Malcolm Wilson (they/them)

Mark Francois in the late 80s.

Oh my goodness. I hadn’t connected your dad with this friend of mine (at the time) who was studying for his master’s in War Studies at King’s.

Keith Urban before and after:

The next chord change is on my wife’s 60th birthday. I wonder how she’d feel about celebrating it with two tickets to witness the chord change?

Me: BA History, QMUL, 1986 Me: BA English, Birkbeck, 2008 She: BA Art History, Bristol, 2019

Too right

The reverb 🤌

He’s jealous because David Lammy went to Harvard and he only got into UPenn.

My dog barked at the postman and he’s …

oh, he really *is* a terrorist.

I hope I’m there on my 100th birthday to celebrate.

This is very cool

Someone at my leaving do the other night was talking about their racist uncle Martin. And here he is!

This is wonderful, as I’ve always considered it a tragedy that he should’ve died so young, having been out on the piss that night.

It *does* feel different to be in a street or on a train or bus where there’s no one who looks like me.

And it’s fine, it’s just life.

After all, many people experience it in white ghettos such as Herefordshire.

Obvs bollocks *but* you should talk to your toddlers all the time, and talk to them in ordinary language, because EYFS and KS1 teachers can see the difference in engagement and early writing when children have been talked *with* a lot. And please don’t put screens in front of them, however tempting.

I taught in primary schools in Wembley and Ealing - not ‘posh’ areas. Most of my pupils had English as a second or other language. Some had just arrived and had no English. They picked it up bloody quickly, putting my language skills to shame. Bright minds, learning out of necessity.

What I noticed, in 2012 when I returned to @ioe.bsky.social to train as a teacher, was how rude some younger students were, talking while the lecturer was talking, as if they were sitting at home watching tv.

We listened and wrote notes quietly in 1983 at @qmul.bsky.social and in 2003 at Birkbeck.

Greta Thunberg after being released #FreedomFlotilla

Argentina? Brazil? Paraguay?

Or are there new ratlines?

To conclude, The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, [22] but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end. And on the contrary, Metaphors, and senslesse and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention, and sedition, or contempt.

Hey Hobbes, gotcha!

Using metaphors and then condemning their use…

I doff my cap to @benansell.bsky.social, someone who’s thought a lot more about this than me, a mere philosophical dabbler.

bsky.app/profile/bena...

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan scarily brought into being.

That Hobbes guy was onto something:

“men … clamour and demand right Reason for judge; yet seek no more, but that things should be determined, by no other men’s reason but their own … in play after trump is turned, to use for trump on every occasion, that suite whereof they have most in their hand.”

Paddington putting up his immigrant’s flag.

Sorted.

Me shyly retiring:

Me quietly walking out of the organisation:

1. I didn’t know that a u-bend was to stop sewer gas from backing up.

2. I pay and respect plumbers for their expert work.

Like the Loughborough taxi driver who told me about all the Asians buying up the houses in the area and then, glancing round at my colleague, Shazad Hussein, sitting in the back of the cab, and saying, “I don’t mean you of course,” Jenrick doesn’t mean his fellow Tories. Just … those *other* people.

I made myself unnecessary by building up my team’s competence before I retired, which meant I could just tiptoe out to … THREE RETIREMENT PARTIES AND ALL FOR ME.

Rationally, I wanted to disappear quietly; the attention junkie in me wanted a glorious finale with everyone crying at my departure.

At the weekend, I had to explain to someone - who thought, like many towny incomers to rural areas, that solar farms have no place in the countryside - that grass can grow around solar panels and animals can graze on the grass.

Oh yes, I very much know that feeling.

It’s the same when you’re working on major infrastructure projects: 90% of the pain is in the last 10% of the project.

One of the unexpected joys of retirement: half of the passwords that I’ve struggled to remember, write down and maintain* are no longer necessary.

* my organisation didn’t allow my laptop to autofill passwords