We've just lived through the hottest UK summer since records began. However, there will probably be even hotter summers in years to come. It's just the part about living through them that might change.
Writer in residence, at my house. To look upon my works, ye mighty, visit my website: https://www.thewritertype.com
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We've just lived through the hottest UK summer since records began. However, there will probably be even hotter summers in years to come. It's just the part about living through them that might change.
I miss the time when school was boring.
Keep hoping.
It’s the end of meteorological summer, that heartbreaking time when you explain to your garden furniture why you must now imprison it in a cold, dark shed. "It's for your own good," I tell an angry deckchair as it tries to snap shut on my hand. I lock the shed door, fighting back my tears.
😎✌️
Parents, if your kids have just gone back to school, do you now find yourself wandering aimlessly around a strangely silent home that’s fraught with a poignant sense of absence and emptiness? Lovely, isn’t it?
Medieval parents trying to make their kid get up and go to school on the first day back after the summer holiday.
What do we want? Passive-aggressive behaviour. When do we want it? Never mind, you're clearly very busy.
Amazing offer. Are you planning to attach a patriotic flag to a lamppost? I can sell you a lamppost with a flag already attached. It’s just down the road from me. Leave it where it is or take it away, your choice. Fifty pounds, cash only.
I’ve an eclectic selection.
Sure, the issue is mental health, not gun control. Specifically, the mental health of people opposing gun control.
Needs more laser weapons and cocktails.
Some people have to go back to school next week. But not me. Because I’m old. Old! Ha ha! I'm too old to even be a teacher! Old, do you hear me? Ha ha! Chew on that, you little rotters! Old! Ha ha ha!
Ideal garage for what I have in mind.
Glad to see you’re thinking this through.
Not ready for an electric car so I’m thinking of getting a hybrid. What I have in mind is a hybrid between a car and some type of spaceship equipped with a bar, a swimming pool and cannons.
Hey Americans, nobody’s coming to take your guns away from you. And that’s the problem.
Brexit, Trump, choose your poison.
Voting for Nigel Farage would be like asking the captain of the Titanic to reverse back over the iceberg because it hasn’t done quite enough damage yet.
As the days shorten, one detects - perhaps in the shiver of leaves on a slender tree; perhaps in a goosebumped urge to curtail a stroll and head home for tea - a sly hint, a muted whisper - the merest intimation - of summer's end and autumn in the air. That can fuck right off.
Shocking that a Reform government under Farage might want to negotiate with the Taliban. The reputational damage is potentially huge, and the Taliban must distance themselves from the suggestion immediately.
Condolences. Cruise ships are a plague.
The Festival Fringe is over. The residents of Edinburgh creep from their attics and cellars, sniffing warily for any lingering traces of Comedy. The designated hairy Braveheart lookalike sounds the All Clear on his bagpipes, and cheerful everyday misery reclaims the streets.
Very glad to hear you enjoyed the book; the Amazon 50 quid rule seems to come up intermittently (I think you can give stars but not reviews or something) but stick with independent bookstores, which need our support, and if you’re in a position to recommend the book to anyone, please do. Thanks.
Memo to Nigel Farage: we already had a civil war, thanks, and it didn't end well in 1649 for the rich, arrogant autocrat who wanted all the power without accountability.
I've just invented a new kind of pillow that's cold on both sides. There are also several live eels inside it. "Couldn't you make a version without the eels?" Yes but I won't
Just spitballing here, but maybe postpone the idea of giving humans rights to AI until we’ve managed to give human rights to humans.
Thanks, I endorse this message! And Stephen Greif was wonderful.
A reminder on International Dog Day. When painting a dog, always begin by applying a thin layer of underdog.
He would have spent so much time gazing long into the abyss that he might have fallen in by now.
“To bomb one hospital, Mr Netanyahu, may be regarded as a misfortune; to bomb the same hospital again twenty minutes later to wipe out even more medics and journalists looks like a war crime” - Oscar Wilde, UN prosecutor.
I watched it next week.
And less time gazing long into the abyss.
“What does not kill me makes me stronger,” according to Friedrich Nietzsche, who died on this day in 1900, of being wrong.
Ha, very good plan.
Look out, the comedians are all coming back from Edinburgh. Start acting weird again, they’ll need new material.
It might just work…
Welcome to broken Britain, where overstimulated flagshaggers are manipulated into believing they're taking back a country that never actually existed, from an imaginary enemy who didn't take it away, to benefit populist demagogues who don't care for people other than themselves.
Historians in the future looking back on what’s happening right now should be grateful if there are any historians in the future, or a future.
Hurrah
Heading to Notting Hill for Carnival? Watch out for: 1. Dehydration. 2. Pickpockets. 3. Awkwardly cheerful police officers trying to dance with you and entrap you into a PR photo-op for the Met.
Very much in favour of the new law that requires all bad drivers to display a white flag with a red cross on it to warn other motorists of their incompetence. Excellent idea.
I’m bored of following my dreams. Tonight I’m going to follow yours instead. So, when you’re lost in an airport with a glass suitcase full of snakes, I’ll be the nun who turns into your mother and points out you’re naked.
There are lies, there are damned lies, and there are the Ripe & Ready to Eat labels on avocados. And then there are the barefaced falsehoods Ghislaine Maxwell is prepared to utter to save her skin and get Trump off the hook, which wouldn't fool a newborn baby.
You can choose to respect a flag, but if you rely on it to make you feel special, you might be confusing it with a security blanket.
Many people have legitimate concerns about things. As soon as you choose to express them by endorsing the murder of asylum seekers, there’s nothing legitimate about your concerns, or the people cynically manipulating them. At best you’re a dupe, not a martyr.
