Luke Seaber

The MHRA has transitioned from Twitter/X and will now use Bluesky to communicate our work. We are excited to contribute to establishing Bluesky as a dynamic, inclusive, and engaging platform for academic exchange and collaboration.

To celebrate this new chapter, we are hosting a book giveaway! 👇

Dad’s books are full of empathy, common sense, and a healthy suspicion of the powerful. But at its heart his work is also about how systems keep people poor while pretending it’s their own fault. So I hope Kemi’s taking notes as well as reading the jokes.

This fox clearly likes our garden.

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

Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

This whole section really.

Ebeneezer Howard, leading light of the scene, know what I mean?
E created the vibe - E takes you to Letchworth as if by Design
The city ignites like it's comin' alive

There's a guy in the place who's got a bittersweet face
And he goes by the name of Ebeneezer Howard
His friends call him 'Ezer and E is the main geezer
And E greens up the place like no other coward

I was out of the UK from pretty much 2002 to 2012 - it’s *all* a cultural hole.

You know it’s a good afternoon in a pub when you get given a kilo of unsold whelks to take home.

WILLIAM BLAKE: I, the venerated William Blake, have written the finest verse about a tiger anyone will ever conceive.

NAEL: hold my juice

It’s National Poetry Day.

The greatest poem in the English language.

For years I would have almond milk in Italy as a late-night summer treat if I’d been out for a drink - I still can’t get used to it being offered as a ‘virtuous’ option.

I always get stupidly flustered by this question - ‘Yes, I do. But unless you’re serving certain types of antibiotics or pollen, I don’t think it’s relevant. But I can’t answer “No” with a clear conscience. So now we’re all confused’.

I was told by a (very drunk, admittedly) regular I know there ‘This is the best gay pub in London: it’s the only one with young gays, old gays, out gays, in-the-closet gays, straight gays’. Something interwar about that too!

My very traditional back-street local, I am told, has a quiet reputation for being an excellent gay pub, which I suspect the landlord and a lot of the regulars don’t actually know (and wouldn’t care about if they did). I find this fascinating and cheering.

I am really looking forward to this #Orwell Society event in #Polperro #Cornwall today.

And, vice versa, that the *defeat* of fascism was inevitable, with much the same (ac)quiescence caused.

This has been rattling in my head so much because one of the most useful rhetorical moves in favor of fascism was to say the rise of fascism was a fated thing.

Not that you liked it, just that it was inevitable so it didn’t matter.

It’s what Orwell knew was so dangerous in Burnham’s vision.

Then there was the famous exchange between Bill Gates and Terry Pratchett in 1996(?) when clearly only one of them understood where human nature would take the Internet, and it wasn't Mr. Microsoft.

I'll be turning 95 this coming Monday. In my younger years, I was often filled with worry - worry that I wasn't quite good enough, that no one would cast me again, that I wouldn't live up to my mother's hopes. But these days begin in peace, and end in gratitude."** My life didn't quite take shape until my forties. I had worked steadily - on provincial stages, in radio plays, in West End productions - but I often felt adrift, as though I was searching for a home within myself that I hadn't quite found. At 50, I accepted a television role that many would later associate me with Hyacinth Bucket, of Keeping Up Appearances. I thought it would be a small part in a little series. I never imagined that it would take me into people's living rooms and hearts around the world. And truthfully, that role taught me to accept my own quirks. It healed something in me. At 60, I began learning Italian not for work, but so I could sing opera in its native language. I also learned how to live alone without feeling lonely. I read poetry aloud each evening, not to perfect my diction, but to quiet my soul. At 70, I returned to the Shakespearean stage - something I once believed I had aged out of. But this time, I had nothing to prove. I stood on those boards with stillness, and audiences felt that. I was no longer performing. I was simply being. At 80, I took up watercolor painting. I painted flowers from my garden, old hats from my youth, and faces I remembered from the London Underground. Each painting was a quiet memory made visible. Now, at 95, I write letters by hand. I'm learning to bake rye bread. I still breathe deeply every morning. I still adore laughter - though I no longer try to make anyone laugh. I love the quiet more than ever. **I'm writing this to tell you something simple:** **Growing older is not the closing act. It can be the most exquisite chapter - if you let yourself bloom again.** Let these years ahead be your *treasure years*. You don't need to be famous. You don'…

She was a good one Patricia. This hit me right in the feels

By my usual experience, ‘It shouldn’t be doing that. Do you have any idea why it’s doing that?’ in response to my request to make it stop doing that.

I hear people refer to themselves as ‘English’ in Cornwall in an unselfconscious way that I seldom hear in England; in the same way, I have to remember in London *not* to use ‘English’ as as ‘technical’ a term as I would in Cornwall.

they should and anyone who thinks it's silly has an unrepresentatively inflated sense of the proper size of the unit of "nation"

was chatting to a student from Cornwall the other day and was amused when they instinctively referred to England as somewhere completely different.

It wasn’t till I went to university and left Cornwall that I learnt there were people surprised by this - I knew there were people who *disagreed* with it, but that was a different thing.

CUTTING CORNERS

A Scanner Dreckly — The Life and Legacy of St. Austell Proper Job IPA — Pellicle It is a sedate summer’s afternoon in the bar of The Globe in Topsham, five miles outside Exeter. Wimbledon is on the big screen, with the sound turned down, and there are five other customers inside. ...

Proper Job is an institution. There, we've said it. Who better to talk about the legacy and impact of this IPA than @atjbeer.bsky.social?

www.pelliclemag.com/home/2025/9/...

I think this is the only thing I feel sorry for my supposed lookalike for.

Reminded of one of my favourite Giles cartoons (14/11/50).

‘Mum! Cyril's wrote a wicked word’