Jennifer Williams

I’m dealing with it by putting the Harry Styles Netflix thing on in my bedroom and pretending not to hear when I’m called down for tea

I have assumed there is something clever here I don’t understand about Tory strategy, which I’ve so far missed. Reform I understand slightly more, as they’re given to foreign policy (and economic) stances that are on occasion wildly out of line with more than a small % of voters

It baffles me that anyone thinks an electorate exhausted by economic precariousness, more than the sustained memory and political mythology of Iraq, would be up for it.

Presume I’m meant to respond to this with “oh shit”, but I imagine the centre of gravity in this country is roughly “glad we’re on the same page”

Yeah mine was exactly the same and made the point repeatedly to no avail. Meanwhile he was quietly indoctrinating me with long summers of Botham and Gooch and John Humphrys’ brother, who covered rugby on Wales Today

My mother disdained all of his sporting pleasures as “he’ll watch anything involving a ball”, so she was no help on the football front

I think it’s true of sport in general - localised cultures mixed up with class in a messy way. My dad came from a N Wales farming family: played every sport including football but followed cricket and rugby, not football. Which is mainly why I have no strong football inclinations

Certainly not from the matches I went to at LCCC last summer 😂

I’d add cricket tbh. Coded posh but by no means always the case

Yeah I saw someone on this thread from Cornwall describing it in a way that sounded very Welsh

The latter two categories also cross over considerably

well aware of the difference. Im Welsh and live now where I live. He said rugby

Tell that to Wales, or Wigan. Although I suppose both are getting there

Not unlike rugby union in wales

Superlative ending though

Not the main matter in hand but interested to know what that local media strategy is

I would rather not be baited into being more worried about the thing I’m already worried about

I went looking for this article online last night (it wasn’t there yet) because I suspected it wasn’t what it sounded like. But there’s an implicit glee (is that the word?) to plastering that across the top of your front and it makes me very very uneasy

Don’t think I’ve played this since 1989, not sure if it’s delightful or terrifying that the muscle memory is still there. Hats off Arcade Club

I whiled away some time in a bar last summer watching a coach accidentally go down Tib St then have to somehow get out via a 29 point turn. Was a good distraction from talking to people about Oasis

In defence of the Iran war's handwringers and pearl-clutchers.
www.ft.com/content/8117...

Nissan warns of Sunderland closure if UK excluded from ‘Made in Europe’ rules EU proposals presented on Wednesday require vehicles for corporate fleets and small EVs to be assembled within the bloc

Nissan Sunderland production only running at 30% capacity + Nissan has been shutting down plants even in Japan, so this is not an empty threat. Nissan warns of Sunderland closure if UK excluded from ‘Made in Europe’ rules - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT

Also did they definitely put the right gwlad into chat GPT

Indeed. If you asked the q “Liverpool” rather than “Merseyside” I daresay you’d get a very different answer

That’s not me making value judgments: people can and will disagree about the merits of the methods. But those are a few of the ways the city centre got moving. What does Manchesterism look like for a soft left government? I merely pose the q

Anyway: big things have happened in Mcr. But actually a lot of visible ones happened by Labour being fairly un-Labour, and certainly not soft Labour. Deals with Abu Dhabi, waiving housing affordability requirements to attract £, giving big taxpayer loans to profitable developers

😂

Probably sounds like I’m always being negative (NB if I didn’t love Manchester I’d have moved) - but anything like this deserves proper scrutiny (see GMP 2016-2020: not a proud period for devolution)

My personal hobby horse (atm, but others are available): do we know where the tram is going next? No. Not really.

I think Manchester has deployed boosterism well over the last decade, but it has tended to work because it delivered things at the same time. Boosterism without delivery is just words and there’s some risk the city starts to rely too much on narrative for its momentum