meadowyarn

Your cricket posts are confirmation (if it were needed) that blue sky is my new home. So many cricket fans emerging from behind their academic/artist/musician facades today. It's great!

steve smith, you scored 17 on your specialist subject, "getting hit by jofra archer"

That ‘ashes in oz’ feeling of impending doom as you switch on the radio at 7 in the morning to find out what happened overnight… 😆

"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

Charles Babbage, inventor of the mechanical computer, 1864

Totally read that as UEA. Which also makes perfect sense…

Every now and then it works, as if by magic, and I’ve no idea how/why, and it is still no more likely to work the next time.

Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay

And why call it 'golden ticket'?

Disgraceful language. These people have lost everything. Should they also lose their spouses and children?

A reminder that last year 4,671 family reunion visas were granted.

4,671.

Does anyone think this number is a major problem for the UK economy and society?

Imagine receiving a pay rise 18 times more than the average UK salary of £37,800.....

Ok. They’ve pissed me off.

I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards:

1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.

Love it! Was about to ask if there was any 'cheeky Monk' on the set list... 😆 Kids love live music don't they, and they're often frowned upon at performances, especially of 'serious' music, which is shockingly short-sighted given the average age of the audience at most classical/jazz gigs!

You can’t out-fash the fash.

Stop trying. It makes us hate you, and the fash will never love you.

I can take or leave the middle class puff pieces, it’s the rampant transphobia that I’ll never support.

She doesn't! And I'd completely forgotten too but am now recalling the very familiar struggle to get it into the boot of the car (all our car purchases start with 'can we get a double bass in the back of it'!) She's about to head off to London to spend four years studying jazz, exciting times!

Can govt please explain to those of us who aren’t racist or anti-immigration, who’ve protested peacefully in far greater numbers against Brexit and in support of Palestine… why we are not worth representing at all? Why is it ok to doggedly ignore us in favour of a minority of ignorant haters?

Politically acceptable UK racism is rising, even under La... As I wrote these words last autumn: “We have made progress... even though that progress remains fragile and insufficient”, little did I realise just how ...

This is outstanding. God knows what Labour is doing: legitimising the racism that'll be its undoing, losing the coalition which put it in office, trying to secure voters who will never support it, digging its own moral grave.

observer.co.uk/news/opinion...

“Feminism for me has always been rooted in intersectionality and as a society we should be proud of how we treat our most vulnerable. That’s what I want to be part of working towards.” #WhyWeSigned

“Feminism for me has always been rooted in intersectionality and as a society we should be proud of how we treat our most vulnerable. That’s what I want to be part of working towards.”

🩷 This is what one woman said when we asked our founding members why they joined NION Women.

#WhyWeSigned

THREAD The media treats racists in the same way it treats transphobes. Less than 1000 racists protesting against refugees gets loads of mainstream media publicity, like the transphobes got from MSM.

Meanwhile counter-demos & demos against the Gaza genocide with 1000s in attendance are ignored.

1/5

Jazz-head-double-bass-playing teen offspring suggested this list of artists/albums to check out:
Cole Pulice
Jakob bro
Bill Frisell
Portico Quartet
Bandes Originales - Vincent Courtois, Daniel erdmann, Robin fincker
(+ Memoirs - Paul Bley, however, she appreciates that 1992 is not that recent...)

I mean, a girl's got to keep her knitting needles somewhere...

This Labour govt risks £bns of public funds on Sizewell C- vulnerable to coastal erosion & rising sea levels. Thorpeness, just over a mile away, holds EMERGENCY meeting as the village is likely to lose homes to the sea in the very near future- yet no govt ££s available to help!
#SayNo2SizewellC

Thanks, I will. She's studying music, so destined to a life of financial insecurity 😆 (although aren't we all!!)

One of ours is off to London in a few weeks. Maximum maintenance loan with London weighting = £13,700, rent in halls £12,500. That leaves £400 PER TERM for food/travel/everything else. We have no available funds to top it up. How is that going to work? She’s panicking about money already!

