He’s the holotype of special phobias- the man managed to hate subgroups of WASP!
07.03.2026 13:57
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He’s the holotype of special phobias- the man managed to hate subgroups of WASP!
An inability to separate horror fiction from actual horror didn’t stop HP Lovecraft, a man of hateful and profound bigotry underpinned by constant fear and anxiety.
I can’t look at the the New York Review of Books summary of his fears without a bit of sympathy and a lot of mirth.
There is magnificent stuff after Saucerful of Secrets. The joint worst* non-Who fan spat I’ve had was when I said that Pink Floyd were a great singles band.
*the other was openly preferring Fanny Price to Emma Woodhouse. Which I stand by.
Any horror fiction. Films, television, novels. It’s totally a ‘me’ problem. I don’t like avoiding an entire genre but I just can’t separate the art from the feelings I get. I don’t like being scared!
I’m 2 years older than Cynthia Greville when she played Maren (again, she was younger than you’d think but even so 😬)
Warriors’ Gate for 20th century Doctor Who.
Nonesuch has just come out, and it’s a banger.
💜
She’s a brilliant actor, but she looks like herself i.e. so charismatic that space/time distorts around her.
Seriously, there’s a bit in this trailer where she arrives late to a meeting and no one offers her a seat. In real life in 30 seconds that room would look like the shop window at Heal’s.
There’s a rich and necessary genre exploring how women fight against invisibility in middle age.
I just can’t buy *Rachel Weisz* as the invisible woman.
Love Harold Wilson’s soul patch.
With sausage, bacon, fried egg and Dulux Golden Sands 🤢
At lunch today I sat next to a table of 20 somethings who had just discovered that a narrow slice is a ‘sliver’ not a ‘slither’.
Everyone nodded along because it’s brand new information, “I thought it was because it’s thin like a snake” and pulling up Merriam-Webster.
Meanwhile I’m:
I have served 11 governments in the past 30 years. If I'd believed in all their policies, I'd have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to joining it. I'd have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel and of denationalising it and renationalising it. Capital punishment? I'd have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolitionist. I'd have been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac, but above all, I would have been a stark-staring raving schizophrenic! ~ Sir Humphrey Appleby (Yes, Minister) paulsarmstrong.com
*MHCLG officials sigh, replace the existing maps with the ones immediately previous*
In 2022 the county council of Cumbria was split into the two unitary authorities of Cumberland and Westmorland and Furness.
In 2026 the two unitary authorities of Cumberland and Westmorland and Furness will be the two constituent councils of the new county combined authority of…Cumbria.
Like the hated enclosures of the 1750s becoming the precious hedgerows of the 1990s.
The phrase “Battle hardened GB News presenter” in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles font.
In 1998 my brother gave me a book that he’d bought at a car boot sale.
It contained the name and address of my future husband, who I would not meet for another 7 years.
That Goodness Gracious Me sketch for anyone who hasn’t seen it:
I refer to him as ‘Britain’s very own Jim Dale’, from a write up of Pete’s Dragon in a 1970s Disney annual.
A combination of Twitter, a trolling husband, and Robert Ross led to this getting back to Mr Dale himself.
The main reason I have a soft spot for Brendan O’Carroll is that his episode of Who Do You Think You Are? completely bypasses genealogy and nice locations to investigate his grandfather’s murder during the Irish Civil War.
The Watcher, from the 1981 Doctor Who story Logopolis, a figure with a blurred face shrouded in white. He is an avatar of the Fifth Doctor, brought into existence before the Fourth Doctor’s regeneration because of the unravelling of the Causal Nexus.
Presumably:
Tweet from the UK Department for Education , 27 May 2022 This week, schools across the country began their early celebrations for the Queen's Platinum Jubilee! Here are a few of our favourite photos... @PSMInfants @GreenstedJun @Fairfieldstweet #PlatinumJubilee
3 primary school children dressed up for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee: a boy in a Naval captain costume, a little girl with Union Flag face paint. And a bespectacled boy dressed in an orange boiler suit, white helmet with Union Flag insignia and a placard saying ‘Victory to the Miners’.
Not World Book Day, but any excuse to share this Platinum Jubilee post from the DfE official Twitter account:
Extract from DWM 627: THE RANDOMISER THIS ISSUE: POLITICAL CARTOONS Can Doctor Who be a useful touchstone for satirists? James Goss considers some of the worst Daleks ever drawn...
Special shout out in this month’s DWM for @gossjam.bsky.social’s marvellous Randomiser on Political Cartoons in Doctor Who. Funny, tender and informative (love that Giles did right by the Daleks).
How I arrived on Bluesky
My ice cream palaver was thinking I could save time by pouring all the mixture in *then* churning. Followed by 5 finger numbing minutes of chiselling frozen (but unaerated) ice cream mixture from the side of the bowl.
Full television story for the Fugitive Doctor and/or a double act with the Eighth Doctor.
We lost Kenith Trodd last weekend, a brilliant producer and forward-thinking man who believed deeply in television and the British screen. He was ahead of his time in many ways. "A film is a film is a film."
My tribute is now up on the BFI website: www.bfi.org.uk/news/kenith-...
You're trapped in the last TV show you watched. Where are you?
Damn!
