Kat Brown
LightNews LightNews
banner
katbrownwrites.com
Kat Brown
@katbrownwrites.com
2.9K followers 620 following 3.1K posts
Freelance journalist and editor, hello! Only Connect Jilly and servant to v entitled animals. My books are on ADHD and infertility, but I’m 99% fuelled by The Archers and horse riding. www.katbrownwrites.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
katbrownwrites.com
Bonus Wibble, the glorious golden dimwit, light of my life
A golden retriever is lit in golden hour sunshine, her derpy tongue out as she trots along towards the camera
November 28, 2025 at 4:25 PM
katbrownwrites.com
Totally. They are brilliant at doing it from a childless and childfree angle. They and their gang have been really helpful to me. I also love Heather Corinna’s work on menopause.
November 28, 2025 at 1:47 PM
katbrownwrites.com
Ooh there is. Jody Day, Stella Duffy and others do a lovely series of Elderwomen circles.
November 28, 2025 at 12:29 PM
katbrownwrites.com
This is such beautiful magic.
November 27, 2025 at 4:51 PM
katbrownwrites.com
Yep exactly! I cover this through the piece, down to Johnson and his Latin and Shakespeare schtick.

www.independent.co.uk/voices/amol-...
The question, really, is if you are clever, should you show it off? For geekery, learning and education full stop was, for some time, seen as deeply uncool. But then, too, some like to throw references in as tests. Just as Mitford had her words that were U and non-U, so little references can appear, whether to combat low self-confidence or make it clear that their education was really, really great. Really, it’s a class thing. Forget dog-whistling – this is snob-whistling. It is a way of pulling up the drawbridge to the ivory tower and throwing the key in the moat. This is regrettably rather sad and usually English; the equivalent of an American twentysomething who peaked at high school, only this time, during three years at Oxford or Cambridge. As the good prof said on Today, “We tend to think that reading is a skill we acquire once and then do automatically, like learning to ride a bicycle. The truth is, we are learning to read all the time.” Using cleverness as a social trap is just as middle-middle as pronouncing your surname Bouquet rather than Bucket. It suggests that you stopped being interested in the world, in learning, around the time you handed in a dissertation or finished your finals.
November 27, 2025 at 4:33 PM
katbrownwrites.com
Only Connect 4 lyf www.independent.co.uk/voices/amol-...
I consulted one of the most collegiate Brain Trusts I know: my WhatsApp group of former Only Connect contestants. Three years after our teams competed on the show, we do pub quizzes together and have Christmas drinks. Predictably, for a group with 39 people considerably smarter than me, they had some useful things to say: 1) that playing up intellect is less socially acceptable than other areas ( “No one apologises for winning a football tournament”) but also that showing off brains can be on a par with showing off about lavish holidays or the difficulty of finding a cleaner. You need to know your audience. One of our gang shared a newspaper clipping about his graduating from university at 18. When asked by the paper how he did it, he said at the time (I have to stress, aged 18), “I was lucky enough not to have to work too hard.” So yes, why not be a show off? Or, as he phrased it cheerfully, and with the benefit of some 30 years of reflection: “Being a bit of a d***head.” Of course, the fear of “being a bit of a d***head” or worse, “thinking you’re all that” means that people with more self-confidence than qualifications risk running away with the story. See how Boris Johnson charmed the country by waffling his way through some Latin, and then utterly destroyed it during the pandemic. The book on Shakespeare that he was supposed to publish in 2016 remains unwritten – probably because top-level smarts and deep work are not at all the same thing.
November 27, 2025 at 4:10 PM
katbrownwrites.com
This is brill, thank you so much
November 27, 2025 at 1:01 PM
katbrownwrites.com
Absolutely solid rave from the children, just like this Maurice Sendak story! www.openculture.com/2015/09/maur...
Letters of Note also tweeted a quote from a Fresh Air interview with Sendak in which Terry Gross asked for his favorite comments from his fans. Sendak told the story of a boy from whom he received “a charming card with a little drawing. I loved it.” In reply, he sent the child a postcard of appreciation and drew a Wild Thing on it, just as he did on the envelope of his letter to Hogrogian. The boy’s mother then wrote back to say her son “Jim loved your card so much he ate it,” which Sendak considered “one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
November 27, 2025 at 10:43 AM
katbrownwrites.com
Sybil is the Wiggle Pig and names stemming from that because she has such a jaunty way of walking.
November 27, 2025 at 10:15 AM
katbrownwrites.com
PIGGLY WIGGLES! (Technical term, Ewa)
November 27, 2025 at 9:53 AM
katbrownwrites.com
Wibble met a group of five on the common in the summer and it was just a MASS of wiggling piggling creatures with great ferny tails.
November 27, 2025 at 9:46 AM
katbrownwrites.com
I emptied eight bloody pens out of my bag last week and did not put one back in. Appalling.
November 26, 2025 at 8:42 PM