Ah yes, the 1989 Brit Awards.
Bread, jam and marmalade maker
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Ah yes, the 1989 Brit Awards.
I understand (though I do not accept) the government's case for remaining on X. What is totally indefensible is the *exclusive* presence of many MPs & departments on that site. They are handing a monopoly of key government communications to a site that's increasingly run by & for the radical right
They should do it anyway for the environmental benefits.
Just passed a place called ABBA CAR RENTALS. So I’ve made a start. • Knowing Me, Knowing Yugo • Mamma Kia • The Daewoo Before You Came • The Name Of The Daimler • Jimny Jimny Jimny #abbacars
The final phase of largest-ever expansion of publicly funded childcare support has begun in England, as thousands of working parents receive more help with their nursery costs. Those eligible are now able to get 30 hours of free childcare per week during term-time for their children aged 9 mths-4yrs
3/ But focusing on the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement isn’t the right way to defend human rights law in the UK. We need to win two substantive arguments about why putting constraints on the Executive branch of government and cooperating with like minded democracies serves the British people.
Owls are the best. Be more owl.
My latest cartoon for @theguardian.com books. p.s. I have a new book of cartoons out soon: www.tomgauld.com/comic-books-v2
Yeah yeah geomagnetic meteorological blah blah I know a fucking Highlander when I see one. www.earth.com/news/nasa-ex...
This is a tactical, as well as moral, error. Musk is spectacularly unpopular in the UK. There's a chance to take the patriotic high-ground, calling out foreign billionaires stoking up violence in Britain, without being seen to dismiss "ordinary people". And you can challenge Reform to back you.
Labour are also REALLY shit at comms. Things like this are getting totally eclipsed by the flag nonsense and the phoney ECHR debate.
Happy American-liberal-accidentally-does-racism-through-bad-take-on-british-food day to all who celebrate. Comes earlier every year.
I like to imagine a family of half a dozen bees live extremely happily and peacefully behind this door and printed out this sign just to ward off cold callers.
The core of what we do, says the BAFTA speech, is great stories that speak to audiences. Stories that, as we know, occur naturally through the action of the wind and rain, in combination with midnight visits by mysterious and nameless elves, who must not be seen by humans.
31st August 2025 07.05
I can
And well done to Crystal Clean Windows who cleaned it for free "A huge thank you to Isaac Crystal Clean Windows York Limited. After this incident happened, he kindly came and cleaned our windows for free. We are truly touched by his kindness." www.crystalcleanwindowsyork.co.uk
The desperation by those on the Right to smear Angela Rayner is wearing thin🙄 And no - don’t bother replying UNTIL you’ve read the thread! I’ve trawled through multiple versions of this “story” in the Telegraph and Daily Mail to try and piece together what’s going on! 🧵1/17
It was in an episode of QI, wasn't it? Maybe someone was so inspired, and so wanted to share that aspect of the assassin's art with the world, that they... drew it in biro in a library book?!
Just removed the date label from an old book and discovered that someone has drawn a design for a teapot that can serve either tea or poison how's your day going?
Polling from @Moreincommon_ on Lucy Connolly More than half think her sentence was too lenient or about right. Only a third that it was too harsh. Only 18% think politicians should associate themselves her, while 51% think they should actively distance themselves from her.
"Did I dream that time I was asked to do a reading from my work in a barn with a sheep and the whole time I was reading I had to continue massaging the sheep because its owners told me it would 'get stroppy' if I didn't?" *Checks photo archive* "Nope. Definitely happened."
Your mam shouts at hotels and your dad paints roundabouts
During the development of Britain's nukes, a lot of scientists/engineers ended up living in small villages near airbases. Great story of one base commander taking his teenage kid to a village fair and, during the Morris display, saying: "See those men, son? That's Britain's nuclear deterrent."
See a great wikipedia article: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Dom... Including reference to him being a big cheese in the Morris world, also helping to support the early women's Morris sides in the 70s. 3/3
"... who was bopping people on the head with a pig's bladder - and I said to my wife, "Sweetheart, you won't believe me, but that man is the brains behind Britain's nuclear deterrent."' " (Backroom Boys, 2003) 2/3
Roy Dommett, I believe. A quote from a book by Francis Spufford: "A colleague recalled how he had bumped into him once in Bristol: 'These Morris men came dancing up the street, led by this big fat bloke in a kind of Andy Pandy outfit ... 1/3
Ever feel you're being watched...? 👀😅 📷 Chepstow Castle today
Really wonderful visualisation by my old colleague @laorso.bsky.social, showing that we usually get either sun or wind in Britain. Days where there's little sun or wind do happen and are difficult, but they're not that common... ember-energy.org/latest-insig...
