I try that in Paris I am immediatelly guillotined
06.03.2026 11:34
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I try that in Paris I am immediatelly guillotined
recently I was in a supermarket in another city, and I accidentally set off an alarm, and when everyone looked over to see what was happening I held my hands in the air and said 'I'm a tourist! Sorry! I'm a tourist!' which somehow worked to get me excused
Sir Gawain Fucks the Green Knight Here’s a tale ripe for telling. Can’t say where I heard it first—in pretty French or Dutch. Perhaps as a young lady walking ‘longside the Rijn. I’ll spin it for you in an English tongue, fine as frost on lace, sweet as malmsey wine. So it goes that young Gawain, strength kissed into his limbs, fresh as the bright dawn, comes trembling down to the Green Chapel. You’ve heard this tale, I know. His breath makes peach fuzz in the air, fear into him like worm to apple. Christmas Morn is too soon, time is short. You have your own life to save, he says, picking through thorn and bough to an ivy-clad cave. The creature is the Jack O’ the Glen / forest prince / the wood’s own laughter. Beard of lichen and eyes like dark elder. I need not repeat their exchange—my boy’s flinching heart—a songbird in a rattled cage. It is after the blows are dealt, he asks, what god is worshipped in these green trees? Boy, the Knight replies, boy, were you not just down on your knees? The Knight is the tang of sap / bark rough and petal soft / everywhere leaves scatter / easily crushed / Gawain clings / hardly knows what he clings to / he is the forest and the flower / a turmoil of roots / where god and tree meet and melt / the birch the oak the fern the deer / mushroom maggot crow / here Gawain is branch and bud / blow returned for blow
This is a sheer indulgence on my part, but it turns out I never actually shared the poem here, so:
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Dear Shabana, I notice today that you referred to me in your speech on immigration at the IPPR think tank. You said: “A party leader should not be on the beaches of France encouraging people to make a perilous crossing on small boats.” I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised especially after the hateful Labour campaign in Gorton and Denton, but this is just the latest in a string of lies peddled by a discredited Government who intentionally fan the flames of racism and division. When I went to Calais, I was not there to encourage people to travel to the UK. I was there to see at first hand the suffering your Government and successive Governments have done in demonising migrants in a pathetic bid to pander to the base instincts of Reform and the flawed strategy of Morgan McSweeney. As you will know, if you even bothered to research my visit instead of taking Reform talking points, I was there to witness the brutality of families living in tents in freezing temperatures. I filled water tanks and picked up litter. What that visit did do is confirm my belief that if we are to smash the boat gangs and stop the boats, we need to offer safer and managed routes for migrants to come to this country. Showing compassion as a politician is not a crime. In fact, we need to see much more of it. It reminded me of a young MP who in October 2015 spent three days in Lesbos helping migrants fleeing war-torn Syria. She posted videos on X, talked about handing out water and croissants to refugees and food parcels. When she returned to the UK, she wrote a very moving piece in the New Statesman. She said “we have to work with our European partners and create new, safe, and legal routes for refugees to get to Europe. We cannot abandon them to their fate, left as prey for smugglers whilst risking death on the seas.” She said “maybe we can make ourselves feel better by saying no-one is making them get on the boats. And again, the Home Secretary is not entirely wrong when …
Dear Shabana,
Let's clear some things up around migration and remember we're talking about people's lives.
The man in the bookstore told us its the ghosts that look like people that you should be most afraid of
They spent years telling me about this fantastical, non-euclidean, impossible vertical garden, and all the impossible things that could be found there, and when we finally went to Knaresborough together I was able to confirm that literally everything they had said was 100% true
Limestone Quarry, Knaresborough It’s not my fault the rocks are insane, I’m just announcing stone-intent. If you were two-hundred-million years old and each century was worth less than a grain of sand if you had been mud and coral in Pangea and saw extinctions and then in the great yawn of tectonic plates became a little spit of something that one day would be England, if humans were the latest news, a misplaced handaxe your first trinket, if you watched Romans introduce gods and rabbits, if you saw Christ carried in a book, if you were a sprawl of caves, a castle, a cliff, a series of shrines, generations of homes, if you wore a vast forest as a cloak, if you buried a prophet, dug up a saint, if you kissed the last boar goodbye, if you became black with soot, if the forest was shorn to a sliver, if the river washed you to sand, if the day and night were a spinning top and your voice was the great echo of grit, if there was no moving through your history but the history was you over and over and over again, wouldn’t you be a mudslide, a haunt, a great unspoken secret?
