Anna Girling

In April 2020 I bought a 10kg sack of Elephant Atta chapatti flour which I have since used for absolutely everything (bread, crumble, sauces, many many birthday cakes) – even if at a depreciating post-lockdown rate. Tonight I used the last of it – does this mean my pandemic is finally over??

Rally to Save Jobs at UoE UCU, with the Joint Unions, EUSA and the SSSN, will rally at Parliament as the big finish to our upcoming 3 days of strike action.

Join the Rally at Parliament on Wednesday, if you're in Edinburgh:

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rally-to-s...

Edinburgh university staff back industrial action again in longstanding dispute over cuts and redundancies Staff at the University of Edinburgh have today (Tuesday) backed industrial action for a second time in a longstanding dispute over £140million cuts, job losses and compulsory redundancies.

There was moment I thought perhaps we had movement here, but the @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social strike is on. You can read more about why here:

www.ucu.org.uk/article/1423...

Please write and call your MSPs on Monday: www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/lobby-your-msp

If you care about the future of University of Edinburgh, call or email your local MSP on Monday:

Monday, 17 November: Call your MSP. UCU has prepared a briefing here, but you can also simply call and tell your story. These cuts will affect the whole city.

www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/lobby-your-m...

This campaign needs you now SAVE AMERICAN STUDIES TEACHING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

Please support and share this petition to help save American Studies teaching at The University of Nottingham. Staff are facing redundancy. The expertise that would be lost would be monumental. Please sign.
c.org/26qjPmffNy

American and Canadian Studies at Notts have been so important for so long. Our colleagues there have a plan to save jobs and teaching provision and management are not considering it. Please sign and share.

mystic bridge (with train window filter)

The unhinged right-wing opinion to 'evidence-based' journalism pipeline described here could just as easily apply to the BBC – on which Justin Webb stated, as 'heard' fact this week, that 'all' UK university staff & students are 'looking for a victim group of some kind to which they can belong'

can anyone who has had library fellowships or similar in the US recommend a tax accountant who can help with claiming back the $$$ that are taken pre-payment? i have tried the self-service route and have hit several brick walls (social security numbers, mailed-in documents, etc etc)

Ahhhh! This is wonderful! Congratulations to @cdrose.bsky.social!!

How Users Imagine Archival Research This talk will focus on the development of JPCA Explore and how it reflects wider issues around creating human-scale digital projects.

If you happen to be in beautiful Edinburgh on 10 Dec, perhaps come to the Edinburgh Futures Institute to hear me talk about developing archival imaginary digital interactives! Maybe I will even explain what that means! Hopefully by then I'll know!

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/how-users-...

‘How do you rebuild all this?’ Black River residents assess damage after Hurricane Melissa People of Jamaican coastal town described as storm’s ground zero are traumatised and desperate for help

That the UK has so far pledged only £7.5 million in aid to Jamaica is shameful - it is a drop in the ocean of what is needed, & of what Britain can afford, particularly given the wealth that the UK has extracted from Jamaica over the centuries. Justice means reparations, not drip-fed handouts.

Seconding this endorsement. It's @priyamvadagopal.bsky.social, so no surprise that it's good, but the range and depth here are just what we need.

As a map to the landscape of current global politics and ideas 7 decades on from Bandung, this is essential. Coexistence & the Commons!

Honestly, all I can think about right now is #JAMAICA. Hold her in your heart RIGHT NOW! #hurrianemelissa

Join us for the launch of
Henry Dee’s ‘Militant Migrants: Clements Kadalie, the ICU and the Mass Movement of Black Workers in Southern Africa, 1896-1951’. Published with @livunipress.bsky.social.
Marx Memorial Library, 29 November
sslh.org.uk/2025/10/27/b...

I shouldn’t be surprised, but it‘s pretty appalling to hear Today on BBC Radio 4 cover Hurricane Melissa exclusively through multiple interviews with British holidaymakers in resorts –completely ignoring actual Jamaicans & the millions of people in the UK worried about family and friends in Jamaica.

Hurricane Melissa strengthens to category 5 as communities in Jamaica warned of ‘potentially unimaginable impact’ – live Jamaicans urged to seek shelter immediately, and Cuba, Haiti and Dominican Republic also threatened

www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

Amongst all this, I feel like there is something about the relatively recent naming of individual storms coinciding with this shift in magnitude, frequency etc - encouraging us to think in terms of individual catastrophic events, rather than a catastrophic systemic change?

“No Category 4 or 5 hurricane has made a direct landfall on Jamaica in recorded history. No one living there has ever experienced anything like what is about to happen.”

today's typo which could also be a work by Leonora Carrington: 'ear of a queer planet'

‘The jobless should lead the attack’: a radical Jamaican journalist in 1920s London The long read: Economic insecurity, race riots, incendiary media … Claude McKay was one of the few Black journalists covering a turbulent period that sounds all too familiar to us today

Brilliant snapshot of Claude McKay and the transnational radicalism of #20s30s British world.

www.theguardian.com/news/2025/oc...

Amazing. When I did my Masters, the first text on our 1922/Modernism course (taught by the wonderful Lesley Higgins) was Whose Body?

Lord Peter Wimsey is the narrative voice of The Waste Land.

Marcus Garvey in Scotland in 1914: 'I have seen wonders, I have learnt wonders and I hope to teach wonders... At some places I have been the only black man seen for a good time... I have had access to places that only the aristocracy would think of going... some take me for an African millionaire'

'Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.'

(Oscar Wilde, 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism', 1891 - full text here: www.marxists.org/reference/ar...)

PS @atarbuck.bsky.social have been reading Pink Witch - and loved your My Little Pony poem!!

oh no! Rivals was a seriously important book to me at a key teenage moment - it sustained me through the bleak grimness of Higher Physics, etc. (in a beloved copy that had belonged to my mother I think - and was later stolen by an awful person who ended up on Celebrity Big Brother!).

'I find earth as beautiful as heaven, and the body as beautiful as the soul. If I do live again I would like it to be as a flower — no soul but perfectly beautiful. Perhaps for my sins I shall be made a red geranium!!' Oscar Wilde dissing the (suburban? bourgeois?) red geranium in 1885.

Wonderful - lucky you!

can't wait for your Swift/Pynchon double review