David Hendy

Monday evening walk, Dungeness

Tackling the scourge of modern ‘quality’ journalism: false balance.

Tory Conference debate on free speech. You see? Sometimes being "cancelled" is a mercy.

Alan Partridge is back at rock bottom – and it’s the funniest he’s been in years After stadium tour success, the delusional broadcaster is back where he belongs: self-funding a series about the nation’s mental health. As comedy goes, it couldn’t be more pleasurable

‘an exquisite study in dwindling celebrity’

Our friends at the brilliant @littletollerbooks.bsky.social have just launched a new crowdfunding project for 'Looking for Mr Schwitters' — an innovative and finely illustrated book about the émigré artist Kurt Schwitters’ final years in the Lake District www.caughtbytheriver.net/2025/09/look...

Thanks for the tip off - just two left now!

Goody-bag merch from Tory Conference branded "When Labour negotiates Britian loses" and signed "Kemi Badenoch".

It helps to be able to spell the country you say only you are competent enough to run.

Monday morning walk, Dungeness

Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? The author and activist behind the term ‘enshittification’ explains what’s gone wrong with the internet – and ...

‘Corporations, being artificial, immortal colony-organisms that use humans as their inconvenient gut flora, do not have consciences to appeal to.’

Cory Doctorow on The Great Enshittening - and what to do about it

*gasp*

Peacehaven: Police release photos of mosque arson suspects The images are of two people in balaclavas seen outside the mosque before the large blaze spread.

Police investigating a suspected arson at a mosque in East Sussex have issued images of two people they wish to identify.

Ah thanks. I do realise - as an ex BBC journalist - that these things change continuously. Still, overall, nationally, I feel the significance of what happened will end up being underplayed.

Yes, I saw the Sky News and the BBC. I realise it’s not being totally ignored. But unless I’m mistaken the BBC news coverage appears to be local only; my feeling is that it should have v quickly been categorised as national news. I’m sure it will at some point.

And yes, coverage in Poland.

Wakey wakey UK media

UK mosque set ablaze with two people inside, police investigating suspected hate crime | CNN A UK mosque was set ablaze with two people still inside in a suspected arson attack that police are treating as a hate crime.

Well, CNN are covering it at least, even if the British media are largely uninterested

Peacehaven: Fire at East Sussex mosque probed as 'hate crime' Video appears to show two people in balaclavas at the mosque before a large blaze spreads.

Two people in balaclavas torched a mosque in Peacehaven, East Sussex. This is not far from where I live.

Fascists are in an open war with Muslims and people of colour in the UK.

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

You can donate to the Peacehaven mosque here bsky.app/profile/xunl...

Peacehaven: Fire at East Sussex mosque probed as 'hate crime' Video appears to show two people in balaclavas at the mosque before a large blaze spreads.

Men in balaclavas set fire to a mosque in East Sussex last night. It's only appearing on the BBC's local coverage, rather than its main national headlines, despite coming just a week after the (also under-reported) firebombing of an asylum hotel in London last week
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Sunday morning walk, Dungeness

Men run for their lives from fire after arson attack at mosque There has been a fire at a mosque. A man was seen escaping with his life after the fire starts

Arson attack at Sussex mosque.

I dunno, maybe it’s time we got some old Spanish people to tour Europe explaining what it’s like to get stuck with geriatric fascists running your country for forty years. Or some Portuguese who still remember how shit Salazar was. Or some Greeks who lived under the Colonels…

A hideous, and for traumatised British Jews profoundly unhelpful, expression of allyship & agreement with a violent, racist, serial criminal & former member of an avowedly anti-Semitic organisation from the *Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs* and so, as Sunder says, the Israeli government. 1/3

Anyone who thinks promoting a vicious racist conspiracist like Robinson is good for Jews has lost any grip on reality

Netanyahu government invites the convicted criminal and fascist Tommy Robinson and calls him ‘courageous’ and a ‘patriot’.

Says it all really.

This Israeli government decision to host Tommy Robinson will widen the growing gulf between the Netanyahu government and the British public, including the broad majority of Jews in Britain (3/4 of whom dsapproved of Netanyahu, before this new link to this anti-Muslim racist UK far right convict).

Monster: The Ed Gein Story review – Ryan Murphy’s depravity-loving murder show is unforgivable This Charlie Hunnam-starring true-crime drama about killer Ed Gein is utterly devoid of morality. Instead, it panders to viewers’ basest instincts by lingering gleefully over the worst depredations hu...

‘Nothing but a voyeuristic pandering to the basest instincts of viewers’

Yep, the US streaming company Netflix strikes again.

I'll say it again. Our horror at the Gaza genocide and at the atrocity in Manchester comes in both cases from the same, inherent part of our shared humanity. We need to assert that shared humanity in the face of both these evils as loudly as possible, and in as many practical ways as we can.

‘To Calais in Ordinary Time’, and ‘For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain’ come immediately to mind.

Currently reading Sarah Hall’s ‘Helm’, which has a great medieval seam in one of its multiple timelines.

On a day for sharing poetry:

Material Girl, by Eloise Hendy, shortlisted for the 2018 White Review Poetry Prize

Lithophones are great. I touched on them in the very first episode of my BBC radio series ‘Noise: A Human History’ - ‘Echoes in the Dark’