Caitlin Moran - āthere's England, right there. Patois, Winehouse, custard; golden owls, brews and gurdwaras, and Betjeman keeping watch over the whole thing'
I sometimes wonder who I like best, out of Hyde, Lewis and Moran
This is Caitlin Moran in Saturday’s Times. You miss the context about brews and golden owls, but I didn’t feel I could post the whole article
This is still a fine, fine country. These 24 hours of travelling across it are like collecting unexpected joy. Heading back to London, at Wakefield station - Wakefield! the sexy future has arrived: the departures board is a full-colour screen with a BSL interpreter in the corner, casually signing “Doncaster” and “12.42”. The poisonous chimneys of the industrial north have been replaced by wind turbines and solar farms. The tribes we superseded would be astonished by how clever we became. How the smogs and the soot seem as ancient as Permian rock now.
Back at King’s Cross, and a teenage girl sings Back to Black with a Jamaican twang, at the piano, next to M&S - and there’s England, right there. Patois, Winehouse, custard; golden owls, brews and gurdwaras, and Betjeman keeping watch over the whole thing. JD Vance would be bewildered by these things. Or, crucially, blind to them.
He does not know what these things are when he sees them. How this is England.
England is still here. Of course it is.ā
Got kicked out of the queue for Chelsea tickets for no discernible reason….I think the new system is worse than the old one š”š”
I might have to go and support Frank Lampard and Coventry instead
ā½ #ChelseaFC #cfc
As Harold Wilson almost said, a week is a long time in football, and in Strictly Come Dancing
At least you can depend on Liverpool
ā½ #ChelseaFC #cfc šŗ
Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper were on This Morning with Josie Lawrence today. I’ve never heard so many west country accents on TV at the same time
There are the ravens leaving the Tower of London, and then we have Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman leaving Strictly.
Rylan, Alison Hammond … Bill Bailey? Who could possibly replace Claudia and Tess on Strictly?
Exactly what I thought
Mourinho: Whoever has the ball has fear. Whoever does not have it is thereby stronger. ā½ #ChelseaFC #cfc
Marina Hyde quotes Diego Torres' description of Jose Mourinho’s footballing philosophy
The game is won by the team who commit fewer errors.
Football favours whoever provokes more errors in the opposition.
Away from home, instead of trying to be superior to the opposition, itās better to encourage their mistakes.
Whoever has the ball is more likely to make a mistake.
Whoever renounces possession reduces the possibility of making a mistake.
Whoever has the ball has fear.
Whoever does not have it is thereby stronger.
The Rest Is Entertainment - Can The Rock Win An Oscar?
Also here: JosƩ Mourinho, the anti-Barcelona, stands alone in modern football
Chelsea won. Liverpool lost. Tottenham lost. And Jimmy Floyd is still in Strictly.
š
ā½ #ChelseaFC #cfc
Child #1 said she’s going to a thing celebrating Samuel Coleridge Taylor this weekend
Me: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, surely?
Nope.
London Mozart Players: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor at 150
My Crucial Tracks this week - London You're A Lady, London Pride, I Dreamed a Dream, Mulder and Scully, Blackbird, Fester Skank, Skank in Bed, Street Tuff and Dusty
If I automated this a bit better then I wouldn’t need to worry about mis-spelling ‘Crucial’ every week.
Anyway, these are my Crucail Tracks for the last few days.
#TodayILearned that to substitute more than one thing at once in vim you can do this
4,40s/Arsenal/Chelsea/g | 4,40s/Tinpot/Champions of the World/g
You do seem to need the ‘/g’ (or presumably ‘/1’ or whatever)
I enjoyed this film’s footage of Old London, and Old Suburbia. The film maker is a bit down on the latter.
I think the film was made at around the time of the first 7 Up
Watched: A City Crowned with Green šæ
Interesting bit on The Rest is Entertainment.
For someone to earn the UK minimum wage from Spotify they need to have 567,000 monthly streams. That is roughly the number of streams that Alison Moyet gets
Thankfully Ms Moyet will have other sources of income
Vim command to replace all your backslashes with forward slashes, on the current line
:.s/\\/\//g
š #TodayILearned
Video Games are bad for you ā ļøā ļø
“In May 1981 Labour backbench MP George Foulkes proposed a bill for the āControl of Space Invaders and Other Electronic Gamesā. They were, he said, a āforce for evilā, dependent on āblood moneyā extracted from children:
I have seen reports from all over the country of young people becoming so addicted to these machines that they resort to theft, blackmail and vice to obtain money to satisfy their addiction ā¦
That is what is happening to our young people. They play truant, miss meals, and give up other normal activity to play āspace invadersā. They become crazed, with eyes glazed, oblivious to everything around them, as they play the machines. It is difficult to appreciate unless one has seen it for oneself. I suggest that right hon. and hon. Members who have not seen it should go incognito to an arcade or cafĆ© in their own areas and see the effect that it is having on young people”
Currently reading: The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook š
Interesting read about Trump and NATO
I didn’t know this, about Tiger Man, one of my favourite Elvis songs. It references both Hound Dog, and an answer to Hound Dog.
[Sam] Phillips penned an answer song to Hound Dog that he dubbed Bear Cat in which the singer rebuts Big Mamaās bad-dog accusation from a male perspective. …The Bear Cat melody, though, sounded indistinguishable from that of Hound Dog, and so Bear Cat and Phillips infringed on the Hound Dog copyright.
Sam Phillips got sued, and had to give up the royalties. Phillips then produced the original of Tiger Man…
The lyric shares Samās sense of humor about his recent legal setback, as Thomas sings, āI get up on the mountain and I call my bear cat back. My bear cat comes a runninā and the hound dogs stand way back.ā In his 1970s power and glory phase, Presley would perform Tiger Man in his live sets, in medley with Mystery Train.
From BEFORE ELVIS by Preston Lauterbach
There’s a new Cecil Beaton exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery
Regular readers will probably be bored with me saying that my Granny was his cleaner
Pic: catalogue for Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World exhibition at the NPG. 9 October 2025 - 11 January 2026
I think many people will instead be comparing the duo to the Judean Peoples Front, and the Peoples Front of Judea
Zarah Sultana has said she and Jeremy Corbyn have patched up their combustible co-leadership of a new leftwing party, with the MP comparing the duo to Liam and Noel Gallagher. Zarah Sultana says she and Corbyn have reconciled and can co-lead new party
Retirement project #4 (possibly)
A psycho-geographic, hyper-local history of some runs I’ve done e.g.
The Big Half
- “The ship was named after Cutty-sark, the nickname of the witch Nannie Dee in Robert Burns’s 1791 poem Tam o' Shanter.”
- Ratcliff Highway murders - Wikipedia
- Cabot Square - John Cabot was actually Giovanni Caboto
I’ve still got no plans to retire though.
Pic: John Faed, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I switched over for the last 10 minutes or so of the Scotland match.
One of my better recent decisions ā½
Also trying out Micro.blog’s new movies thingy
Saw this again a couple of weeks ago….a candidate for my favourite ever film
Watched: Brief Encounter šæ