, rather than as now, respond to specific research enquiries clearly ‘dumbs down’ the value of the archive as an open and accessible resource.' Dan Briggs Lewes, Sussex

Absolutely delighted that Dan Briggs, son of the BBC's first official historian Asa Briggs, has written to The Observer supporting the need for on-request vetting to re-instated at the BBC Written Archives Centre (p.29; not I think online).
Letter's wording is in the .alt element.

#waccampaign

Exactly. He’s a thoughtful guy, not prone to extreme pronouncements. I wouldn’t lump him in with the reactionaries of his generation.