UK readers, if you can't afford to buy any of these books, order them from your local library. The authors will see your support through loan figures and PLR. You don't even have to finish reading them if you don't want!

Pecksniff: Voters would approve of 80% of immigrants – but nobody dare tell them In which Mr Pecksniff lays before his readers for their approval certain observations and speculations reflecting on the political life

Labour came to power under the banner of ‘change’.

Every poll for years had been saying change is what everybody wanted.

Yet the government had made it its business to go out of its way to portray business as usual.

@pecksniffsdiary.bsky.social

It has been six years since the Gender Autonomy Act was passed in Iceland. In those six years, none of the usual fears that anti-trans advocates warn against have manifested - and trans people, non-binary people and intersex people have enjoyed increased rights and protections.

A mock-up of a Guardian column. The headline reads: Every autumn I am shunned by friends and neighbours. But I think I've finally broken the curse. The text reads: Year after year, I struggle to give away an enormous crop of scarred, worm-eaten apples. Each Autumn I rise, my scarred, worm-eaten hands digging up through the earth to reach the surface, my sightless, worm-eaten eyes facing the cold white moon above. On flesh-stripped, worm-eaten legs I tread the desire paths which wend their way through the trees, pausing with each broken step to bend and reach for the mangled fruits which pepper the orchard floor, the heavy hessian scrumper’s sack which hangs from my whip-wounded, worm-eaten shoulders becoming gradually filled to the point of bursting. When my sleepless bones can carry no more, I set out on the slow walk towards the village, to find the kin of those who made me pay for the theft of their crop, ready to give back what they so cruelly demanded. My scarred, worm-eaten hands knock on each door, and I await their answer. I bring their own rotten fruit, ready for them to taste.

A mock-up of a Guardian column: The headline reads: Scatter cushions and bedspreads - can someone explain to me what they're for? The text reads: Every night I hurl them off the bed. Every morning they are replaced. I don’t know how or by whom, but the cushions are there; varied in size and colour and pattern - some small, some large, some soft as marshmallow, some rigid as bedsprings - they crowd the pillow where I lay my head each night like a Greek chorus. And like a chorus, some nights before I throw them on the floor, I swear I can hear them whispering. On the last night of my stay, I have disquieting dreams. My limbs whither to almost nothing, becoming little more than limp tassels attached to a bloating trunk. I feel my neck retract, pulling my rapidly diminishing head into the straight line of my shoulders, my bones disintegrating into mush. Soon I am looking out through sightless eyes from a body that is all torso, its skin now woven like fabric, muscle- and bloodless. I strain every part of what remains of my body to edge myself along the wooden floor and up the bedpost to the bedspread. There I join the chorus and finally hear their whispered song, now clear to my earless ears as what it always had been - a siren call.

A mock-up of a Guardian column. The headline reads 'Where have all the headphones gone on public transport? The noise is eating into my soul'. The text reads: The bus is stuck in traffic, has been for nearly ten minutes now. I’m at the front on the top deck, so I can see the problem up ahead - two vehicles have collided, strewing debris across both lanes. Two police cars frame the scene, their blue lights pulsing in the evening rain. All I want to do is get home. The headache which has been squatting in my skull this last while is filling more and more of my consciousness, blotting out every other thought, every other sensation. Everything but the sound. Somewhere behind me, music is playing, the tinny tsch tsch tsch of a mobile phone speaker. The noise is eating into my soul. It’s like a skewer on which the pain is impaled and revolving, a parasite buried so deep it has become an integral part of the host. I try to move my head to see what kind of person would subject others to this torment, but all I can glimpse is an outstretched bloody hand on the bus floor, the cracked phone beneath broken fingers. Above the noise, beyond it, I hear the sound of ambulances approaching. I try to turn again, to see the face of my torturer, but I can barely manage more than an inch. The shattered windscreen which cradles my bloodied head like a crown just won’t let me move any further.

My talented wife @jeaniefinlay.com has turned my 'Adrian Chills' stories (short horror stories inspired by the Guardian columns of Adrian Chiles) into actual columns!

Totally read that as ‘cartoon based’

We were the 'now', we invented it, man.

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