Prepared for a lot of people to disagree with me on this, but dammit I’m right.

Until 1995, every time you bought petrol in Italy you were paying extra to help fund the war in Abyssinia…

Yes!

The *written* part of the Fremlin biography is c. one (1) paragraph… I do have a lot of raw material, though, and I’ll get there.

But I had a copy of the first edition because years earlier I worked in Blackwell’s head office, and we’d get free copies of books from publishers left on a desk to take, and it intrigued me.

It’s the introduction, Margate, the few lines on the Rev. David Railton’s disguising himself as a tramp.

I wrote a book on the history of that phenomenon from 1866 (including interviewing Railton’s grandson).

It certainly lingers, and can see why @backlisted.bsky.social went back. It’s a ‘what did I just read?’, ‘was any of that true?’… go back start again, trace the descent into darkness rather than follow the particular plot of the ‘histories’. Well that’s what I’ll do.

Bikeable? It’s walkable!

I tell everyone I manage that an OoO is to protect them from me: if it’s on, I’ll not chase thing; if it isn’t, and there’s no leave showing up on the system, at some point I’ll start phoning.

Anyone who can look at the current underfunded state of UK universities and think there's half a billion quid you can take out of the sector without doing catastrophic damage is just not fit for office.

We hear a lot about the ideological reasons for the attack on HE, but I think we underestimate the effect of practically everyone in government being bloody stupid and having no interest whatsoever in how anything works.