-
[The deals listed here are long gone but the recommendations are still good] I get quite annoyed by social media posts urging us all to be productive and/or learn new skills during THE END OF THE BLOODY WORLD but I also get really bored when I’m stuck at home and I find messing around with [more]
-
I’m normally a big fan of schadenfreude, the feeling of pleasure in others’ misfortunes. But so much of what I’m reading just now just makes me sad. For example, there’s no joy in seeing prime minister Boris Johnson admit to having coronavirus just days after boasting about shaking coronavirus patients’ hands; I’m just sad [more]
-
There’s been a really nasty outbreak of everything-ism over the Coronavirus and people’s reactions to it. A tweet from the comedy programme Have I Got News For You today was a good example: it captioned a photo of people queuing too closely outside ASDA as “natural selection in action”. The replies included lots of comments [more]
-
A fascinating piece in Mother Jones by historian Patrick Wyman. The fall of an empire—the end of a polity, a socioeconomic order, a dominant culture, or the intertwined whole—looks more like a cascading series of minor, individually unimportant failures than a dramatic ending that appears out of the blue. Carts full of olive oil failing [more]
-
Alex Andreou, writing for Politics.co.uk: I fully support Peter Hitchens and Brendan O’Neill’s inalienable right to be infected with a deadly virus. If they existed in a vacuum, I might buy myself one of those big foam fingers and cheer them on, as they march to the extinction that is the destiny of every dinosaur. [more]
-
Just because it’s the end of the world doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of stuff to laugh at. This, from the Mirror, had me in tears. Man had sex with a dolphin called Dolly for a year – and claimed she seduced him Almost every paragraph has a killer line, such as: “At first I [more]
-
BBC Teach has thousands of free videos, mapped to the curriculum, for primary and secondary schools. It’s a fantastic resource for parents that also offers advice to those of us suddenly and unexpectedly running a school in our homes. [more]
-
Audible, the Amazon-owned ebook service, is offering free audio stories for children for as long as the schools are closed. It’s a pretty good selection, ranging from classics such as Winnie the Pooh and White Fang to more contemporary Audible originals. I think it’ll come in handy on a rainy day. [more]
-
This is my bag. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My bag is an Animal, canvas and khaki. It was a present from my daughter nearly three years ago, a happy gift during a sad time. Since then my bag and I have been inseparable. It has felt my nervous hands [more]
-
(Update: the dolphin photos were fake news: the images are from Sardinia where our marine mammal pals are regularly spotted. But the sentiment still stands) I’ve given up trying to predict the things that make me cry these days. The latest ones were images from Italy showing the now-clear water teeming with fish and even [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
