Robin

I love how Dickens just throws stuff like this in at any moment he can, as though his brain were constantly full of mad nonsense

"We made some changes to McVitie's Penguin and Club earlier this year, where we are using a chocolate flavour coating with cocoa mass, rather than a chocolate coating. Sensory testing with consumers shows the new coatings deliver the same great taste as the originals," the McVitie's owner, Pladis, said in a statement. Club's classic advertising slogan citing its chocolate content is no longer in use, replaced by: "If you like a lot of biscuit in your break, join our Club."

Omg

Rachel Reeves takes aim at Motability scheme to save £1bn in budget Chancellor is examining reforms that include scrapping tax breaks on cars for disabled people using the programme

This is awful if correct. Chancellor preparing to save more than a billion pounds by targeting disabled people’s capacity to get cars through the benefits system

www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

Looking up through the reeds to a blue sky…

Beautiful Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire was said to be haunted by lantern men, strange lights that danced over the dark surface of the great mere or moved erratically among the reeds, intent on luring unsuspecting mortals to a watery grave deep within the marshes…
#PhantomsFriday

👏 "We've lived here all our lives. And I have never felt so unwelcome in my own hometown as I do since your party came into Caerphilly."

"With all the rhetoric that you bring in, I have to say to my sons, please don't go there. Please don't do this."

"I blame you for that."

2/2 Also supremely well dressed w/ truly extravagant slashing but rather odd headgear: Duke Henry the Pious, plus his quite fierce dog. Painted by Lucas Cranach.

The absolute bloody vandalism of austerity in one chart. Good analysis of the overall picture here.

It's also true I think that the broad popularity of the 'universities bad' theme is down to it being the one salient issue where the insane billionaires are in tune with the 2-10% upper burghers (who decide editorial trends) who also hate that their own failsons are not shoo-ins any more

YouTube video by Classic British Telly Occupations - starring Donald Pleasence, Georgina Hale, Jack Shepherd & Nigel Hawthorne (1974)

When ITV albeit late on a Sunday evening when nobody was watching broadcast a play with revolutionary Marxist themes. youtu.be/o0KxIR2xO-E?...

A card that reads: Dear Name and Name, How are you both? I are still in Shropshire , inspite of one valiant attempt fo get back to Oxfordshire , my parents’ home county. Name and I finally parted for good and all last July (1982) He met someone in the Psychology Dept at Keele and they are now living together in Sussex. I was very upset, as you can imagine, and I am still not properly back to my old self. Such is life though and I try to make my life useful in other respects. I am once again involned in the L.P. and C.N.D. I would love to hear from you and hear how life treats you in South Wales. Have a lovely time at Christmas. Take care, Name XX

A delightful but poignant find in a second-hand copy of Ulysses that bought this weekend. I doubt that someone today would think that they could ‘make their life useful again’ after a divorce by getting more involved in politics.

Next time you come round I will show you ours- it is worse than this

OpenAI is trying to clamp down on ‘bias’ in ChatGPT GPT-5 is better at resisting liberal ‘pressure,’ the company says.

The administration “is currently pressuring OpenAI and other AI companies to make their models more conservative-friendly.”

Ever since I finished Question Time, Reform have massively been on the attack.

Including a rant from Richard Tice entirely designed to distract from Reform and Russia.

Everyone should know about Nathan Gill, the bribes from Russia and the link to Reform.

This is so damn scary. The book claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was the one who introduced Donald and Melania. Now the CEO of Harper UK is out.

Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness— for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps-they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of-and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our black church) in their sins—that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.

James Baldwin to Angela Davis in 1970, discussing white Americans:

London Councils Face Losing Half Their Share Of Children's Services Funding Some of London’s poorest areas could see their share of funding for children’s services halved under Labour’s plans to reform local government gran...

Some of London’s poorest areas could see their share of the children’s services funding formula halved under Labour’s plans to reform local government grants.

By me, for Politics Home: www.politicshome.com/news/article...

Employment tribunals: ‘scandal’ of toothless scheme to punish… Just 2% of fines given to employers who disobey court orders have actually been paid

Here's the second part, where we show that less than 1% of fines (by value) issued for non-payment of tribunal awards are actually paid.
www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025...

Phlebopteris frond on a grey mudstone, Late Triassic Chinle Formation, New Mexico/Arizona.

A frond of Phlebopteris, a 230 million year old fern from the Late Triassic Chinle Formation, New Mexico/Arizona.

#FossilFriday #FernFriday ⚒🌏🌱🧪🔬🌿

Headline from the Times: "Bestselling novelist Jilly Cooper dies in fall aged 88", illustrated with a rather famous black and white picture of Virginia Woolf

Epic; no notes

Today’s artist without a (known) birthday: Masolino da Panicale. Painter in Florence & Rome, master of perspective. As in this beautiful Annunciation from 1423.

In fact this *understates* the point here.

Tory policy is not (just) to remove benefits but to remove ILR and deport, exactly like the Farage plan the PM correctly described as racist.

Multi-generational vulture nests hold 700 years of human artifacts Crossbow bolts, sandals, slingshots, and more.

Multi-generational vulture nests hold 700 years of human artifacts.
www.popsci.com/environment/...

Sartre on disgust:

On reports the Home Secretary plans to grant police more powers to prevent ‘repeated protests’, Greenpeace UK:

“Protest works because it is repetitive. If police had told the Suffragettes or civil rights activists ‘you’ve made your point,’ they would never have won the victories we all enjoy today"

A politician who embodies the current direction of the Tory party: a supporter of all the big policy shifts of 2016-24, who literally worked in Downing Street, who has decided oh, no, it is actually the fault of the immigrants. No, it’s your fault!

This is a very clear account of how government policy has already reduced access to degrees in History & other SHAPE subjects for members of marginalised communities and how new moves risk making matters worse still.

I didn't know until we buried my mother, so probably most people here don't know: Jewish cemeteries strongly recommend that you get insurance for the headstone.

Because the cemeteries are so often desecrated, the gravestones smashed.

The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984

Strange Garden https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/483586

Opinion: It would be a hugely welcome development to discover that we have not merely reached social media saturation point, but that the experience has been degraded to such an extent that it has shocked people out of their stupor. on.ft.com/476Dcr8