TODAY!

👀 v excited for the anniversary celebrations of my favourite bookshop tomorrow - especially since i'm getting to chat to Tim Burrows about our most wet, unglamorous? & liminal of counties

Looking forward to talking Essex, myth, storytelling and, since we're in the Hopkins Zone, witches, with the brilliant A K BLAKEMORE tomorrow (Sat) at Manningtree Arts' Big Day Out, at 2pm. Free entry with an RSVP, details and rest of schedule here: manningtreearts.com/schedule/ma-bi…

I'm at Hart's Books in Saffron Walden to talk about The Invention of Essex this evening, from 6.30. More info here: hartsbooks.co.uk/talks-and-even…

Next time I get the flu I know what remedy I’m trying! Thoroughly enjoying ‘The Invention of Essex’ by ⁦Tim Burrows⁩

I asked colleagues about starvation in Gaza. They said there is no precedent for what is happening | Devi Sridhar theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

americans are so serious man, why is nobody fucking creasing there’s a man stuck in a vase for fuck sakes

“I have never… seen a place… so bombarded for such a long time with such a trapped population without any escape. People are traumatized beyond belief.” Jan Jan Egeland of Norwegian Refugee Council is in Gaza for the first time since Oct 7. “I’m pretty shaken, actually, from what I saw.”

This was a really sad story to report. How the education of Ukrainian school children is being hurt by the war.

Just under a million Ukrainian children are studying remotely and another million are doing a mixture of in-person and online classes because of air raid alarms.

Watching mealy mouthed, lost, pathetic Tory politicians pandering to extremists by being weather vanes instead of being signposts and leading from the front is always a good reason to post this take down of Enoch Powell by the great late Jonathan Miller.

A lovely surprise of a review of TIOE by a Harlow-born Essex boy living in Basque country:

'This is a great and unexpectedly moving read which I insistently recommend to anyone wishing to learn, or perhaps just think, more about Essex...'

🚨PUBLICATION DAY! Same dreamy cover. Easier to bend🚨

Boomers had Top of the Pops, whereas Gen Z has

Great summation, this: 'Gaza has become the expression of a legitimacy crisis for an Anglo-American political class who preside over already fragile systems that deliver less and less to their populations, and whose main offering is that the alternative is worse.'

Q: Does The Labour Party have a policy on tackling this crisis in cultural funding?

In this photograph Chris Evans and Laurence Fox have very strong 'German couple who have just checked into an AirB&B in Twickenham because they are going to see Depeche Mode but are 'first looking to have some of the famous British fish and chips!'' energy.

Flashback to that point in the interview where I have momentarily stopped listening to their previous answer and they are looking at me and I desperately make something up out of thin air

Intense flashback to being hauled into the headmaster's office

“Normally in consultation, what happens is that people send me letters. But no one had been sending letters … Next thing we knew the building work started. They [his constituents] are furious.”

Quite something to complain about how not enough American journalists are reporting on the Russian side of Putin's invasion of Ukraine when two of them – Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva – are *in jail right now* for doing just that