It's been a year since my piece for Balls.ie about the rising Argentine footballers with Irish ancestry so I thought I'd do an update on their progress over the past year with a few more new players I've been keeping my eye on recently.

Thread.

Can any bird people identify this incredible white bird I spotted at Shoulder of Mutton pond in Wanstead Park today? Its tail was swallow-like. It was quite big. Could it be a white swallow?
#birdID #swallows #wansteadpark #shoulderofmuttonpond

I've found a little more about the black Battle of Trafalgar veteran Richard Baker - photographed at Greenwich Hospital Old Royal Naval College with his comrades nearly 50 years later - including perhaps why he joined the Navy when he did. We know he was born a slave in Baltimore in 1770

We are not alone in dreaming at night

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Born otd 1944

Every time I see The Spy Who Loved me I am delighted anew when we get to the greatest line in movie history [James Bond is posing as a marine biologist, and someone tells him to enjoy his holiday]. His reply: “Where there is an ocean, a marine biologist is never on holiday”

We finished Sugar last evening and can’t recommend it enough. So many parts you wouldn’t imagine working together that do, several strange story arcs coming together, and Colin Farrell completely compelling in a way I couldn’t have imagined, brilliant.

Grève des Bateaux Parisiens, du viaduc d'Auteuil.
1936. Tour Eiffel

The haar & intermittent mackerel skies were magical today, as they ebbed & flowed over and around us here on the coast. The sea was even more beguiling than usual from the top of the dunes and I eventually spied Annie O'Garra Worsley in the distance, sitting quietly, contemplating.

As Troubles inquests are shut down ⁦BBC Spotlight NI⁩ investigates why the government stepped in to stop the release of information about the involvement of state agents in murders by Mid-Ulster UVF. Testimony from inside the gang raises new questions.

Tue BBC1 & I-player

Poppies, uncountable these days in the fields and verges of Huesca. Amapola in Spanish, ababol, I'm told in Aragón and beyond.

I shouldn't have snuck up on Bamburgh Lighthouse unannounced 😲

Congratulations to our colleague and MA in Creative Writing Student, Juliana Adelman, on the launch of her novel, The Grateful Water, last night in Hodges Figgis. Get yourself a copy ASAP!
New Island Books Dublin City University

once again we have state-appointed historians representing their project as a matter of historiography and collegiality. For a 'public' history it's striking how much it is being represented as an internal problem for the academy

Advertisements give a fascinating insight into the past. This programme for an 'Aeridheacht' or Open Day in aid of the Volunteer Dependents Fund held on 21 August 1921 in St. Enda's in Rathfarnham contains an advert for a showing of the film 'Li Ting Lang' in the ...1/4🧵

One of the most frightening days of my life. Mum had gone into town to exchange a pair of shoes for Nana in Boyers of North Earl St, but hadn't returned by 6 pm. She turned up an hour later having walked home, having missed the Talbot St explosion by minutes.

Remembering Thomas O’Brien who was bereaved on this day, fifty years ago. His brother, John (23), sister-in-law, Anna (22), and two nieces, Jacqueline (17 months) and Anne Marie (5 months), were killed when a no-warning car bomb exploded on Parnell Street in Dublin. 1/2