Dr Amanda Brunton

You *get* to be looked after and I *get* to look after you! This is how it works!

Friends who worry of being a burden also need to remember this stuff comes back around. I had an exam I was terrified of this week and returned to a little pile of chocolate on my desk from colleagues I has done similar things for. And then got treated to ice cream when I passed ❤️🍦

HELL YEAH THIS IS THE GOOD SHIT

"On The Spectrum" 😅

Fun story! I have a 'cigarette paper' scar on my knee where tissue thickness never filled in. Years ago a friend saw it when I was wearing shorts and asked 'why do you have a bumhole on your knee?' and unfortunately he's SO RIGHT it DOES look like a bumhole and now I HAVE TO LIVE WITH THAT EVERY DAY

'Never ever read the comments' is decent advice, end of ❤️

Glad you clarified because I had also just assumed knee scars were standard and then went 'ahhh yes, collagen disorder'

M A N I F E S T

Tweet that reads Leo Xander @STALLEON Stop taking social media so serious. Nothing here is real. Look at this chicken V - it is bigger than the car

I think about this tweet every time I feel something online start to curl its annoying little grip into my head

Lenny, a yellow labrador looks sleepily into the camera. He is swaddled in a pile of blankets and is upside down.

Yes, but there's a labrador just woken up from a snooze on my feet, a loving spouse at the other end of the couch, and many blessings besides.

It hurts that my friend didn't get the same, he deserved these joys no less than me. All I can do is be grateful and make sure I always share when I can.

Two young people pose by a huge sign saying 'The University of Sheffield'. They stand close together, smiling.

Miss you, old man. I hope it's better there.

We went to shit gigs, thought liking Arcade Fire made us edgy and interesting, we drank too much, we told each other everything about ourselves - but so many years later and with so much life filling in that space between, that 'everything' now feels so small.

I simultaneously miss him terribly and also feel like I forget him a little more with every year in which I become more and more different to the version of me he knew. I relate to that version of me less and less, and with that distance I lose him too. It's been almost 15 years. Impossible.

Listening to this new one is an intense burst of nostalgia for being a pair of impossibly pretentious teenagers. I wonder if he would like this album (too 'mainstream' now? Or would he have mellowed out about that with age?) and I don't know I don't know I don't know. He's dead.

Many many years ago I lost a friend to suicide. He was a very early fan of Mumford and Sons (and the sort of indie kid who declared them to have 'gone mainstream' when the album was a huge hit). Second album came out the year he died.

Today has been a lot. I had a (very long) exam this morning, then rushed off to EDI committee (very grim discussion of trans rights following EHRC). Chris has put on the new Mumford and Sons album, and oh man, that's a feels trip all of its own.

Trans Swimming Hour We've booked out the whole of a pool in North Cambridge just for us transes! Come get aquatic with us in peace!!!

Do you want to be WET and in WATER? Come swim with us! 5th April, 12.30 - 1.30pm!
Book here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trans-swim...

Lenny, a yellow labrador, sits patiently in front of his food bowl. In the food bowl is a pancake smeared with peanut butter and topped with Brussels sprouts

Lenny firmly believes that all this talk of 'lemon and sugar' is hogwash. Real ones know peanut butter and Brussels sprouts are the best pancake topping

A table piled with pancakes and lots of toppings

Another year, another pancake feast. My Belgian colleague made some incredible crêpes, it has been a good pancake day

For those wondering 'won't those things make him quite farty?' The answer is absolutely yes, but I am working from the office today and Spouse is at home, so this one is firmly filed under 'lol, not my problem'

Lenny, a yellow labrador, sits in front of his food bowl looking attentively at the camera. Pay no attention to the bits of toy stuffing all over the carpet, he doesn't know how they got there or why his toy has no stuffing in it. In his bowl is a pancake covered in peanut butter and Brussels sprouts.

Lenny wishes you all a merry pancakesmas, and hopes father pancake visited you all with as much peanut butter and as many Brussels sprouts as your heart could wish for

I run a writing retreat for neurodivergent students. Today, after years of teaching in here, they have FINALLY fixed the lighting controls so that the lights are dimmable! This is fantastic accessibility!

My joy is tempered by the discovery that my comrades are not fellow bright light autistics

A lino print of a tin mine in Cornwall, freshly printed. Behind it is a carved block of some swifts, as-yet uninked. A red glass baren with swirling patterns is visible behind the print.

A wooden table covered ink printing paraphernalia - an inked block sits ready to be printed, another one is waiting to be inked. A brayer is resting on a glass sheet with freshly rolled ink, and a big wooden box of tools and ink is at the edge of the table. On the workbench rests a red glass baren with the light shining through the swirling patterns in the glass. In the background, there is a stack of cut paper and cardboard size guides.

Been a little bit creatively stuck lately. Had a lovely afternoon printing some lino blocks that I carved a while back and haven't had time to print. It's been lovely to do something creative, and the house smells pleasantly of drying printing ink.

hold on i gotta take this

His top surgeon did him dirty that's what

Nerds assemble! I need recommendations for a speaker who can talk not only about the growth in awareness of ADHD/autism in the UK, and the importance of accommodations etc., but also the sociological aspects of underdiagnosis/stigma in women/minority communities etc.

Pls repost for wider reach, ta.

Anyway, I had a Right Good Chat about this with a mate over a cuppa today and while I remain somewhat peeved at it all, there is nothing quite like a good friend to put your hope back in the right place.

For a series that deals with growing up in the absence of all women, it doesn't look *too* closely at Ben and Cillian's relationship, nor queerness in general, trans identities are absent.

I am also given to wonder the extent to which the proximity to section 28 means that for all that Chaos Walking is a series that otherwise doesn't shy away from challenging topics, it really pulls some of its punches (especially given how outspoken much of Ness' later work is)

It feels like there was a forceful lobotomisation of my imagination and understanding of what love and happiness could look like, and it pains me to imagine how different we all could have been without Section 28, and how close we seem to be skirting to it being enacted again.