Great job Google!

I don't know man, I ... think we do ordinarily take pleasure in those things.

A rare moment when I can chip in to say don't sleep on IKEA Ivar. Cheap, super solid if you fix to the wall, expandable. I moved all my records into it this year...bliss.

Quite enjoyed being reminded of writing this piece today. In particular thinking of just how much writing time I put into composing this one paragraph:

How your email finds me:

Very exciting that thanks to the magic of the internet I can verify this memory from when I was a tender 18 years old. Turns out the beeb website still has a transcript of the precise moment:

Want.

I'm very pleased Manchester is doing so well, and at the same time:

I presume you've seen this @roberthutton.co.uk? Not that Lisa Nandy cares what you think, of course ... www.ft.com/content/dc47...

Picture makes it look like Sting is nearing the final stages of his transformation.

I've had a pretty good year so far, and done some exciting things, but sort of the best thing I've done was to build a fitted bookcase for the books that had been packed away since last March.

Well, it's prompted me to get the collected down, and this... Good to revisit with more patience at last.

So delighted to see our translation of Magali Le Huche and Pauline Pinson's Bum Fish named as kids' book of the week by @irishnews.com. Thanks fellas! Correction, though, this was not a solo effort: my wife and I translated it together, pouring all our shared love of cheese puns into it.

The sort of prose that really makes you sit up and look for typos.

Perhaps it shouldn't amaze me that we're still unpicking the mess of Nazi theft and extorsion, but it does. Beautiful Lesser Ury painting restituted to the heirs of Curt Goldschmidt by the Bayerische state museums today, 90 years after Goldschmidt was made bankrupt by Nazi laws ...

I spent a good 20 minutes looking at this yesterday at TEFAF... glory.

I feel like no one ever talks about Bazille, and I know next to nothing about him ... and yet every single time I see a Bazille painting I'm floored by it.

And actually it turns out that the major issue I have is that I'm simply too tired and time poor to sit down and read Adorno more often. Because, wow, I just love Adorno. I find him so much effort and so much fun and god what a pleasure it is to make the effort and find the fun! 3/3

Meanwhile, the study, finished as of a month ago, went from this, to this, to this. OK, we still have a packing blanket pinned up instead of a curtain, but we're getting there.

As more elements of the house fall into place, we're now very nearly there on on the kitchen too. A year ago it looked like this. Now it looks like this. Still some finishing up to do, but we're getting there.

The living room used to look like this...now it looks like this.

We completed on our house one year ago this week...it took until 10pm last night to finally get the living room to the point where I could unpack my records. It's been a long year.

I am very, very grateful to have been directed to The Book of My Enemy, Jeremy. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

I suppose this also serves as the, ahem, small announcement that we're expecting our second bay this May. Can't wait! Looking forward to this guy having a sibling.

tfw you want to check a word you've used really exists and you discover that it's listed as a job by the Welsh government.

Just laughed out loud in the reading room. I love Victor Hugo:

Let em have it, Victor!