just found a tiny little worm or grub of some kind inching across my laptop keyboard. will nobody rid me of this turbulent cat

my actual cat isn't best pleased

I appreciate Bluesky's probably useless for this because you're all effete metropolitans, but I've been adopted by a very young cat who I think probably has an owner somewhere. West End of Newcastle, NE4. Haven't been able to scan her for a chip yet. I've temporarily named her Butterbeans

To mark five years of this book existing I've been collating some of the praise it's received from grateful readers

Pride and passion, lads. Pride and passion

also: 1. how does this follow the 'Them and [uz]' stuff, what's it an echo of, I don't understand 2. do vowels, in fact, sussurate 3. might other cultures have vowels too

so much to be bewildered at here, but I think this is the worst bit: what does it even mean? would Harrison or any halfway attentive reader of him recognise "reclamation" of anything, much less of the word "us" (*which one?*) as being what that poem does

The relentless Northshireism of this stuff is maddening: Tony Harrison addressed his dad's ghost, in rage and shame, about "busk[ing] the class that killed you" and here he is, conveniently too dead to protest, dug up and made to dance for a Labour party that can't be redeemed through minstrelsy

(that should read "Didi", obvs) I also met some very peaceful ladies

I enjoyed hanging out with Did the Slovenian mountain hut dog and I hope she is still thriving one whole week on

then came to a nicer pub and unwittingly sat next to the Cool Guys Wall

Happy Bloomsday from Trieste, and especially from this photo of a young James Joyce which my companion here has, inevitably, described as "cunty"

met this lad in the slovenian puppetry museum. someone's already remarked on his "cunty little boots". you are all so lost

done it haven't I. I've bummed Triglav

Apropos of this, I just drove through what's left of Radovna, a Slovenian village which was burned to the ground and its inhabitants massacred in 1944 because the woke virtue-signalling left simply would not moderate its demands

God, you'd pay to see it wouldn't you

fucking hell

men will literally write 39 volumes of cathedral prose rather than go to therapy / confront the reality of female bush

I did my first ever lino cut about this! (The whale is Norwegian, the skellingtons are Swedes. It's a geopolitical allegory)

Some welcome coverage from the Daily Nation (apologies for the screengrab) - as I say here, time is of the essence in finding out what happened to my sister, and we've faced nothing but obstruction so far:

The Gaffer

we're here

Some coverage of this on tonight's BBC Look North:

you have to admit that this is very, very funny

John Brown sez happy birthday, from his toilet

What Jonn, sorry I mean Henry, really nails here is how relentlessly *local* our campaign's been, & how much we've focused on meeting people where they actually are and listening to their needs and concerns - which aren't necessarily what people remote from places like Walker often imagine they are

Amongst other stuff you can vote for on Thursday, you can vote - provisionally, without guarantee, but with at least a rejection of reflexive cruelty or cynical despair - for hope and dignity for people seeking asylum

this one's great, though. I can neither confirm nor deny

Fascinating that British political discourse is still haunted by the ghost of The Dinner Party: an event that's shifting, protean, always happening somewhere, capacious enough to hold all your enemies' decadent iniquities, and never happening either at your house or that of any your friends

campaign's going well