The Quakers are doing exactly what all public services are legally allowed to do even if the EHRC wants to pretend they're not: say gender-based toilets are inclusive and for anyone bothered by that as a matter of belief, there are stand-alone cubicles that they are very free to use. 1/
Hi all, me, @richardjbutler.bsky.social and the amazing UK-US-Moroccan team are delighted to announce that.. we have a new specimen of Spicomellus AND IT'S WAY WEIRDER AND WAY COOLER THAN WE EVER IMAGINED!!
Here's the paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#OnThisDay 1918 Cardiff Railway labourer Mary Cox was injured at Bute Docks, #Cardiff, #Wales. She stepped into some fire - cinders got into her boot & burnt her ankle & heel. #Railway200 There's more on Welsh railwaywomen's dock work here: www.railwayaccidents.port.ac.uk/wales-rails-...
The only european countries that are not signatories to the ECHR are Russia and Belarus and that’s all you need to know about people who want the UK to leave the ECHR and what they think about human rights.
New: Solar power generation in Britain so far this year has overtaken the total for 2024🌞 It's one third higher than at this time last year and the total for 2025 was enough to power 5.2mn homes for a year or the Tube for more than a decade.
This is true, and it's pernicious. Musk's algo changes and pay-to-play mean that blue tick replies get all the visibility, and those are disproportionately likely to be far-right nuts. MPs see their Twitter replies are dominated by racists and assume that public opinion is dominated by racists too.
Yep, of course. And I'll bet you won't leave the back door half open in all weathers, either. More judging incoming.
One of two very good threads by Adam on this. A startling number of people - responding, in part, by the tone set by their government - just have this very complacent 'oh, no, this plan will never work'. I mean, 1) it could but also 2) they will definitely try.
It was always quite a fragile system, dependent on the health of the major political parties. But GBNews, in particular, should not have been given a license (or permitted to consistently violate even the laz rules) - it was always just a transparent attempt to reformulate the UK as the US.
At next week's RSS conference I'll be presenting a poster (a first for me...it's about time!) "Tetraplot displays of UK General Election results" shows how to graph GE 2024 vote shares across 4 parties in a useful way. Full PDF poster at: github.com/DavidFirth/t...
A government getting on and doing what it promised. The New Home Accelerator Scheme aimed to unblock new homes stuck in planning or which had failed to make progress in being built. It has done just that with 100,000 in the first 12 months. And the next 6 sites/12k homes are already identified!
Reform UK, which has a grand total of four MPs, was just given an uninterrupted platform for an hour and a half on the BBC and Sky News channels, in order to talk about its plans for mass deportations When was the last time the Greens (with four MPs) or the Lib Dems (with 72) were given the same?
Here's another question for the PM's spokesperson: 'Does the PM feel confident that he can win a sufficiently large number of Reform-curious voters to make up for those he's lost to Ed Davey?' Asking for a friend. And another friend. And myself. And a whole bunch of other friends.
Public opinion on the ECHR is fairly inchoate and figures would change in a campaign/depending on framing. But support for remaining in the convention has tended to be around 50%. Support for leaving around 30%. When we asked in July there was an uptick in support for reamining.
My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com
Excellent piece! Time for a new Corrupt Practices Bill to counter the danger of plutocratic wealth - often from the US - corrupting British politics.
Back to school is coming fast! In #Paris, they have la rentrée sorted. There are 300 "rue aux écoles," streets closed to cars, but open to people—up from 185 last year. That means *half* of kindergartens + elementary schools now have school streets. What's your city doing to keep kids safe?
End of runway 1, LHR, while the lights are down for a bank hol clean.
This book may have come in handy.
#PPOD: That bright speck isn't a star – it's Earth! And the dot above it is the Moon. The Psyche mission captured this image from 290 million kilometers away while calibrating its cameras. The spacecraft is en route to a metal-rich asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU 🧪 🔭
Slideshow of today in Washington DC, and how it looks when a terrorizing government scares people away. By me, no paywall: fallows.substack.com/p/a-summer-a...
