Jon McGregor

stopped
at felicity

Nederlanders: Als jullie weten wat dit 'paradijsvogel' is, kunnen jullie me erover vertellen? Ik ben absoluut in de waar.

Sometimes I think learning Dutch would be easier if I lived in the Netherlands.

In my Dutch lesson last night the teacher tried to explain the figure of the 'paradijsvogel', not literally a Bird of Paradise but the woman in brightly coloured clothes and hair, who enthusiastically tells stories in the street. Hoe zeg je dit in Engels, she asked, and we were all like: WHAT.

Presumably the window is there so that when you put a child to work behind the bar they can see the customers.

That's a drinks bar. A local family on our estate had one - it took up half the room and I never understood who was meant to stand behind it and serve the drinks.

I am suitably awed!

I just broke out in a cold sweat wondering how you would organise this through a university travel booking system. But hopefully if the university has any kind of "sustainability policy" you can argue the case....

And then your UK travel is included as well, so peak-time travel is an option. You have to factor in the cost of seat reservations (£35 for Eurostar, £10 or £20 on highspeed trains, often free on slower/regional trains) but it usually really makes sense.

Well, as always my main tip is to ask the Mr Seat61: www.seat61.com/how-to-use-a...
But also the real highlight for me is that the headline train fares always seem to sell out - whereas with the interrail pass you've got a fixed price. Really takes the stress out of booking tickets.

He's the best. Lmk if you want any interrail tips - have only got into them in the last couple of years and am kicking myself I didn't start much sooner.

And yes an Interrail ticket is almost always the cheapest way of doing anything, it turns out - even if you only use two days.

The direct train from Paris is great, and means you can do the whole thing in a day; but it's usually expensive. Man at Seat 61 has some scenic/cheaper/slower routes here: www.seat61.com/Spain.htm#lo...

If you like the look of this, you'll probably want to get yourself a copy here: store.nottingham.ac.uk/product-cata...

The joy of new hearing aids! Discovering (a) birdsong, (b) rustling paper in a distant room, (c) everyone I love has been shouting at me for ages, (d) my god cars are LOUD how do you all put up with it?

"Universities don't pay speaker fees" is a flat-out lie. I couldn't even ask a student to hand out pencils at an open day without making sure they were paid.

I was a judge on this, and I can confirm that I judge this book to be an absolute banger

Wordcount respects wordcount. Has just occurred to me that with a recentish novel you could always email the editor....?

Greetings from Big Sur

You can get a pretty good approximation by counting the words on one page and doing the maths. (Typical paperback is around 300-350 words per page.) Emphasis on the approximate, though.

Or you could go full Richard Brautigan, and count all the rivets.

The front cover of Kevin Harvey's book: "The Literary Lifeline - Bibliotherapy and the Transforming Power of Reading", with the cover image showing a 1960s style black and white photo of an older couple in deckchairs on the beach. He is reading a newspaper, she is sleeping. He has a white knotted handkerchief on his head.

Recommend 'The Literary Lifeline', by (my colleague) Kevin Harvey, on reading groups, libraries, 'bibliotherapy', & more. There's sometimes a glib assumption that reading is "good for you" in a strange medicinal way, and Kevin really unpacks that idea properly.
www.bloomsbury.com/us/discover/...

brass solidarity band performing “stand by me” in the streets of whittier next to alex pretti’s memorial. the crowd started chanting “the people united will never be defeated” so they incorporated it into the song. i love minneapolis

Honestly, editing this collection of letters from nine other @unesco.org Cities of Literature - and working with a great murmur of translators in the process - was an absolute joy. You could share this joy just by buying a copy for yourself. store.nottingham.ac.uk/product-cata...

There is still time to get your hands on a copy before Christmas.

Whatever my uni declares, I am not going to engage with AI. I am not going to use AI or teach students to use it. I am going to continue to explain to students why it is harmful. Absolutely absurd to allow this anti-intellectual, environmentally devastating technology into the university at all.

Always important to remember that imposter syndrome is often not even a syndrome, many of these people are in fact complete numpties.

This is incredible, you have literally changed my life.

‘You Who Wronged’ by Czesław Milosz. For some reason or other this poem came to mind this morning. Written in a time of tyrants:
#Poetry

Never fails to blow my mind that something only 4% of the population can afford (or has much interest in at all) ever gets presented as *middle* class. That 96% of us are in need of outreach.

(You will especially be in luck if you order your copy by Friday because next week is not a putting-things-in-envelopes kind of week)

And if you didn't recently buy your copy of the new @theletterspage.bsky.social, then you are *also* in luck! store.nottingham.ac.uk/product-cata...