Gareth Prior

Anonymous portrait of Henry VIII and Katharine

Copy of the Holbein More

“Surrounded by Tudors…”

Mishearing the words 'the big Heaney book', my wife formed the impression that the large tome I was studying was something called 'the bikini book'.

Picture of the side of a box saying “Pea Husk: Clumping cat litter”

Am I the only one to think this sounds like an album track that never made it…?

A night of anxiety dreams ended with my being swapped in at the last minute to give a speech defending the humanities to a crowd of heavily-armed legionaries, using a slide deck consisting of nothing but dollar signs. I mercifully woke up at the point I was being carted off by the secret police.

We’d better stop before they lock us up, or that would be… clink pony club.

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was set upon by robbers…”

Stink pony club…?

Went to see the new Knives Out last night, which is excellent locked-room fun. The plot centres on murders in the Catholic church, and it somehow pulled off the feat of having me and my 3am-atheist beloved both leave the cinema feeling our (mutually exclusive) metaphysics had been vindicated.

A very large mixing bowl filled with 5 litres of Christmas Pudding batter (dried fruit, eggs, vegetable suet, spices, etc).

Six individual steamed pudding bowls filled with Christmas Pudding mix and in various stages of being wrapped for slow-cooking.

Two baking trays filled with boiling water and each holding three individually wrapped Christmas Puddings for 8 hours of slow-cooking in a bain marie in lieu of steaming.

Stir-up Sunday…

A Burmese cat sitting on top of a high shelf

“Surrounded by losers, misfits and boozers…”

I’ve only just discovered Lucy Beckett via a recommendation, but I can’t get over how good A Postcard from the Volcano is. Humane, poignant, perfectly-judged, and with a classicist’s eye for the action’s happening offstage (in time as well as space) but that somehow making everything more immediate.

My 8yo twins are reading Harry Potter (they’re alas a couple of years too young for Ursula le Guin) and book #2 revolves around an evil snake sneaking into a women’s toilet.

No comment.

My essay collection focused on ancient literature and translation will be available for pre-order in the UK in October.

Some quick googling has just confirmed that’s the joint-second worst score in #strictly history (there’s been one other 10 and an 8; the rest of the catastrophes have been 11s or 12s).

It’s the first dance of the series and it…sucks. #strictly

Photo of a Burmese cat accidentally giving a Roman salute.

Ave atque vale…

Audition for poetry journal iamb in Sept 2025 Audition to be part of quarterly poetry journal iamb between the 20th and 27th of September 2025.

Fewer than two days now till wave twenty-three of @iambapoet.com arrives on screens large and small.

There's also only a week left until YOU can audition for your place in the journal in either 2026 or 2027.

Find out what you need to do, and be ready to submit next week. 🤞🏻

iambapoet.com/audition

If there’s a shag on stage in Act I, it had better go off by Act III…

(and a separate compound-noun for the realisation that you’ve left an egregious typo in the middle of your post about it)

If it doesn’t already, German should have a l compound-noun for the satisfaction that a middle-aged British man feels in a central Paris restaurant when the bill arrives and he realises his flurry of semi-idiomatic French has headed off the post-Brexit Dance of the Service Charge…

Photograph of a Eurostar onboard café cup with the slogan ‘I am compostable’.

I’ve always been a sucker for a casual memento mori while crossing an international border.

Got bumped onto the earlier Eurostar at Gare du Nord just as it was about to depart (excellent) then had the hilarious experience of (1) the nice woman at the gate saying we didn’t need to run, then (2) the guys on the platform saying: ‘Run!’.

[P.S. we made it]

(Correction: 15th century)

A copy of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose

The ticket inspector on the Rome-Milan train just got excited at this and started talking to us about medieval manuscripts. I love this whole region...

To be fair, there are easier ways of laundering money in this town…

Same pasta dish as above, but now 1/3rd eaten.

(Still a thing)

Photograph of an aubergine pasta dish framed by a glass of Greco and a side salad.

Second iteration of a new invention: “Tagliatelle alla Laura in Trastevere” (slow-cooked aubergine; garlic; Gorgonzola piccante; tuna; basil).

It’s a thing.

Yes to all of this — I keep coming back to William Gibson’s Neuromancer — a truly sentient AI (which I believe to be an impossibility, but whatever) wouldn’t be a friend — it would be a voluntary pact with a demon.

My problem with the article — and with many other conversations on related topics recently — is the docility with which we’ve side-stepped the question of what it means to be sentient, or to suffer, or to experience the world in all its imperfections.

Ah — I think we’re agreeing. Strongly.