Jo Lloyd 🌍🐎

Excellent 😉

Emily Dickinson’s birthday (10 Dec 1830), so…

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Did you see this @vickymackenzie.bsky.social ?

I managed to watch all seasons of Stargate SG1 despite its claim that the original language of the 50-million year old Ancients was Latin :)

How the World Ends #53: Ghosts The world ends when the spirits of the unforgotten dead grow so huge in number that there’s no room left for the living. Nobody knows why. The list of ghosts includes: The ghosts of everyone who ev…

I gave up and started writing about the end of the world owen-booth.com/2025/12/07/h...

If you had an edit function, would you change "biege" to "beige" here? 😉

Finally took the time to read Colin Bramwell´s brilliant Scots translation of the great Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa. Stuart Kelly called it a ‘modern Scots language masterpiece’ in The Scotsman: this isn’t an exaggeration.

(1/3)

I am reading this now - I concur

Linguists start compiling first ever complete dictionary of ancient Celtic More than 1,000 words used as far back as 325BC to be collected for insight into past linguistic landscape

Linguists start compiling first ever complete dictionary of ancient Celtic

More than 1,000 words used as far back as 325BC to be collected for insight into past linguistic landscape

www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

#History

Five things I've loved this year - and new masterclasses for 2026 Books, songs, recipes - and a new writing course with Emily Perkins

Are you, like me, a sucker for every stupid listicle gift guide you see? Here's my list - three sets of five things I've loved this year, and 100% guarantee that none of them are stupid.

Take up your hurdy gurdy & join us for A Medieval Christmas all week at 4pm Composer of the Week @BBCRadio3 William Lyons is Donald Macleod’s guest, exploring Christmas traditions lost, changed & familiar through glorious music. Producer Chris Taylor www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

An invention that used to just work and now doesn't also the ink is more expensive than gold - it would be cheaper to print with liquid gold

This was the 300th edition of the project, which means that the archive website now presents over 3,500 individual short story recommendations!

And who's been picked the most times? I hear you ask.

Largehearted Boy's favorite short fiction collections of the year include titles by Emily Greenberg, Julia Liz Elliott, Kerry Donoghue, Kristina Sergeevna Ten, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and Sara Jaffe largeheartedboy.com/2025/12/07/l...

A male rock ptarmigan (Lagopus muta) in winter plumage.

Ptarmigan is from Gaelic 'tarmachan' meaning "croaker". The p- was added when people mistakenly assumed it was a Greek word.

A bird forever warning people: "A werewolf!" (just in case of werewolves).

I've realised I answered your question wrong in two ways - but it sounds like a treat of a book :)

And Mark Haddon's recent book includes a story which concludes with a history of dogs from Acteon's hounds to Laika

Some short stories: Karen Russell's Madame Bovary's Greyhound; Lauren Groff's The Midnight Zone - "a dog with a mouth so soft she would go down to the lake and steal ducklings and hold them intact on her tongue for hours until we noticed her sitting unusually erect in the corner, looking sly"

Good argument - but it may be dead to me forever :)

I think (theorise/invent) modern langs do distinguish - eg, modern Welsh has a perfectly good word for green. But the lang holds ghosts of "grue" - eg, "glaswellt", grass, incorporates "glas", blue, always used of the sky - "awyr glas" = blue sky. I bet there are egs in Engl too - and in Gaelic???

That does seem likely - I think people say the early categorisation of red is because it's the colour of blood and therefore important

I guess I could have just said "No I don't know why" :)

I imagine this indicates something about the need to categorise colours communally rather than actual human ability to detect colours

I've read that the development of colour words in many disparate languages indicates similar evolution of colour categories - eg, red comes very early, there's a stage called "grue" where blue & green are same, orange toddles in very late

The cover of the 'Winter Songs' mini-anthology: the bare branches of winter trees, just visible in the darkness, with the title and contributors' names in white text.

First published as a 'digital pamphlet' in 2023, and briefly available as a print edition in 2024, here's the free, downloadable PDF of our 'Winter Songs' mini-anthology, with poems apt for the year's end, and the year to come.
longbarrowpress.com/wp-content/u...

Story of the Month, December: ‘The Broken Wand’ by Jane Fraser The Lonely Crowd will feature a new short story by a different author each month throughout 2025. For December, we are delighted to publish a new story by Jane Fraser. It wasn’t a white Christmas i…

'It wasn’t a white Christmas in Gower as they’d promised on Wales Today. Lynne and David looked out over the ocean – frothy-white and agitated as far as the horizon.’

Read 'The Broken Wand' by @janefraserwriter.bsky.social
our #shortstoryofthemonth for December.
thelonelycrowd.org/2025/12/07/s...

Two flowerheads of Devil's-bit Scabious (Succisa pratensis) stand out, almost glowing violet in the centre of the photo. Each flowerhead is a cluster of florets, each with delicate white stamens extending out from the floret, a pinkish-red anther topping them. The blurred background is a morass of rushes, their rich brown heads discernable, and a patch of yellow flowers, probably Greater Bird's-foot-trefoil (Lotus corniculatus). The open rush-pasture is fringed at the back by trees.

Botanical #adventcalendar Day 6 - Devil's-bit Scabious, its blue-violet flowers almost glowing in the dull light. Sensational!

Far more widespread than Day 5's plant, but also assessed as Vulnerable on the #GBRedList as its geographic range has declined by 37% over three generations
#wildflowerhour

Never seen this before - love it! Made me think of Jim Shepard's wonderful story "Hadrian's Wall"

"Writers like me who work very slowly are well advised to settle on topics...whose fascination may never be exhausted." Glad to happen again on this from Lewis Hyde after I stumble through several more months of thinking but very little writing

Issues — Bad Lilies Issues of Bad Lilies, a digital poetry journal.

Amazing to me, but @andrewjamesneilson.bsky.social and I began @badlilies.bsky.social five years ago this coming spring. Five years! A lockdown project of optimism in a sad time. The world continues to disappoint. Bad Lilies keeps going. Explore our archive: www.badlilies.uk/issues