It’s so disappointing the day after a children’s party when you take the balloon animals to be humanely destroyed and the receptionist at the veterinary practice is even more hostile than last year.
Happy birthday to the great Dorothy Parker, born in 1893 but still causing good trouble in my novel Dead Writers in Rehab, disrupting riotous group therapy sessions with Coleridge, Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson and many other deceased literary substance abusers. www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1785...
3 stages of mindfulness: ABSENTMINDFULNESS: When is that mindfulness workshop? REMINDFULNESS: *checks date* NEVERMINDFULNESS: Missed it. Oh well.
Even with the unfair advantage I’m finding it a struggle.
Famine in Gaza is official. It must be a great comfort to starving Palestinians to know that the rest of the world is now not doing anything about it officially, rather than ignoring it informally, as we were before.
Thank you!
👍😎✌️
Happy birthday to the great Dorothy Parker, born in 1893 but still causing good trouble in my novel Dead Writers in Rehab, disrupting riotous group therapy sessions with Coleridge, Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson and many other deceased literary substance abusers. www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1785...
Good plan.
Memo to braying dickheads on the train: if your phone runs out of battery, simply distribute a printed leaflet featuring details of your career, interests, and personal relationships to everyone in the carriage so your fellow passengers can continue to be enthralled by them.
Writing an autobiography but finding it difficult to empathise with the subject, who seems totally self-obsessed.
Whoo-ho, surely.
Too late. (See other replies.)
Nice try.
It’s taken. Ghost-thrusters might work.
Incubus, succubus, what’s the difference as long as there’s some type of bus. Transport links are vital to a successful imaginary business.
I can’t, and I suggest you register the domain name before I do.
Never give up on your dreams. Except maybe that one about opening a brothel for ghosts.
It’s a work in progress. Or perhaps regress.
I’m starting to think I haven’t got what it takes to be a patriot. I can’t seem to summon up sufficient levels of xenophobia, hate, ignorance and rage.
I still remember the tense and agonising wait for my results the summer I was 16. Luckily it turned out to be a minor infection, not gonorrhoea.
Trump says he wants to get to heaven, but Jesus says (Mathew 19:24) it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of god. Breaking: Jesus detained by ICE.
In six days god created heaven and earth. On the seventh day he read the comments and replies, and got the idea for hell.
When my kid starts telling me about his favorite YouTuber
Obey… the… voices…
Fortunately you can now consult the Cambridge Dictionary to find out. Whatever a dictionary is.
Sorted. Now casting for Miss Moneypenny. Maybe the late Maggie Smith.
Asylum seekers housed in hotels have caused nothing but trouble ever since mobs of bigots who don't live in the area have been turning up to stage violent protests against them, according to a statement from a shirtless hooligan drinking cider on the roof of a police van.
Breaking: scientists have confirmed that a flag is essentially a piece of decorated fabric that possesses no magical properties and advise everyone to get a fucking grip.
Close, but no cigar. Now, if I’d suggested a duck you could have won a prize.
Very good.
The next James Bond should be played by a penguin. But not a female penguin, obviously. That would be unrealistic.
They’re just trying to make out you’re a square, daddy-oh. Believe me, I’m hep to their jive talk.
Probably
I’d vote for that
Steady on.
Our days are numbered.
Definitely legit. Suggest it to them,
Abandon any lingering hope that a tiny flame of decency or joy might still flicker in the encroaching stygian darkness, as one by one the stars are snuffed out and the cosmos is engulfed in fathomless, eternal horror. "Skibidi" "delulu" and "broligarchy" have been added to the Cambridge Dictionary.
Maybe I could be the next James Bond. I’m very similar to Bond, in that I first appeared more than fifty years ago, I fuck up a lot of expensive gadgets, and I’m totally unrealistic.
Thanks
Seeing President Macron in Washington is a reminder that France was a key ally of America in its War of Independence against the British, and without that vital French support Donald Trump might be speaking English today.
Things might look bleak, but we'll be OK in the end. We've got through this type of crisis before by working together as a team and helping a brave young pilot to exploit a design flaw in the Death Star and... no, wait. That's a movie I once saw. Sorry. As you were. We're doomed.
I went to London today and it's unrecognisable. Gone are the cheerful Cockney chimneysweeps and flying nannies of my youth, replaced by terrifying people of different ethnicities and women wearing trousers. Roaming cannibal suffragettes. Giant bears. Tigers. Is it time for my medication?
Don’t be surprised if Trump seems particularly incoherent today. His instructions were probably clearer in the original Russian.
People of Gaza, you’re not being ethnically cleansed. You’re being “relocated” to a “secure area,” specifically a hole in the ground known as a grave, and you can’t get more securely relocated than that. We mustn’t call it “genocide” either, or our governments might have to act.
Pretty sure that’s Ray Winston’s in his Sexy Beast role. He’s harmless until Ben Kingsly appears as Don Logan and forces you into doing a heist.
RIP Terence Stamp "The Devil is cheerful, agile. He looks like a little girl." www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8vL...
Then they came for the reasonable people, And I did not speak out, Because I was listening politely while I gave them a fair chance to make their case in the marketplace of ideas as they were kidnapping me, locking me up, and deporting me.
It's increasingly clear that AI will destroy our ability to engage meaningfully with real life. On the other hand, have you tried real life recently?
These are the first 5 of Umberto Eco’s List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism. We are currently witnessing number 3, especially, on a daily basis.
If Donny ever had a soul, he sold it. Judging by his record, the devil probably tricked him as easily as Putin does.
See also: BBC, NHS, etc.
Elvis Presley died 48 years ago today. He was in the toilet, bloated, incoherent, blitzed on prescription drugs. For most people that’s a tragedy; for Donald Trump it’s a role model.