Your periodic reminder that the vote that triggered the ousting of Liz Truss as Prime Minister was an attempt to lift the moratorium on fracking. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
OK! As Tintin is going down well, here's one I did trying to get a style like the graphic novels. Everything in Lightwave, as usual. And here's a free source for the font: www.cufonfonts.com/font/tintin
My suspicions about the accuracy of the BBC's new historical drama were first aroused by the Norman motorised artillery digging in on Senlac Hill
This is outstanding. God knows what Labour is doing: legitimising the racism that'll be its undoing, losing the coalition which put it in office, trying to secure voters who will never support it, digging its own moral grave. observer.co.uk/news/opinion...
Some context for the headlines about rising plastic bag use in England - yes there was a rise in the most recent data for 2024-25, but it's still below 2021-22 levels and *far* fewer bags are sold than a decade ago...
My latest cartoon for @theguardian.com books
25th August 2025 06.17
Why the strange reluctance of Labour to stand up for ethnic minorities is damaging integration policies and weirdly also Labours own prospectives to win another election. This, by @anandmenon.bsky.social is nailing it.
Tomorrow's front page 📰 Refugees are welcome here: New series highlighting their positive stories in Scotland begins
The 15th century fan vaulting in the nave at Norwich Cathedral. 📸 My own. #MedievalMonday #NorwichCathedral
Leonie is watching it so we don't have to:
Fucking awesome. With a few blasts of red spray paint you can turn the English flag into the Dead Kennedys logo As the band said: Nazi punks, fuck off!
It is so so SO refreshing to hear a UK farmer say simply we need to eat less meat. This whole interview with Guy Watson-Singh is excellent. I also completely agree we need to spend more on food and much much less on rent. www.theguardian.com/environment/...
![Just eat less meat’ Singh-Watson may believe he has softened. But for many years he has been an iconoclastic voice among farmers. Take meat: most British farmers reject calls to eat less red meat to reduce damage to the environment and people’s health. Singh-Watson says eat good meat but less often: just 5% of what Riverford sells is meat. He had shared an organic chicken with eight people the previous evening: “I probably won’t buy another one for a month.” “I spent a lot of time looking at the evidence on [the impact of meat] and it was overwhelming,” he says. “Ten billion people can’t live sustainably on this planet if we are eating anything like the level of meat consumed in a western diet. The only answer is we just eat less meat, dairy and eggs.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:rc66vw4ruqwyhohdi6y75gdw/bafkreiailejl5nvrrr6u3oab5ggyhlblkgobygxfcqeqbjkgwxckdoi77u@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Just discovered from the props list for The Chase that the TARDIS food machine actually dispensed Mars bars and Crunchies. (Vicki claims the one she gives Barbara is guava flavoured.)
Quite. Congratulations, Kemi, you’ve mildly rebuked the deputy editor of the New Statesman. Can we please move to the guy you want to put in charge of the criminal justice system now?
"What was 2025 like, grandpa?" "The world was falling apart in many ways. Also, almost as gallingly, there were more people than ever who decided they didn't have time to read pieces of writing yet did have time to post opinions on what they'd imagined the pieces of writing they hadn't read said."
Not many farmers would tell you that we need to eat less meat; that wealthy landowners shouldn’t moan about inheritance tax but should “pay the whole fucking lot”; & that Reform UK are “a load of rich rightwing toffs” 😂 But Devon farmer Guy Singh-Watson does: www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Seven years ago today we lost Pat Long: a beautiful human and a wonderful writer. He never got to enjoy the fruits of his labour, his book on The History of the NME, something that still saddens me. Sharing his wonderful intro here for anyone who might like to read it:
A shame there was never a Spice Class in the Royal Navy - HMS Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Ginger, Scary, Posh etc
Happy weekend! Here’s a 3,500 year-old Minoan clay flask decorated with a spectacular wide-eyed octopus! 🐙😍 From Palaikastro, a Bronze Age settlement site on the island of Crete. Heraklion Archaeological Museum. 📷 by me #Archaeology
Lucy Connolly tried to claim in her appeal that she didn’t know what a guilty plea would mean. Her first lawyer brought *comprehensive* receipts demonstrating that wasn’t true. As Sunder says, she’s repeating claims a court very clearly found to be false.
