Sarah Elizabeth Cox

OH we've been there a while 😀✨

Black pencil sketch of Victorian men gathered around the front window of the large Sporting Life offices in the 1890s, most wearing large bowler hats or top hats. A bike is in shot. The building is grand and has THE SPORTING LIFE in large letters. It was both a newspaper office and a social network for sporting types at the time eg. boxers and their backers would go there to arrange matches, and memorabilia was displayed in the window.

Joseph Pennell, The Sporting Life Building, 148 Fleet Street, London, 1891.

I have finally signed a contract for my first book 🎉

Details to come. Maybe in the Autumn?! This feels like a very long wait.

Thank you! I'll let dad know they've entertained and informed people today (he's now 73 and getting his knee replaced!) :)

Black and white photo of three men in early 1970s newsroom, all with chin length hair, wearing ties.

It was indeed! This one is from the early 1970s, my dad Geoff Cox on the left, David Renwick in the middle, Steven Matthews on the right :)

He used to find out what news was happening in the community by going down to all the local pubs, having a half, and chatting to the old blokes 😂🤷🏻‍♀️

You didn't have to go to university or anything in those days to be a reporter. He left school at 16, worked in a car factory with his dad for a few months, then got a job on the Luton News aged 17 in 1969 after writing a bunch of letters asking if they had anything going. Stayed until 2015.

black and white photo of a busy newsroom at a local newspaper. A dozen journalists in an office type on typewriters. Tables are covered in stacks of paper, phones, lightbulbs hang from wires above. All the men have luxuriously thick hair, beards, knitwear and ties.

A little throwback, for any journalists in the room, to what it all used to look like. The Luton News news desk, 1978. My dad (snazzy jumper, left) was only 26 but had been there almost a decade by that year. The paper was selling up to 40,000 copies a week! Fabulous flares on the lady at the back.

Very true! My son went through a months' long phase of picking up TV remotes or anything shaped even slightly like one, holding it to his ear, and talking to the voices in his head on them, regularly pausing and laughing in response haha... I wonder what they were saying...

There's actually a more serious point to this post, I guess. Early years care is WOEFULLY UNDERFUNDED. Our nursery in a poor seaside town often has to crowdfund for resources. In turn, they collect clothes donations for kids and parents to take if needed, and provide a small foodbank service.

Nearly all the ladies who work there were born, at a guess, between 2002-2006 😭

Just noticed one of the other requests is specifically for flat caps 🥹 I'm gonna assume they're for being farmers or shepherds (?!) rather than Peaky Blinders but you never know...

Used one of those rotary dials until I left home in 2006! 😂

Ooh maybe it's for a history lesson like when we were kids and they made us wear aprons and bring bread and cheese wrapped in paper for lunch and learn about being a Victorian maid or chimney sweep or something (no? Just me?). But the 90s is now so far away, it might as well be 1864.

My son's nursery has messaged us asking for help providing new toys and role play gear for the babies and toddlers. The requests include old landline phones and TV guide magazines 😂 ... are they roleplaying in the '90s?!

tbt to when creatives could afford to eat

Loved the end even though I knew it was coming 😂 The kid just being very chill and stoic about getting handed a skull that had somehow been totally cleaned and made spotlessly white in an hour or so... less so. I mean, I'm fine with skulls generally. But I'd probably have cried & thrown up a bit?

Hahaha amazing. It does. Although... it's also my dad's name. Geoffrey! Take out those bins!!!

SO lovely 🥹

July’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage at Sea, Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s The Aviator and the Showman, and Madeline Potter’s The Roma: A Traveling History all feature among the best reviewed non…

Incredibly grateful to see my book, ‘The Roma’, on this list, alongside such fantastic titles!

lithub.com/julys-best-r...

Scene from Mr Biff before the fight

Photo of an action scene from the 1980 book Mr Biff the Boxer. Illustration shows two boxers collapsed on the floor of a ring. Text reads Suddenly Mr Bop bopped Mr Biff at the same time Mr Biff biffed Mr Bop. They biffed and bopped each other out! It's a draw the referee said. The timekeeper rang his bell. The fight was ended.

Seriously it's so good ♥️

After remembering having it read to me in the late 1980s, I bought this book for my son before I'd even given birth to him.

Thank you, Allan and Janet.

(Mr and Mrs Biff and Mr and Mrs Bop drink loads of wine with their kids at the end and make friends and even their dogs share a bone 🥰) 🥊

I follow a couple of young women on Instagram who, in 2025, presumably honouring dads, grandads or great grandads... have a baby called Martin and a toddler called Richard. David will surely endure!

When is Geoffrey making a comeback.

Most popular boys' and girls' names of 2024 revealed New entrants into the top 100 most popular in England and Wales include Athena and Yahya.

It's ONS Top 100 Baby Names in England and Wales Day for all who celebrate/fascinate. My son Jack's become slightly less common as muck, down four points to number 22! Middle name (Orson) still nowhere to be found, the weirdo.

Always fascinating that David holds on.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

@lmbd1418.bsky.social Important news: the IG algorithm has FINALLY given up the shirtless tattooed leather-clad farrier unto me. Oh my god and... he's... got a dog sized miniature horse for cuddle time.

Re-upping this because I'm living in my mom's basement waiting to hear if I'll ever be able to go back home to the UK and I have no energy right now to post medical history content, so you all are gonna get "author begging for preorders" for the time being. 😂🫠

Book cover for VICTORIA’S SECRET: THE PRIVATE PASSION OF A QUEEN by Dr Fern Riddell

Congratulations to @drfernriddell.bsky.social on her blockbuster new book, out today!

It’s full of startling new revelations about Queen Victoria’s secret love life — including a possible (probable?) marriage to John Brown and maaaaaybe a secret lovechild!

Been there and it will be okay but also I only managed it while housebound in a pandemic, admittedly?

Currently four inches into growing out 23 years of black hair dye and ONE glass of wine away from shaving my entire head oh my god 😭

Bamboozle, the Teletext pre internet game where Bamber Boozler a pixel man tested our general knowledge

Given the colours, I'd say this drawing is clearly a modernist interpretation of Teletext, which your kid must have seen in a previous life...

Ooh this is a GREAT parakeets history feature with lots of lovely photos (even if it does quote several times from our 2019 study without mentioning the title, authors or linking to it, of course...) 🦜

doi.org/10.1111/jzo....

I use one as my flat has nowhere to plumb one in without dismantling the entire kitchen and... good grief it is literally £20+ a trip now!