Share a song that perfectly captures longing.

When the winds blowing in the right direction, I might be inclined to say that this is the best pop song ever recorded

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#TodayILearned

To launch a challenge against [Nigel Farage], 50 per cent of all [Reform] members would need to write a letter to the party chairman requesting a vote. That’s around 130,000 people – basically impossible. You can also trigger a leader challenge with 50 per cent of MPs, but only if there are over 100 Reform member

Ian Dunt - In suspending Tim Montgomerie, the party has lost one its best media operators

[Mourinho, the documentary ] " is also the portrait of a hero and a villain, one of the great leaders of men that the world has ever seen. As a civilisation, we’re lucky Mourinho didn’t go into politics!”

Interviewing José Mourinho: ego, charisma, talent and his ‘rucksack of pain’

⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc

What’s a song you associate with your favorite photograph?

The same photograph, the same song, but a different version to the last time this prompt came up.

The two men are Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness. They were on opposite sides in ‘The Troubles’ in Ireland, but they established a cheerful, friendly relationship during the Peace Process.

I’ve got family connections on both sides, and I love this picture

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Ruddy Arsenal.

Hopefully they are peaking far too soon this season ⚽

What song makes you feel connected to nature?

I enjoy being in nature, but I’ve never really been very much interested in it, in the sense of learning stuff. I don’t know why.

I do enjoy the folklore-y aspects, and this song is about that. I think it was possibly in an episode of the Detectorists.

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A bit sad. ⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc

We briefly meet his family for the first time about 15 minutes before the end of the concluding episode. “I know that they enjoy life much more without me,” he confesses. Mourinho - The Guardian

I think I’ve always been worried intellectually about global warming. This is the year when the worry has moved from my head to my heart, to my gut, and to various other bits.

It’s gone from intellectual to visceral

“Unexpected crypto-mining breach”. Two more from them after the news.

[I’m trying to keep this old ‘joke’ alive]

Last time we had an eclipse in this country, you couldn’t take photos with a mobile phone.

• I very much like the phrase “zone of totality”

• If the moon was a bit smaller, or a bit bigger, or further away, I’m guessing that eclipses wouldn’t be so good. It’s a Goldilocks moon

• Celestial events always reminds me of the start of The Day of the Triffids. We have been warned

• the last eclipse in the UK was AUGUST 11th, this one is August 12th. I’m too ignorant too know, or work out, whether this is a coincidence

• my main memory of the last one, which was cloudy and partial, was being on the roof of our office block and looking around and seeing all of the other people on the rooftops of London

• also it got a bit colder

• if I had a Time Machine, I would first travel back to the 1970 FA Cup Final. After that I’d travel back to a time when eclipses were unexpected and not understood. That must have been an experience

Pic: J. Walker, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

“if you know a lot about a field, you always know why it’s hard to disrupt, and you’ll be right until you’re not. But there’s an equal and opposite trap - if you know all the times that something people dismissed ended working, you can make the mistake of thinking that anything people dismiss will work. As Carl Sagan put it, people laughed at Einstein but they also laughed at Coco the Clown. More relevantly, Elon Musk made Tesla and self-landing rockets work, but there’s also the tunnels, hyperloop, the roofs, the roadster… "

Benedict Evans, from the free version of his newsletter

If we ever had another Public Holiday in the UK, I’d like it to be called “Test Your Smoke Alarms Day”. This would seem more useful a title than ‘Battle of Britain Day’ or ‘Autumn Bank Holiday’ or whatever

Share a song that feels like a prayer.

This song is actually about a hurling team, but it sounds prayerful

In mid-2024, Eoin Fitzgibbon was asked by former hurling coach Phillip O’Neill to write a song for Killeagh GAA to which he agreed if the juniors made the east Cork final that year. Fitzgibbon believed it was unlikely as team hadn’t made the final since 2001. Fitzgibbon said, “lo and behold, October arrives and they get to the final” and he is contacted by O’Neill.

The song was written in 20 minutes, with the group saying “It literally could not have been more of a slapped-together job” referencing the sport of hurling, the focal point it provides for local people and County Cork broadly. The group also joked in a video recording from October 2024, “Welcome to the best thing we’ve ever written”. Wikipedia

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I’ve seen many references to Stepford Wives over the years, but never read the book or seen either of the films. It’s very good, but uncomfortable to read. The introduction says the Nicole Kidman film was a comedy. God knows how that worked.

Finished reading: The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin 📚

I enjoyed this sequel to Animal Farm. It’s not as tightly focused as Orwell’s book, and I was a bit uncomfortable with the mixture of references to contemporary politicians and the general horror of the story. Worth reading, though.

Finished reading: Beasts of England by Adam Biles 📚

Harry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby’s ‘grave’

A bit mad. Much as I love Dobby, obviously.

Power cable linking UK and Ireland now passes near Bronze Age human burial remains instead of fictional grave on Welsh beach

The truth about the past is this: A day can only be perfect once it’s ended. - Ian Dunt

Nostalgia is a terrible drug - We’ve become obsessed with the past and fallen out of love with the present

My favourite book this year. I’m not always very receptive to comedy in books but this manages to extract humour from ISIS, Iraq, and people smuggling.

Finished reading: Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis 📚

“When a business gets something wrong, the executives sometimes do the precise opposite just to show that they have learned their lesson”

I think Pat Nevin is quite right here, although I wish he wasn’t: BBC News - Welbeck and Henderson ‘might not have much time left at the top’

⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc

What song makes you want to write a letter?

I’m answering a different question to the above, but the question above prompted the idea. The question I’m answering is:

What song makes you want to write a blog post?

There is, or there used to be, a Pogues website that was a kind of ‘annotated edition’ of the words to the Pogues songs. So it explained who McCormack, and Richard Tauber, and Mr Cohen were, and what the ICA is, and what KMRIA stands for, and so on.

I’d like one day to similarly explain the words to this. Being English rather than Irish I’d have to do a bit of research. I get some of the music references. I get:

And there’s Adam and Bono and Larry and The Edge Gettin' their photos taken with Naomi!

but I’m not sure about:

Finbarr, Charlie and Jim Hand And they’re drinkin' pints to bate the band

let alone “PLAC and SPUC and the FCA”

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For, I think, the fourth time in my life I saw a kingfisher this evening. Magical creatures.

What’s a song you associate with your favorite holiday?

Possibly my favourite holiday was a short family trip to Liverpool. To be truthful there’s no one song from the trip, but given some of our surnames this is the one I’m picking

BTW…if you go, you have to book visiting the Beatles' houses a few weeks in advance

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Share a song that feels like it has healing powers.

Dolores O’Riordan said

There were a lot of bombs going off in London and I remember this one time a child was killed when a bomb was put in a rubbish bin – that’s why there’s that line in the song, ‘A child is slowly taken’. [ … ] We were on a tour bus and I was near the location where it happened, so it really struck me hard – I was quite young, but I remember being devastated about the innocent children being pulled into that kind of thing. So I suppose that’s why I was saying, ‘It’s not me’ – that even though I’m Irish it wasn’t me, I didn’t do it. Because being Irish, it was quite hard, especially in the UK when there was so much tension.

Wikipedia

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I failed to get down to the river path last night so I ended up just plodding around the industrial estate. I thought this was weirdly picturesque anyway #salisbury 🏃