Sophie Duncan

Placards in Dean reading "Fascists not welcome here" and "Vance stop funding genocide"

Placard in Dean reading "Vance you are not welcome"

Placard in Dean reading "Vance go home"

Residents of Dean have erected placards protesting against the arrival of American vice-president J.D. Vance in the tiny West Oxfordshire village. They say that they are “extremely angry”, but that the police presence which has sealed off the village has made a “proper protest” impossible.

My personal entrails will never warm again, thanks

Nick?

It is very nice to be in rehearsals and it’s also very nice to snuggle a spherical baby who has learned to make a variety of appreciative noises (at the lampshade).

yes I am trapped under a sleeping baby why do you ask

A womenswear version of Derek Guy would rock. I have been thinking A LOT about jeans lately as I now own two good pairs, one of which Levi’s has stopped making and one of which used to belong to my mum!

still thinking about the Montana knife maker who said you don't have to worry about tariffs if you buy american. and then three months later, he realized he imports swedish steel and german equipment. and even MiUSA equipment costs $100k more now because of tariffs

I find this sort of thing so funny

Yesterday, I saw a designer cut a calico toile into shape, freehand, while said toile was being worn by an actor. I think this is basically magic.

Finished re-reading A Fairly Honourable Defeat yesterday. Started re-reading it again today. If anyone has any good current fiction recs I would welcome them, as do feel I should read more of that. Instead of just fully obsessing (but Simon and Axel!!!! argh)

Every rich person is going to tell *you* how great AI teaching is while sending *their* kids to the kind of schooling the Ancient Greeks would recognize. I just wish everyone would think about why that is.

15. Excluding vegetarian/veganism, religious reqs or a diagnosed condition, saying “I don’t like fish” as an adult is like refusing all the vegetables or all the fruit in the world. It’s not on.

Good news: this apparently still works, it just needs more coffee

I have to write a piece of prose on a subject I know loads about and I feel my brain has Gone. Currently drinking coffee in undergraduate fashion to wake it up again.

!!!!!!

14. The Courtyard (Stratford-upon-Avon) was the best U.K. theatre and cannot be equalled. The NT Olivier, the Swan, the New Vic in Newcastle-under-Lyme, and the Kiln in Kilburn are the other really elite ones.

13. A Fairly Honourable Defeat is the best Iris Murdoch novel and possibly the best novel of the 1970s.

Which makes you quite right!!!

12. It should be called Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day not Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

11. The best Nigerian food in London is served from a van in Deptford.

10. It’s often in writing meals and mealtimes that novelists really reveal themselves.

Have been deep-diving #InkyCloak for you know what!

9. The best cities in the north are Liverpool and Newcastle; York, Durham, and Leeds are (in particular) overrated.

8. Claudius is Shakespeare’s most interesting villain.

7. The trend for giving Shakespearean fool/stupid characters cod Brummie (and it’s always Brummie! It’s never actually sodding Warwickshire!) accents in otherwise non-Midlands-accented productions is stupid and insufferable

I will be stretching that definition but humour me!! I will do this!

This, from a woman whose judgment is otherwise so sound

see!!! This is civilised! Also theatre tickets are so expensive that people deserve a full evening.

Haha always willing! headlines: mix of audience comfort (many theatres are wildly uncomfortable, people get hungry & need the loo), value for money (big one), objection to the cinematisation of theatre as an act-based form. Plus, most performances improve post-interval tho most plays don’t.

Baby has now quadrupled her birth weight and has thigh segments. She is full of smiles and today I pushed her round and round @magdalenoxford.bsky.social while she communed with the lurid, developmentally excellent crinkly dolly which is her one true love. Then she slowly fell asleep.