Author | Lightnews

Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · 4h

A just and fair list.

Composer John McCabe certainly felt the same way as Katie does about the combo of Striding Edge (16'20" in the link) and Helvellyn (16'48"). His 'Cloudcatcher Fells' is a wonderful piece, well worth listening all the way through.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va5Q...

Cloudcatcher Fells

YouTube video by Black Dyke Band - Topic

www.youtube.com

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · 6d

"The victory they never recovered from" is becoming a fashionable tactic in modern British politics. Everybody wants their 1906.

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · 7d

"You're looking tired!"

Well, thanks*. I'm tired 100% of the time, but I thought I was more or less successfully not broadcasting it to all and sundry.

*Not actually thanks. Actually sudden annoyance. Why do people say this?

Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · 8d

Anything that even hints at Christianity seeking to reclaim the controlling cultural role that it once held in the UK worries me right now. Just look at the US. We must resist attempts to embed religion into our lives.

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · 9d

A page for the Thames Path walk

Short one, this - the content is all here at this link on this newly created page. I'll update that page as I go, and make occasional posts to draw people's attention to updates.

A page for the Thames Path walk

Short one, this - the content is all here at this link on this newly created page. I'll update that page as I go, and make occasional posts to draw people's attention to updates.

moomindave.wordpress.com

Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · 11d

23rd October 2025 – Maximal Oxford is completed

It's been a very long time. I hope you haven't been chafing too badly at my laziness in failing to keep you posted on my walking progress. I do feel bad about it from time to time, if that helps. My previous blog entry, announcing a new type of…

23rd October 2025 – Maximal Oxford is completed

It's been a very long time. I hope you haven't been chafing too badly at my laziness in failing to keep you posted on my walking progress. I do feel bad about it from time to time, if that helps. My previous blog entry, announcing a new type of purple map line (paths walked from home, restarting the project on days when I couldn't be bothered to drive), dates from September last year, and…

moomindave.wordpress.com

Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · 15d

Light on ideas, incompetent, heavy on bluff, with an amoral edge allied to a will to power layered under a personally pleasant manner to gull the unwary into trusting them?

David Cameron might have been the trendsetter?

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Sep 30

As setup for the last third and for the missing fourth third that the book very much needs

Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Sep 19

The comparison that keeps drifting irresistibly to my mind is Change UK

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Sep 16

People losing their minds over small things, described in the most absurdly hyperbolic terms.

How _do_ we persuade the more gullible and artifically frightenable half of the country not to shit the bed every single time?

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Aug 23

I came back to this today (should have taken a photo. Didn't.) We've had a long dry spell of late, and the gauge read 40 cm lower than it did last November. Was slightly disappointed to find that the water only just reached my ankles. Gauge zero must be around 47.3m, I think.

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Aug 22

There's a similar situation with the EHRC. Full of Tory-era plants put in in order to promote transphobia.

What has Starmer's team done? Renewed the chair for a year, then forced through a new chair who is also transphobic and was objected to by both WEC and JCHR.

Watch the BBC carefully in 2027.

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Aug 22

Every damn time, it's:
"Awful person who worked hard for decades to do untold harm to society dies peacefully at a great age, at the height of their power, unbothered by any consequences of their appalling actions. On the contrary, they lived to see the mainstreaming of their awful ideas."

Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Aug 19

Going to delete my replies here because me being confused and mistaken adds nothing to the conversation :-)

Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Aug 19

Oh, I'm being slow on the uptake, aren't I? It shows "Blocked" for me when I look at your profile because he's blocked you, not because he's blocked me, right?

Slow Dave...

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Aug 13

Yes. Worse, the hard-of-thinking reduced it to the grossest and stupidest kind of triumphalism: "Two world wars and one world cup!"

Such people sought to overwrite the moral lessons of WW2 long before those who lived it had in fact gone. And they and their heirs make the political weather today.

Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Aug 7

This feels like something that @goodlawproject.bsky.social must have already seen?

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Aug 6

Right now it feels like I'm sticking around to vote against whichever transphobes are at the table at the next Labour leadership election. Leaving a party to its worst members doesn't seem good.

Being a Labour member has felt pretty joyless since Starmer turned. He fooled me, and fooled me badly.

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Jul 31

Following due to having a similar question regarding having recently transcribed my great-grandfather's memoirs from his handwritten notebook

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Jul 23

It happened once Cameron/Osborne's austerity kicked in, didn't it? All of a sudden, they were far more people who couldn't afford to eat.

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Jul 22

A great-grandfather was a genuine aristocrat (the others were labourers). I've been transcribing his handwritten memoirs.

He seems mostly pleasant, but the class thing produces personality defects, mainly a sense of deserving entitlement.

The US seems vulnerable to people with a matching defect.

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Jul 22

Over lunch today, to a Spanish colleague I described the USA as "the continuity British Empire". Does that seem fair to you? There is this weird connection that persists between the two countries, but it isn't based in current British reality, but in an imagined mythology of its past.

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Jul 22

Don't feel too bad. I'm a fusion physics modeller by profession and the other week, puzzled by an apparently missing power contribution in a run that I'd launched, found that I had made exactly the same mistake.

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Jul 22

This has always been a part of human experience - there have been cults since time immemorial.

But the intimacy and relative anonymity of social media plugs into this circuit in a powerful way, and the turning over of much social media to algorithms directs the vulnerable onto radicalising paths.

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Dave Taylor @moomindave.bsky.social · Jul 17

It never goes well to prod one's nose in to a private argument. So, I submit to whatever scorn I am due for doing so.

But I'm British too, a bit younger (but not that much), and saw it used widely 2010-15, among acquaintances and press. It was most definitely in common parlance at that time.

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