Well well well, the UK govt has released a big report on the tech needed to decarbonise each part of the economy Conspicuous by its total absence? Hydrogen heating. Instead, it's all about heat pumps, district heat and a "niche role" for resistive electric + hybrid heat pumps
Three thoughts. 1 - Should be "claimed" not "says" 2 - BBC online puts anything remotely tendentious in inverted commas. So should be "political prisoner" in inverted commas. 3 - The prisons are full of nasty, deluded criminals with bullshit reasons why the court was wrong. Treat her like them.
There's one of these in Discworld. Absolutely delighted to learn it also exists here on Roundworld.
It's similar in the UK. Over 50% of electricity last year was from renewable sources. Coal already all closed down. And bills are only high because of the price of creating electricity from gas (something that will change). Many lies about renewables are spread but the facts say otherwise.
You made me wonder what the UK data suggest. www.gov.uk/government/s... Seems to tell me * no significant heat-related deaths except in 75+ * 1311 of those in 2024 * which is a rate of about 2 per 100k Am I doing this right? The stats pages tells a nuanced, complicated story, and it's not my area.
I understand an argument has been made about why to stay on the former Twitter. Here is my counterargument: It's a miserable fucking place run by a fascist catering to fascists, and I've been much happier not being on it, so there
Still stands up today - a fairly original concept (ID monsters anyone?), a great sense of wonder & scale, protagonists aren’t blithering idiots, strong verisimilitude despite fantastical setting (feels like “real world” military) Honestly, 10/10 💜🛸✨💫
The storm that inspired weather forecasting climatelabbook.substack.com/p/the-storm-...
US political coverage vs political coverage in the rest of the world.
It's just ridiculous: like something out of Brass Eye or Black Mirror.
In Q2 of this year, a record level of renewable energy capacity was given planning permission in Britain There's also a surge in battery storage planning applications as the govt plan for clean power seems to be gathering pace www.ft.com/content/926a...
It's an *extremely* interesting piece. And devastating. And it's one that only someone saturated in the politics of the left could have written.
Okay. I've got admin bits to sort today. So to distract me while i wait on things to run at various points: For every few likes this get, a fact about university websites and how gen z and below interact with information, as proven by testing/data. (Most of which unis aren't handling well yet)
NEW from me: Clean energy growth helped China’s CO2 emissions fall 1% year-on-year in the first half of 2025, extending a declining trend that started in March 2024. Power sector CO2 fell 3% as growth in solar power alone matched the rise in electricity demand.
While solar power growth in the first half was stunning, future projections diverge, with the China Electricity Council and Photovoltaic Industry Association expecting a slowdown and State Grid researchers a repeat of last year’s record additions in the second half.
NEW – Analysis: Record solar growth keeps China’s CO2 falling in first half of 2025 | @laurimyllyvirta.bsky.social Read here: buff.ly/bkl7zDr
Haha. On Amazon's (DE) product page for the #Scarfolk Annual, there is a Product Safety warning. "Warning: Do not use near overhead power lines..."
And a lot depends on where you live. Some cities, large towns have managed to retain/create a lot of space for bikes. There's a lot that I feel hopeful about, and do my bit to support. I can only act on a small piece, and trust that others are able to do their part. You can create the pathway.
Depends what you are looking for. It's only one book, introducing a complex idea, but does point towards some obvious things. As does Mike. Avoid long-haul flights, use public transport or walk rather than driving. Eat little meat. These are things you can do now & point towards a future lifestyle.
“… private car ownership uses space very inefficiently: individual cars are parked perhaps 95% of the time, and roads and parking mainly used by cars has been shown to occupy as much as 41% of space in some localities.” Interesting discussion piece considering whether ‘things have to be like this.’
It's not obvious from those two posts where you are with your research. Have you read Kate Raworth's book? www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/ If you want to know about climate and related impacts, options for personal change, Mike Berners-Lee is a good choice. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Be...
Letter in Times today
Here's is my modest proposal for Keir Starmer: decent hardworking British network data should make use of the empty "reserved" bit in TCP/IP packets to indicate if someone has been age verified, this will absolutely work, solve society's problems and make him popular
Thanks for the reference! It seemed familiar but my days of browsing RFCs for kicks are long gone. But RFC3514, is a classic of its type. I'm quite fond of RFC1149.
"Doesn't he know-" I'll stop you right there. No.
A DYSON SPHERE?! Okay, look. I love SFnal ambition, I really do. Tell me you want to build a space elevator and you have my attention. It would be a massive - erm - moonshot, but it’s a visible-future challenge. But “we’ll build a Dyson Sphere so we have room for data centres”?
Aidan O'Brien 