birthday boy string

Really basic stuff, but a fair amount of the most dismayingly stupid and energy-draining and (as here) plain dishonest stuff in our political discourse could be solved by a recognition that politics is, for the most part, something you do rather than something you are

If you're around Newcastle on the 21st of this month, you could do a lot worse than come and see me in conversation with Richard Smyth at the Hancock Museum. A *lot* worse! nhsn.org.uk/events/richard….

There's something pleasingly 80s/90s retro about the shoddy gimcrackness of modern aesthetics of power & state violence - so much of this is just the bit at the end of a Victor Pelevin novel where the entire edifice is revealed to be three drunk guys, some bad tv sets & a chicken

congrats to the Academy for finally choosing one of the very rare novelists about whom all the tiring online discourse about a lad at a party lecturing you about this extremely profound book he's read, &c., &c., is *actually true*

very strongly tempted to go to this, anyone in?

Unlike T May, I will go head to head with Jeremy Corbyn in a nightmarish and incomprehensible game of charging at each other wearing massive shoulder pads and trying to give each other brain injuries while hundreds of thousands of cornfed morons wave big foam fingers in the air