With that profession, allied to his surname, my mind went immediately to Swedish musician, Fever Ray (also of the Knife). It would've been a perfect nickname for your friend in India, even if I imagine he had a slightly different aesthetic.

The sunny south-slightly-east.

Thursday evening listening.

Young Mr Chalk putting a brave face on being left out of the starting line-up.

Lee Keegan has just said on RTE at half-time of the All-Ireland final that Kerry were reminiscing with the referee.

Striking stat in today's FT in the context of new EU laws to control destruction of unused clothing. A very good example of how the capitalocene functions: extractive production matched by destruction in service of maintaining shareholder value, with no human benefitting from the actual products.

Claire Keegan is one of those writers that makes me supremely envious - for what is carried by lines like "so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human upsets and the knowledge of how everything must end" (p. 1).

What I read on my holidays...

A man loses a rug, which was a key part of his interior design.

My Goodness in the English Market, Cork. Terrific food, matched by their politics.

This, of course, is also about geopolitics and who has the power to be a bully and get what they want. Case in point: Thierry Henry.

Sorry, NYT, but this just reads as: "What's the point of sport, if we can't just bully our way to getting what we want?" There's also an existential issue about how this and VAR are symbolic of a sport that's losing its core humanity, but that's for another day. www.nytimes.com/athletic/742...

The view from yesterday afternoon.

Amazing. First All-Ireland semi-final in 69 years... My heart nearly stopped in the last five minutes.

It's become trendy to say that conversations and practices are generative, but this very much was. We also managed to fit in time for two sessions chatting about the book we're writing together - and future projects in the pipeline. A brilliant three days. (3/3)

...and topped it all off with a day spent in Callan today, which started at the brilliant Workhouse Union, included a trip to KCAT art centre, and ended with us peering over walls the the site of a milk processing plant that was never built. (2/3)

Just home from a magnificent three days in Kilkenny, where our third Sites of Fracture workshop explored questions of archives, cooperatives, and how we engage with communities. We started in Kilkenny City, managed a trip to the site of Avonmore's original factory at Ballyragget... (1/3)

Well, we all know someone who'll be raising a glass to Curacao...

Unbelievable!!!!

You have to love a good regional GAA ground in the summer... (Of course, all this looks better because Louth are two up at half-time.)

A warning from Muirhead Tower, University of Birmingham, yesterday.

Arrived in Birmingham for the Modern British Studies conference. I'll be speaking on the first keynote panel tomorrow morning about the materiality of global capitalism - including reference to the polycrisis and Aughinish Alumina.

Wednesday evening listening. Recorded in a single day: New York, 20 January 1963.

For context, see Michele Horrigan's brilliant Stigma Damages project: www.stigmadamages.com Or, indeed, switch to satellite view on Google Maps. The imprint of the plant is visible from quite a distance.

Sunrise from my back garden this morning. Before the rain...

This week's reading - a solid introduction, written from an insider perspective, to a movement trying to imagine ways of organising post-growth communities.

Spotted on campus today.

I'm now of an age where this kind of headline (from Pitchfork) seems designed specifically to remind me of the extent of my cultural disconnection.

The BFG at Lismore Castle this morning. Making dreams, as you do.

This far-right drift in rhetoric goes directly against broader trends in Irish society, where we are becoming *more* tolerant and *more* aware of the impacts of inequality.