I'm so grateful to @NICMcharity @RecordsAsc for producing this memorial CD to celebrate gifted #composer Barry Seaman, who was tragically taken from us in 2020 by Covid & I remain determined that Barry's beautiful soul & #music will live on.💙 bit.ly/3hmxp9T

My friend: how do you stay in the house all day? Me: all my stuff is there and I don’t like people.

Submissions are OPEN for our project Catamenia Collective. We'd love to see poetry, artwork, hybrids & collabs

If you want to push back against tech’s encroachment into every corner of our lives, you need to be reading books. They’re keen to create a world in which most people are illiterate & addicted to slop, a world without poetry, imagination or knowledge. Reading is resistance.

Is Carl Webster still in Wetherfield or did he go back to Germany? I forget when he last appeared. So many characters now I lose track...#Corrie

It's a strange sort of day here at the tower. We don't know why, it just feels different. So, we're glad we have a familiar poet to read today. A comfort poet, if you will. "midnight love stories for girls fishing" by @workingwords50 crowcrosskeys.com/2026/05/16…

Ordering a Pizza for Delivery 1995 – You call – You order in 2 minutes – It arrives in 30 minutes 2005 – You go to the website – You customize it – It arrives in 45 minutes 2026 – You download the app – You create an account with email verification – You add your address with a PIN on the map – The map can't find your street – You add it manually – You select a pizza – The ingredient you want has an extra charge – You add a card – Payment error – You pay with another method – "Your order will arrive in 85 to 140 minutes"

I see the nation has once again mistaken pale sunshine for permission to wear shorts in public.

I don't get upset about much, but there's an issue going on in the publishing world that's very distressing. I keep seeing people tell writers not to use em dashes or ellipses because people will think their book was written by AI. Here's the truth--54 of my books were stolen to train AI. Stolen books happened to most authors I know. We used those em dashes and ellipses FIRST. They are OUR tools and don't belong to AI. Authors, use all the tools at your disposal and fight back! I use Grok to research medical stuff, especially about my husband's cancer. I ask it things (anything you search on a search engine uses AI) but it never writes anything for me. Every em dash and ellipse in my books are put there by me and they will stay there. There's a frenzy of AI accusations out there, but as readers, please don't join in on the witch hunt. Most of us are just using the writing tools they've always used.

Have you submitted yet? 👀

Digitalisation is “for your convenience.” - try explaining that to the 3 million people who are not online in the UK. The majority (67%) are aged 70 or over. The digitalisation of everything is creating digital exclusion for millions of people - in particular, our elderly.

Chuffed to have a #poem included 🙂❤ thank you @AcropolisJourn

I just multiply 13 x 5. =65 which is 6500. Just like 20% of 80 = 2x8=16 20% of 80 is 16 And 80% of 20 is also 16.

There’s a small math trick that can make your life much easier, especially when dealing with percentages. If you want to find a percentage of a number, you can switch the numbers—and the answer will stay exactly the same. For example, 13% of 50 is the same as 50% of 13. This simple idea can save you time in everyday situations. Imagine you’re in a shop. You pick something you like, and the shopkeeper says the price is 50,000 with a 13% discount. At first, that might sound tricky to calculate in your head. But instead of finding 13% of 50, just flip it. Think of it as 50% of 13. Now it becomes easy. 50% simply means half, and half of 13 is 6.5. So your discount is 6,500. No calculator. No confusion. Just a quick mental trick that works every time.

People say there’s no magic in books but the fact that you can string words together to create a series of visions in someone else’s brain is still our greatest achievement as a species.

The reason I like staying up late so much is because between the hours of 1am-5am, the world is quiet and no one expects anything from me. I could stare at my wall for 4 hours and there would be no consequences. It’s so silent and calm. I love it.

When the internet tells you a shop/business is open but “bank holiday may affect these opening hours” - the internet is basically saying “dunno, mate, but have fun finding out!”

Easter means spending Friday thinking it’s Saturday, Saturday thinking it’s either Friday or Sunday, Sunday thinking it’s Saturday, and Monday thinking it’s Sunday.

Well, in typical British fashion, I got the garden furniture out for the arrival of spring, and now it’s blown over and it’s snowing 👍

I am fully convinced that 2019 was the last normal year we will ever have. Not normal in the sense of perfect. Not normal in the sense of without problems. But normal in the sense that there was still a shared reality. A baseline. A world that, for all its flaws, still felt like it operated according to recognisable rules. That world is gone. Since 2020, something fundamental has shifted and most people feel it even if they cannot name it. A persistent low-level anxiety that never fully lifts. A sense that time is moving both too fast and strangely out of sequence. A feeling that nothing quite lands the way it used to that experiences, connections, even ordinary moments feel slightly hollow, slightly off, like a frequency that no longer quite tunes in. Everyone is exhausted. Everyone is overwhelmed. And yet nothing seems to slow down long enough to make sense of it. The anchors are gone. The institutions we were raised to trust have revealed themselves. The social fabric that held communities together was deliberately stressed and in many places snapped entirely. The relationships that did not survive the last five years left silences that have not been filled. And underneath all of it is something that does not get said enough. Grief. Grief for the world that existed before. For the innocence of not knowing what we now know. For the relationships that were lost not to death but to division. For the version of the future we thought we were building that has quietly been replaced with something none of us voted for. 2019 was the last year most people lived without the constant sense that the ground beneath them could shift without warning. But we are living in the aftermath of something enormous and we are being asked to pretend that we are not. You are allowed to grieve what was lost. And you are allowed to say that the world as it was is gone — because it is. Look around.

A rule that will lower your anxiety: Don’t replay conversations you can’t change, and don’t pre-live ones that haven’t happened. Focus on the next right action. Most stress comes from living everywhere except the present.