Blog post: Inspiration behind the poem If you sit me down and ask me to guess the length of a minute, I’ll wander off midway through, come back a half-hour later and ask you what time it is. For someone this thoroughly timeblind, I have a peculiar obsession with it. Deep time, in particular, the way that it passes for a stone or fossil not measured in days, but in the long yawn of epochs. It’s a scale utterly unimaginable for any of us. In Knaresborough (a Yorkshire market town) when I was a teenager, I met a man who kept a vertical garden. A normal garden would stop where it reached the edge of a cliff-face, but his simply went on up, dug into it, occasionally supported on wooden two-by-fours. It was a fantastic endeavour in non-euclidian landscaping complete with fishpond, at least ten feet up. In front of the garden was his bookshop, poky and ancient like himself. One year during a summer squall, he told me ghost stories, how he invoked the Lord against bits of haunted furniture and how his own dead son had walked through the door one day. Another year, he claimed his garden, his cliffs and the caves under them as the birthplace of a prophetess. He said to me that he’d had an archaeology student spend a summer with him. When this had happened, I couldn’t guess. This archaeology student spent a summer digging in those caves, looking for the tunnels that supposedly ran from there up to Knaresborough Castle. Instead, he found
stone tools and Roman coins. Proof that there’s been people continuously living in and around these cliffs for almost as long as there’s been people on this island. Time flattens. I see myself returning here at fifteen, at twenty-five and all the years between, slipping between Royalists with their muskets, medieval hermits, Georgians on their way to take the waters at Harrogate, Roman legionaries, and my strange, nimble bookseller. But even that is a short gasp compared to the stones themselves. Knaresborough is surrounded by limestone cliffs, which given that limestone is formed from calcite and that calcite was once ancient sealife, I figure those cliffs to be about 99% ghosts—scientifically speaking. And look at everything those ghosts have seen! The last time I visited my bookseller, the shop was shuttered. He had been elderly the whole time I had known him, and I suppose time must have caught up to him at last. Though, I almost don’t believe it. How can I? When I see him vanishing into those ancient caves, his ghost stories, that green cliff of his own making.
A sample poem from my forthcoming @ninearchespress.bsky.social collection and a blog post. Something about time, booksellers and folklore 💚
Had my height measured for the first time in year and I'm devastated to learn that I'm actually shorter than Taylor Swift
We have a rat called Contraband so please tell me how his latest nickname ended up being Constance Bonacieux?
Had a dream where a brainscan revealed my hippocampus was overactive and I was trying to explain this to my wife but I kept calling it my hippopotomus, and telling her my hippopotomus was overactive. She didn't understand, and I got so frustrated I yelled 'The seahorse in my head is out of control!'
One man: there's no need to feel down
'Her biggest flaw as a character is that she's not a lesbian' - me about a character who regularly commits war crimes
"You have to stop looking like you're about to orgasm when you see a woman slitting someone's throat"
Things my wife has had to say to me tonight
It's 10AD do you know where your legions are? (Just checking!)
First of my bloodline to wear a 2000 year old Roman coin as a necklace over Xana tour merch
scrawny 18-year-old about to fall out of an army helicopter over tehran: this is so epic. this is totally sigma, right babe?
AI e-girl operated by a balding intelligence officer in virginia: that's right baby, Iran is totally cringe
god I miss having blue hair
Chat is this true?
browt, an angry looking green bird pokemon with big angry leaf eyebrows
he looks like a duolingo owl that got fired for taking too many smoke breaks. he looks like instead of teaching u spanish he teaches u consequences for ur actions.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abyc...
Pay attention to the top left of the screen and you'll see me having the time of my life
At a guess, I would say the consequences here have very little to do with fare evasion
Volume two of the 14th century Chinese novel Outlaws of the Marsh, signed by Baby Queen
Grunt.
go suck a
[Pauses, realises that as a feminist, and as a queer person, I should know that performing oral sex is not actually a degrading thing, and therefore shouldn't be used as a way to put people down, but I still want to find a way to have this insult land]
gun
Or whatever Taylor Swift said in 'tis the damn season
Whatever Xena and Callisto have? Need.
What's a girl gotta do to get some attention around here?
I'm gonna say it: she did nothing wrong