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Eat a Dinner, Mattress Wayne

When “Z” meant joy.

Wish you weren’t here.

Britain from afar. The party’s over. Liz Truss will make Johnson seem a political genius. We have to stop normalising the absurd.

The Queue is a triumph of Britishness. A rolling thread about the Queue. An interim solution to the Queue. We queue in this country.

9/11 in 3:44.

The tipping points the world is failing to heed.

How the CIA destroyed the socialist internet.

Read more…

17 September 2022 · Weblog

The Royal Mile

Procession of the Queen’s coffin up Edinburgh’s Royal Mile
Click through for a gallery.

I was in at the office today, with its view onto Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. As we approached the starting time of the procession of the Queen’s coffin to St Giles, I ducked downstairs to take some photos, joining some colleagues behind the locked gates of Moray House. After twenty minutes the chatter died down and a sea of arms pointed their phones downhill; members of security walked past, followed by two officers on horseback, the hearse, and the King and his siblings walking slowly behind; then a string of cars, one with Camilla, the rest all Range Rovers; and then it was over.

Apart from a barking dog and a crying baby, the crowd was hushed at our part of the Mile. A few moments earlier, though, a protestor had let Prince Andrew know what he thought.

This procession only took place because the Queen died in Scotland; otherwise the focus would have remained on London. I don’t expect to see another like it in my lifetime, even if I’m around for another king.

12 September 2022 · Events

Ukraine Regained

The speed of the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s advances over the past 48 hours has been breathtaking. They appear to be retaking cities in the Donetsk oblast. Izyum has been liberated. Partisans in Mariupol have raised the Ukrainian flag over key buildings. There are reports that Ukrainian forces were 15 kilometres from Kherson city yesterday, and of explosions in Melitopol. Retaking the latter would put the AFU within missile range of the Kerch bridge connecting Russia and Crimea.

It’s slightly frustrating to be surrounded by wall-to-wall royal news in the UK when one of the most spectacular counteroffensives in history is underway.

10 September 2022 · Events

A Normal Day

UK newspapers after the death of the Queen
Our local corner shop yesterday.

Electronic billboards across the land are displaying pictures of the Queen against a black background, making it look like we’re hosting the world’s biggest philately convention. Paddington has sent his condolences. The royal beekeeper has informed the Queen’s bees that the Queen (though presumably not their queen) has died. Even the Cromwell Museum has retweeted the local mayor’s condolences.

Any understandable sympathy one might feel for the human beings at the centre of all this is going to be stretched to the limit by this marathon of mourning. Twelve days is longer than some overseas trips.

At some point in the next day or so, Edinburgh residents will have the chance to file past the Queen’s coffin in St Giles. Given that we’re here, it would seem a missed historic opportunity not to add to the throng, and so despite having exceeded my annual royal threshold I imagine we will. Please adjust your estimates of the scale of monarchist grief accordingly.

(I’m reliably informed that “telling the bees is a tradition in many European countries in which bees would be told of important events in their keeper’s lives such as births, marriages and departures and returns in the household”. Feeding the workers’ obsession with the lives of their keepers, eh—more relevant than I thought.)

10 September 2022 · 2 Comments · Events

The Head on the Coins

Heads

I really couldn’t be bothered posting about the inevitable ascent this week of Liz Truss, fourth in a line of decreasingly appealing and increasingly appalling Conservative prime ministers, but I suppose I’d better mark the day when we woke up as subjects of Queen Elizabeth II and will go to bed as subjects of King Charles III. It’s my first experience of the death of a British monarch, and provided I stick around for the average lifespan won’t be my last.

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8 September 2022 · Events

Further Dalliances

I’ve been continuing my earlier experiments with DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion—now with added Midjourney. Click through for a gallery.

1 September 2022 · Art

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